Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

This is my Macbook 13" late 2011 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 with 4GB RAM with only safari running in the foreground and dropbox and sophos in the background. All CPU usage is normal. Free CPU stays in between 95-97 percent.

Working with Apple with another little utility that is recording my battery life with normal usage.  It will create logs and I will send them back to my tech who is working with me.

They have been working around the clock on this -- so hopefully all of the sample data will provide information they need to come up with a bug fix.

Just adding my 2 cents, I upgraded to Mountain Lion and am now running in safe mode due to battery drain and a CPU that is HOT. I don't know what to do, I'm not an expert in Macs. Just hoping Apple will pay attention to all these folks here with similar issues and offer some relief.

Adding my voice to the chorus:  just bought my MacBook Pro yesterday:  2.6 GHz Core i7 with 8GB Ram and upgraded to ML immediately via the App Store.  My battery consumption is very disappointing:  I'm running Safari and Mail and percentage remaining has dropped from 100% to 86% in thirty minutes.

Power Info:

Battery Information:

  Model Information:

  Serial Number:          D86224706AGDGDLB3

  Manufacturer:          SMP

  Device Name:          bq20z451

  Pack Lot Code:          0

  PCB Lot Code:          0

  Firmware Version:          406

  Hardware Revision:          2

  Cell Revision:          158

  Charge Information:

  Charge Remaining (mAh):          6032

  Fully Charged:          No

  Charging:          No

  Full Charge Capacity (mAh):          7016

  Health Information:

  Cycle Count:          1

  Condition:          Normal

  Battery Installed:          Yes

  Amperage (mA):          -832

  Voltage (mV):          12032

I'm sure Apple wants to resolve this as much as we all want them to.  Meantime, thought I'd get another case documented.

--Juli

For the people who tried the fix on jonathansblog: did the fix actually affect battery life, or did it just change the system estimate of the battery life? I'm asking mainly because the system's prediction, from what I've read in the thread, isn't always accurate. I would test this myself, but I haven't actually gotten my rMBP yet.

Thanks

As I mentioned in my reply a few up, yes, it increased the battery life (not just the estimate), along with CPU temp, fan activity, etc.  It was a totally non-scientific test though.

I'll post when I have more info but so far, I'm much happer.

I made the same changes on my wife's, older, 2009 MBP which was also getting aweful battery life.  No info on that yet, though, as it just hit 100%.

-r

I did a clean install of Mountain Lion without loading my Time Machine backup and now the battery estimation is back up around 7-8 hours and the heat + fan problem has disappeared.

I copied over the folders from my backup manually and resintalled the majority of my applications manually and everything is going smoohtly so far. I'm yet to fully deplete the battery to verify times, but for now it seems to be that a clean reinstall fixed the problem.

Model: brand new MBA mid-2012 i7 8GB

Yes, I got some improvement with this too. 

Got more improvement by making sure that Parallels was shut down and not  just 'Suspended' - yes I still have to use some Windows applications (unfortunately).

I had a similar problem when I upgraded my MBP15" (mid 2010) from Snow Leopard to Lion - at that time I raised a case and in the end was advised to take it in to a service centre.  The technician ran a few software checks first and found that Parallels was being shared with the Dock which was using lots of CPU, and by turning that off, the probelm was fixed.

This time round, after upgrading to Mountian Lion, I needed to upgrade Parallels so I went ahead.  After the installation and first run, I quit Parallels, thinking it was shut.  But no, when I launched it again, I noticed that it was only 'Suspended'.  So this time I shut down the virtual machine, and immediately the battery life was much better - jumped from about 2 to 5 hours.  I wonder how many others who are experiencing the battery problem are are running virtual machine software.

I have also noticed that the Time Machine backup seems to be quite large.  A back up last night was about 35GB, and with almost no changes the backup this morning was about 37GB.  Still need to check up on this in more detail.  And while the backup is running, the battery life drops fast as I might expect.

A bit annoying all round, so I hope a fix is not too far away.

Yeah, I saw that, but I wasn't completely sure if your battery life had improved. I had noticed a couple of people saying that there wasn't much cpu load, but their batteries were still draining quickly. I guess when I get mine tomorrow I'll try the same thing and post my results, since, at this point, I'm assuming that there will be battery life problems.

I just bought my macbook earlier this week and I'm definitely experiencing the same issue.  Im losing roughly 1% of battery life every 1-3 minutes. 

I did not solve my problem, but reverted to Lion. Some people said that reverting to Lion didn't work, but I found it to work fine and dandy. Probably because I manually restored my files.

1. Back up your applications folder and user/home folder
2. Format your hard drive completely
3. Shut down
4. Do an SMC reset
5. Boot into the install with a USB Drive or CD created from the Lion ESDInstall Image
6. Install
7. When asked, DO NOT IMPORT APPS OR SETTINGS OR FILES
8. Once the installatin has totally completed, restore your files and reinstall your applications manually

This completely solved my issues. I'm going to wait for 10.8.1 or 10.8.2 patch to come out before trying the upgrade again. I may be doing that on a seperate partition on my drive, just to ensure everything's good.

I believe it may be a little unfair to expect accurate reporting on a new mac. It probably takes several cycles of the battery for the mac to configure it's battery meter to the battery that is installed inside the computer. After that the power usage will be fair and accurate.

That said there seems to be an issue here, I've noticed it myself but I'm not too concerned, nor do I have the time or inclination to reinstall old operating systems etc just to see if it fixes the issue. Apple will clearly make an attempt to resolve it in the first patchset when they release it.

You should then wait through several battery cycles again to allow the meter to recalibrate to see if the issue is fixed.

The details are key. I have purchased two (2) MBP 13-inch, Mid 2010. (My brother and myself)
One was upgraded to Mountain Lion 26-July-2012 (thought I was going to be first, what a mistake) and the other is still running Lion.

Being web developers we rely on battery life and wifi connectivity are important. It is with concern that I post once more. His machine still continues to give the performance of 5+ hours w/ wifi, medium backlight on display and keyboard. My machine's performance has drops considerably on the MBP with ML.

Horrendous battery life (3.5 hours) and the snickers don't help either

Document this machine:

MacBook Pro
13-inch, Mid 2010

Model Identifier - MacBookPro7,1
Processor - 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory - 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB

Software - OS X 10.8 (12A269)

Battery Information

Device Name - bq20z451

Firmware - 201

Hardware Revision - 2

Cell Revision - 158

Cycle Count - 267

Condition - Normal

We were thinking of donating our old machines and upgrading to the MacBook Pro 15's (Retina).
Will think twice on that one.

I will be reverting to Lion, to save my battery and improve my connectivity experience. They already have the money for the OS, that I now dislike (it totally ruins mobile productivty).

Larry B. from Apple contacted me two days ago and asked if I had time to help him get some more information on my MBP issues running ML. Absolutely!! Sent me a small download to collect error logs from various places, had a great talk with a really nice and intuitive human being all in a short period of time to get the job done, followed by a friendly "Thank you for your time". I have to say...That to me is Top Notch Service, when I post an issue on their forums and within a day I'm called to try resolve the problem. Name ANY other company you can think of that does This Level of Service, at least I personally can't think of any other experiencesliek this anywhere else. This will get resolved, because I believe Apple will right its customers if any damages occur. For this is why I chose Apple products. Thanks Apple!

I decided this morning at work to run on battery until empty, made it to almost 2pm before empty (woke it from sleep aroung 8:45am), MBP (Late 2011) was probably sitting idle 50% of the time. Started fro 91% carge as MBP had lost 8% of it's charge in sleep mode in my bag overnight. And I have a 500GB SSD Drive. Typically I could get to 5pm before I need to connect to the power.  Initially it said it would have 2:04 to charge, now after a few minutes it is at 4% and says it will take 1:41 Until Full.

Funny thing is I ran for  good 3 minutes while the battery indicator showed 0% charge left.

  Model Name:          MacBook Pro

  Model Identifier:          MacBookPro8,1

  Processor Name:          Intel Core i7

  Processor Speed:          2.8 GHz

  Number of Processors:          1

  Total Number of Cores:          2

  L2 Cache (per Core):          256 KB

  L3 Cache:          4 MB

  Memory:          8 GB

  Boot ROM Version:          MBP81.0047.B27

  SMC Version (system):          1.68f98