Q: Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion.

So it's fine on Windows and not a MAC - is that what your saying. I only posted because it is just a .png file and on the same MAC, within a VM, it loads pretty quick. Strange, it's a PNG "MAC" format image! Wonder if other PNG's are resource-consuming!

richsadams wrote:

 

Franc_Iphone wrote:

 

Anyone out there with 2 mins to try this link - It's the latest NASA image but it kills my (Safari Web Content) with 100% CPU hit and my fan goes crazy! ; [link deleted]

 

It loads fine on the same machine, in a VM on Internet Explorer (Win 7).

 

It's an enormous graphic that Safari stops trying to download and quits and chokes Firefox and Chrome on my iMac, so nothing to do with Mountain Lion or battery life. 

I use Xcode, itunes and Chrome.

My MacBook Pro 13" (Mid 2012) with 10.8 loses 2% battery capacity every day. I try to calibrate the battery but it doesn't works.

Since your question is completely OT it would be worth starting a new thread in the appropriate place on the forum.

FWIW a PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file hasn't anything to do with an OS, Mac or Windows, and my guess is that it's an issue with the website and the size of the file more than anything.

How many time needs to go for Apple people fix it?. Look likes a poor young startup.

I remember when 1st macbook arrive with the problem of the shutdown, At that time we made a website...do we need to make a website in other to make noise and wake up Apple?.

Because i not like that i bought a MBP and then an software ML and is defective.

Another update.  It's now 1:30 and I've been using the rMBP almost constantly (put the screen to sleep while I've stepped away a few times) since 7:30am.  That's 6 hours, so far, of moderate usage (see my previous post for details on apps, etc.).

Battery is at 12%, and iStat is reporting 0:57 remaining.  The notebook has been running cooler than it ever has.

So, with the two changes I've cited twice before, I can just about confirm that the battery performance issues are licked.  I'm done posting for a while -- now we just have to wait for Apple to fix Notification Center and/or Doc, then all will be right in the world.

-r

Thanks very much for the updates and your work on this issue bewmIES.  Too often folks post without any follow-up and/or show appreciation for other's efforts.

I feel a bit badly for anyone here that's new to Apple.  A vast majority of their products work perfectly "out of the box", but they can make a misstep now and then.  However having used almost all of their products for more than five years now Apple has (to date) always been able to resolve these sorts of things...not as quickly as we'd like sometimes, but always.  Like it or not their MO has been to silently work in the background rather than make any statements and then issue the fix.  OS X 10.8.1 has been in the dev's hands for a short while now and I'd expect an update soon.

In the meantime I've made the two changes you've recommended to my late 2010 11.7" MacBook Air which was exhibiting the battery life/drain problem since upgrading to Moutain Lion.  I ran the battery down until it went to sleep this morning.  It's now charging and I'll post back with results.

Thanks again!

update: tried Retina Macbook Pro, using it under windows 8 release preview I get the same sort of battery life - under 3 hours, which is a bit worrying.

bewmIES

Turning off the notification in the menu bar using the command line options (vs the System Preferences) has made a positive difference for me. Not done a full test yet and its definately not back where it was, but I think it has improved by a good hour than where it was. I need to do a proper test, but agree this change is a positive one. Clearly removing the new stuff in ML (as if it were Lion) is the way to go :O)

Well, after a full recharge things did change for my late 2010 11.7" MacBook Air's battery situation.  After deactivating Notifications and custom backgrounds/wallpaper I let it fully run down.  After a full charge the battery indicator showed 4:48/100%.  That's less than it used to show with Lion, but better than previously.

I let it sit idle for one hour with one active application, Activity Monitor, running.  An hour and five minutes later the battery indicator showed 3:32/81%.  The other background applications are drawing little to zero CPU.  Fan has been steady at 1999 RPM.  WiFi has been on (MBA is within two feet of my Airport Extreme) and screen brightness set to 50%.  Everything pretty much matches up to the figues from iStat Pro as well.

I just ran a 15 minute YouTube video in Safari (H.264, not Flash).  Now the indicator shows 4:49/69%.  If true that's certainly an improvement over the previously über-fast battery drain, but it's still not very steady.  I'll have to continue to test it with Mail, iTunes, web browsing and such to get a better feel for things.

All-in-all those two changes don't appear to have taken things back to the way they were with Lion, but look to have made a positive difference.  Time will tell I guess.  Thanks again!  Still looking forward to a true and permanent fix though.

This thread has become too big to review quickly enough to see if something or other has already popped up, so here goes....

Have we confirmed that the battery life issue is consistent, no matter the size of the Mac?

ML being Apple's second full 64-bit OS, its memory consumption will be correspondingly bigger. We've all seen how Lion benefits from running on more than a "mere" 4GB. What if ML memory management policies are such that if insufficent free pages (real or imagined) are detected, this causes excessive page swapping, leading to increased disk I/O and kills the battery? Can people with 8GB Macs or, even better, 16GB Macs confirm a similarly lousy battery life?

Note that many or most of the solutions proposed really work on reducing the OS footprint, hence leaving more free memory. Which leads me to this suspicion.

And Yeah, Grampa Was Right. The oldtimers always said to avoid using the X.0 version of new systems.....

Wanted to add a name to the long list of people having problems and hopefully get included in a permanent fix.  Late 2011 13"MBP, optical removed for Crucial M4 SSD.  While I don't remember the specifics of what battery life I was getting under Lion, I do know that I was not running to a wall outlet nearly as often. 

FWIW - Full charge this AM.  Unplugged and left lid off.  Came home 4 hours later and the charge was at 95%.  Have been on the computer for about 30 minutes (email and internet - no video) and am down to 86%.  All standard ML processes are running (have not attempted to turn any of the new stuff off).  I do have Dropbox on and am using Chrome.

Anyway, as with everyone else, would be interested a good fix.

Thought I'd add my 2 cents. My Macbook Pro 15-inch, Mid 2009 also has horrible battery life after upgrading to Mountain Lion. The battery level even tanks when I have the lid closed and nothing is going on. I left it yesterday afternoon with about 25% power, and by about 24 hours later it was dead. As others have said, I can sit and watch the battery meter tick down almost by the minute. Definitely something amiss in Mountain Lion....

Upgraded from lion to mountain. everything went perfect, and everything is working.

to major problems:

1 - batery draining very fast as most of the people is complaning

2 - fans keeps running permanently

this didn't happen before with lion, with same apps and usage type. I want my 7 hours battery back. can anybody help me please (my OS is in Portuguese)

thanks

an open acknolwedgement is deserved by all of us with ML problems  - when i went in to apple sydney a few days ago, the geniuses also gave the impression that ML was fine, and one did say to me that yes you can see anything on the web --  i pointed out that the evidence of a defective product is on apples own website -- the one we are all reading --

apple promises "the best computing experience yet" in the ML app store download page -- this is dishonest -- given what we all know about ML, and given that apple have phoned me here in sydney from california, and phoned many others all over the world -- why ? not for the sheer fun of it, but because ML is causing significant problems for significant numbers of apple users

the fair way for apple to go is to add to the ML download page a note  that users report battery and fan problems, wifi problems, with ML, and apple is working on an update to ML to address these issues

without some fair warning note on the ML download page, more and more apple customers will download ML, and have problems with their machines, lose productivity, and will fail to get "the best computing experience yet" that they paid for