shorter battery life with mountain lion

I installed the 10.8.1 update the day it was released and it has had minimal effect on the battery life. The battery health seems to be steady at the high end but the actual life is about the same as when I first installed ML. I just re calibrated the battery and will report back with the results.

2.25 hours of Safari web browsing with no Mail App on a battery with 267 cycles and 90% health is simply unacceptable. I'm getting out my pitchfork and torch to prepare for the storming of the castle!

This is crazy, I installed the 10.8.2 update as soon as it was available. My battery was lasting about 3.5 hours on Lion with Safari and Mail running and dropped to about 2 hours with 10.8, 2.5 hours with 10.8.1 and it's too early to tell with 10.8.2. I realize that the system needs to settle down after an update is installed but this morning, my battery estimated 4, 2.5, 3.5 and 3.25 hours use in the first 20 minutes of being turned on. It's battery health has gone from 90% down to 78% and then 81% during this ML Beta testing. I say "Beta testing" because Apple certainly did not care to look at it's portable performance when they were creating it's new OS.

A little update, I performed a clean install of ML which resulted in a little leaner disk space and the battery dropped to 61% health. It took a day or two but the battery recovered to 89% and estimated usage is just under 4 hours. Of course, I'm just doing the usual Safari use on wifi and display is at 60% with no backlit keyboard. I'd be very happy if the system stays at this level.

Update: Two days ago, I saw that my battery had 317 cycles and 80% health. The next day it was 100% with the replace soon warning but woke up this morning to 15% health. I made an appointment at the Lenox Square Apple Store and the "genius" told me it was within specs. My question was, how can my original battery have 844 cycles and 61% health?

Update: I made a Genius Bar appointment after the battery stayed at 14% health. The genius listened to my account of the batteries performance while running a test on my MBP then commented how I didn't run on the battery enough. He offered to sell me a new battery but I wasn't convinced that I was the problem. When I got home I did a little math and figured out that I averaged .66 cycles a day.

Shortly afterward, I received an email inviting me to participate in a survey regarding my Genius Bar experience. I answered the questions with little emotion and included the age, number of cycles and health from both batteries. Ten days later, I received a call from the Apple Store that I visited and a manger left a message that sounded like they read my comments. I spoke to another manager this afternoon and he told me that they use these instances are teaching tools and would like to replace the battery because it did not sound like it performed as expected. I will pick it up in a day or so and introduce myself and am thankful that Apple is reading those surveys and taking action.

I picked up the replacement battery yesterday and charged it overnight. This morning, I worked as usual and have had four hours of use from the battery. Needless to say, this is the best performance I've had in quite a while. If I remember correctly, I had about 3.5 hours with the previous battery when new running Lion. Let's see what happens over time and with the eventual release of 10.8.3. Thanks to Jacob at the Apple Store Lenox for taking care of a longtime Apple customer. Class of '94!

I have put nine cycles on the new battery and it runs between 4-4.5 hours. This is where I expected my MBP to be performance wise and hope that Apple figures out why ML has killed our older batteries.