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Is this occurring for non-iCloud users? My battery life dropped and it is most definitely the fault of the ubd process, which is the "Documents & Data" portion of iCloud syncing. Turn it off, get your battery life back.

This rocks! I turned off everything but Find My Mac and Calendars and the remaining time on my battery has gone up over an hour!!!

Thanks
 
This seems like a very well-documented test.
Unrelated, but I would not have guessed that SSD's use more battery life than HDD's in any scenario, you learn something everyday i guess:)

When I installed a Vertex 3 SSD into my MacBook, it halved the battery life.

Still love it though....
 
Can you cut power to a drive with a dual drive setup, like in the test, with out disconnecting the sata cable?
 
Can someone explain how an SSD uses more energy than an HDD that has to spin?

NEVERMIND, I JUST FOUND THE ANSWER.
 
...

How can an OS "increase" battery life?


Say the battery from Apple in their MBP line last about 7 hours... Is this article saying it will increase it further?
 
It seems like those the most affected are on older machines. If I had to bet money Apple only heavily tests on the newest machines -- aside from some minor UI lag and mouse issues ML has been the best early release to date in my book. The battery life for me runs around 6hrs for regular web use and I've got extra stacked processes from VirusBarrier.

In the communities board on Apples site are so many complaints about sound stuttering, all sorts and ages of hardware. I have a mid 2011 iMac 27" i7 and with ML it stutters and finder keeps pausing for 30 seconds or more, making the whole system not much more than an expensive paper weight.

Reverting back to Lion solved the issue.

Those popping sounds you mentioned are most likely the same bug, but not so bad as some of us have. Listen to the open mic recording I made thats attached to hear it.
 

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http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-recommendation-review,3194-7.html

Quote:
"A disk-based drive will always consume more power absolutely. At the system level, an SSD increases power consumption because CPU and memory utilization rises in response to increased I/O activity (they're not sitting there, waiting on a hard drive to send data). But remember that an SSD-based configuration will always finish those operations faster. You see that reflected in the charts above. At the end of the day, an SSD lowers power consumption. This is why performance and power go hand-in-hand."
 
Hi guys; I performed the tests for The Mac Observer. As I explained in the article, we were also confused as to why the HDD was getting better battery life than the SSD. We looked into it and discovered that our hard drive, a Western Digital Scorpio Blue, is extremely power efficient, using .59 watts at idle and 1.4 watts while active.

This is very low for a mechanical hard drive and our high performance Vertex SSD used more power: 1.3 watts idle, 2.5 watts active.

Some low speed, energy efficient HDDs have closed the gap in power consumption with SSDs, but YMMV.
You should test with a Samsung 830 with .3W idle power draw or a M4 with about .6W and equal to an HDD.
All 5400rpm HDDs idle at .6-.8W. That is not energy efficient that is standard.
Running a 1.X W idle SSD is a bit dumb. If a notebook runs 6h on a 77Wh battery it consumes 12-13W on average. Every half Watt (0.5) translates to 4% difference. So a Samsung 830 should yield quite a bit of extra battery life.
 
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Regarding SSD vs HDD;

I would expect the usage model also make a lot of difference.. If you use your laptop with fairly little disk access the HDD will probably be more power efficient due to lower idle (power down the motor).. but if the usage requires more disk access a SSD will probably be more power efficient as it completes the task WAY, WAY quicker and can go into idle faster.

Anyway.. I'll sacrifice 5 minutes of battery life every day and every hour for the speed and noise benefits of SSD storage.

Also, as mentioned.. the Vertex isn't the best in candidate for testing this.
 
How can an OS "increase" battery life?


Say the battery from Apple in their MBP line last about 7 hours... Is this article saying it will increase it further?

No, the software changes will presumably reduce the load on the CPU/GPU, which will cause the same amount of charge in the battery to last longer. It's like how two different makes of cars will get different mileages out of the same tank of gas.

Say, for example, Apple released an OS update where Finder calculated the first billion digits of pi every minute. No change to the hardware, but you'd expect your battery life to be severely reduced!
 
When are these tests going to finally show ERROR BARS? just make three tests and put the average on the bar, the standard deviation on the errors. Do people really think that 2 minutes difference is significant/real??
 
You should test with a Samsung 830 with .3W idle power draw or a M4 with about .6W and equal to an HDD.
All 5400rpm HDDs idle at .6-.8W. That is not energy efficient that is standard.
Running a 1.X W idle SSD is a bit dumb. If a notebook runs 6h on a 77Wh battery it consumes 12-13W on average. Every half Watt (0.5) translates to 4% difference. So a Samsung 830 should yield quite a bit of extra battery life.

Seems like the point of the testing was not too compare SSD to HDD so it doenst really matter. Clearly, the OS is saving battery life. They arent reviewing SSDs and HDDs.
 
Will 10.8.3 restore it to Snow Leopard levels?

Did you even read the article? In their tests, 10.8.2 gave results better than SL.


How can an OS "increase" battery life?

OS handles power management. Different versions of OS do it a little differently so battery life can be better or worse.


Will this get released on Wednesday?

Unlikely. The last build still had "TBD" instead of release notes in the installer so probably at least one or two more builds before release. But probably in the next couple weeks.
 
How can an OS "increase" battery life?


Say the battery from Apple in their MBP line last about 7 hours... Is this article saying it will increase it further?

It's more like the OS can maximize the battery potential. There's some amount of power consumption the basic components require just to run, but how CPU cycles are used/allocated, HDD activity, caching, even things like sleeping the network.BT, display and KB brightness control, etc. (i.e., computer activities that have a range of potential power usage) are managed by the OS.
 
This rocks! I turned off everything but Find My Mac and Calendars and the remaining time on my battery has gone up over an hour!!!

Thanks

Interesting. Never thought that would affect battery usage so much.

I turned all mine off. Thanks for the tip!
 
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