Tests Find OS X Mountain Lion May Significantly Degrade Notebook Battery Life

[MacRumors]

Ars Technica has been doing some testing after reports emerged that some Mountain Lion early adopters were experiencing degraded battery life after upgrading to OS X 10.8. A 46-page thread with nearly 700 replies has been growing over the past several weeks on the Apple Support Forums.

Ars writer Chris Foresman, after extended testing, discovered that the battery life of his Retina MacBook Pro review unit dropped 38% from its previous 8-hours. He was unable to narrow down blame for the battery loss to any particular bit of software or system process.

Our own testing revealed similar (and significant) drops in battery runtime after installing Mountain Lion. In previous tests, we were able to regularly achieve just over 8 hours of use by relying solely on our Retina MacBook Pro's integrated Intel HD4000 GPU. Performing the same "real-world" test using the same software applications and usage pattern, we never got the Retina MacBook Pro to run for more than a few minutes past 5 hours after a full charge.

[...]

Typically, the quad-core processor wasn't taxed beyond 5 percent capacity, except for occasional 10-20 percent spikes when loading webpages, reading or writing files, or other activities. Unexpected file system or network access, or less efficient use of the GPU, could cause additional power drain without showing significant CPU use.

One poster on Apple's support forums claims a company support representative told him that "an update will be issued via the [Mac App Store] as soon as they can work a fix".

Article Link: Tests Find OS X Mountain Lion May Significantly Degrade Notebook Battery Life

 

[Pianoblack3]

Uh oh! Spaghettio!

 

[AppleFan115]

I personally haven't noticed anything on my MacBook Air, but I'm sure it will be fixed with an update. This tends to happen with new releases. No reason to get worked up.

 

[kjs862]

Screw the update, I want a new Retina Macbook!

 

[applesith]

Better not wait for 10.8.1. This needs to be addressed NOW.

 

[stiligFox]

Ironically, I've used my 2010 MBA in clamshell mode 100% of the time since the upgrade -- So I haven't noticed anything

Maybe clean install vs upgrade is the culprit? Some old system process conflicting with a new one?

 

[jlgolson]

The battery menu in the image above is from the $16 iStat Menus.

 

[Vanarak19]

Didnt this happen with Lion too? Apple stated they "corrected" the battery timing mechanism to better report actual usage? And then continued to sell laptops with 8+hr battery life on the store?

I have never gotten anything close to any estimate they have used for sales, even with light browsing/usage.

 

[aziatiklover]

IB4 all the hipsters coming in starting to say yea no wonder!

 

[Z400Racer37]

crap... already updated...

 

[jmcrutch]

This has happened before with Apple devices and Apple has always responded with a firmware/software update that resolves the issue.

 

[arian19]

scary, especially because the high price people had to fork out for one of those gems

 

[Mortalias]

Thought so... MacBook Air seems to be draining a lot faster now.

 

[east85]

10.8 actually INCREASED my average battery life.

 

[dlewis23]

10.8.x will fix this...

 

[gumblecosby]

Mountain Lion has better battery life than Lion for me on a macbook. Lion was brutal for battery life yet there was no real mention of it on news sites.

 

[srxtr]

Not too surprised, with the new notification center and all that jazz

 

[somethingelsefl]

Oh No! I wonder if this will affect my MacBook Pro now that updated to Mountain Lion. I'm nowhere near a charger right now and running on battery so I really hope that

 

[lifeinhd]

I hope it's just a reporting error from the battery to the OS, not actual degradation, otherwise all the software updates in the world won't do ****.

 

[hobo.hopkins]

I haven't really noticed anything with my MacBook Pro. It'll be interesting to see what's causing the reduction - to go from 8 hours to a little more than 5 is quite dramatic.

 

[Small White Car]

We desktop users may be a vanishing breed, but every now and then there's at least some little thing that makes me feel good about it.

For what it's worth, I've never been impresse with Apple laptop battery life. I've always gotten a fraction of their claimed times going all the way back to the G4 days.

 

[kniemann]

Steve Jobs would never have allowed this to happen.

 

[50548]

ML = Train wreck. Hopefully 10.8.1 will fix ALL problems identified so far.

 

[retinarob]

Wait so what do I have to do to make this issue show up?

 

[HiRez]

Good example of why you never install OS X 10.X.0