Our testing shows noticeable decrease in battery life on the Retina MacBook Pro.
Mountain Lion may be unduly sapping the life from some portable Macs' batteries.
As we noted last week, numerous MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air users had begun reporting that the battery life reported by their systems was significantly lower after upgrading to Mountain Lion. In some cases, they were seeing nearly half the amount of time that was reported previously under Lion. The batteries themselves also seemed to drain noticeably faster, despite the system reporting that capacity had not been affected.
Following our coverage, several Ars readers confirmed via comments and tweets that they were experiencing similar problems. But some claimed that their battery life under Mountain Lion is as good as or better than it was under Lion, so the problem does not appear to affect all users.
Some users in Apple's forums reported potential fixes, including repairing disk permissions or access control lists, disabling or reinstalling Dropbox, or resetting GateKeeper to allow apps to install from any source. These fixes didn't work for all users, but together, they could be a sign of a problem somewhere between Mountain Lion's security systems—like sandboxing and file quarantine—and the file system.
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.
Our test method isn't strictly scientific, of course, but we performed it several times and got similar results each time. I used the machine repeatedly for my daily workload, with Safari, Chrome, Twitter, iChat, Colloquy, TextEdit, Photoshop, Skitch, Mail, and Outlook running, as well as a few background processes like Dropbox and gfxCardStatus. WiFi was turned on, the machine was located in the same office as my Airport Extreme base station, and Bluetooth was turned off. Screen brightness was set to half (8/16 "pips" or "dots" on the brightness indicator) as in previous testing.
During testing, I periodically launched Activity Monitor to gauge CPU use. 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 Apple support forum user who was contacted by Apple suggested that the cause was software-specific, and not related to any hardware or faulty batteries. "I can confirm this is definitely a software (OS) issue, as the guy that was dealing with me said that an update will be issued via the [Mac App Store] as soon as they can work a fix," user stevo_c wrote on Monday.
Apple was not able to confirm to Ars that a fix was forthcoming. That said, we are forwarding our testing information to the company's software team for review. We will update if Apple has an official statement.
Reader Comments
- And this is why you never install an OS X 10.X.0 version. Ever.
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| Ars Scholae Palatinae I thought I'd lost some battery life a couple of nights back, then realised I'd left a Windows VM running in the background.
<3 SSDs, I'm running a whole extra OS on my machine and I don't even notice it in day to day anymore. -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae Matt Wallis wrote:I thought I'd lost some battery life a couple of nights back, then realised I'd left a Windows VM running in the background.
<3 SSDs, I'm running a whole extra OS on my machine and I don't even notice it in day to day anymore.
Heck, I just got a great deal on a new 11" Air (tax free weekend plus educational discount plus $100 iTunes back to school promo) and its easily twice as fast as my 2010 15" Pro. I wasn't expecting that kind of speed, but it is BLAZING. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training Battery health is shown incorrectly on my mac. my battery was almost end of life and I was barely getting two hours out of a Macbook unibody AL with SSD and the About Mac thing showed it was dying. Now it has a clean bill of health under Mountain Lion but absolutely no more then 30minutes of battery life. -
| Wise, Aged Ars Veteran Interesting, I have noticed the opposite. In fact, just last night I was amazed about how my MBP early-2011 was still running on a single charge eventhough I was jumping back and forth between a Parallel's Win7 VM and OSX for hours. I got to thinking whether the ML upgrade had anything to do with this. -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae HiRez wrote:And this is why you never install an OS X 10.X.0 version. Ever.
Hell, after the horrible letdown that was Lion and the fact that ML basically fixes none of Lion's problems, I plan on not upgrading until I'll stumble upon an application that requires it. I mean why even bother at this point? -
| Wise, Aged Ars Veteran IntergalacticWalrus wrote:HiRez wrote:And this is why you never install an OS X 10.X.0 version. Ever.
Hell, after the horrible letdown that was Lion and the fact that ML basically fixes none of Lion's problems, I plan on not upgrading until I'll stumble upon an application that requires it. I mean why even bother at this point?
You will be surprised. It is in fact much more stable and faster than Lion. Ars recently ran an article on several UI code improvements which have made even older hardware faster after upgrading. I was very disappointed with Lion. Mountain Lion has made me love my Mac again. You should try it out...(clean install - don't upgrade) -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training fsck! wrote:Interesting, I have noticed the opposite. In fact, just last night I was amazed about how my MBP early-2011 was still running on a single charge eventhough I was jumping back and forth between a Parallel's Win7 VM and OSX for hours. I got to thinking whether the ML upgrade had anything to do with this.
I had a somewhat similar experience. I have been getting close 5 hours disconnected from my 2009 13" MBP doing coding/compiling for the past week. In the past I've been getting about 4. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training So they tweaked a graphics framework (CoreAnimation?) so that it stops activating the discrete graphics to save battery life (notably when running the Twitter and Sparrow apps for instance), but then they made something else take up that power instead?
Fun stuff. I really like Mountain Lion, but I'm still kind of glad I have a month before I have to use it for school. Figure out the kinks and stuff. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training For a company that makes portable devices you'd think energy consumption would be as high on the list as computational complexity when doing anything.... -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training Ok, maybe I was missing it, but did you guys just simply upgrade or did you completely reinstall it? By coincidence the (Toshiba) SSD in my new 2012 MacBook Air failed just 2 days before Mountain Lion was released, so when I got it back from repair I HAD to do a complete fresh install. I really haven't noticed any degradation on battery life. The again I'm really batterynazi when I'm on the road, switching everything off and even modifying a few kext for increased battery life. I would get 10h a day in University with that.
On another note: I never had a problem with Lion and could not understand that pain other persons seemed to have with it. I found the new functions to be well worth it. In turn I don't think Mountain Lion is that great, but this is probably because there is a lot "under-the-hood" changes and therefore less obvious improvements. I mean I can go without all the Game Center, Twitter and whatnot. Only new function I am using it iMessage and the new dictation function.
Exelius wrote:Heck, I just got a great deal on a new 11" Air (tax free weekend plus educational discount plus $100 iTunes back to school promo) and its easily twice as fast as my 2010 15" Pro. I wasn't expecting that kind of speed, but it is BLAZING.
I switched from a late 2008 Unibody MacBook Pro and thought a ULV chip without discrete graphic would barely be on par when running games...boy was I wrong. Actually Civilization V runs a lot smoother on the ULV i5 then it did on my old MacBook Pro. Again Anand over at Anandtech said he could not get it to run smoothly, but I sure don't know what settings they are using. It is completely fine under bootcamp. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training TempestCore wrote:fsck! wrote:Interesting, I have noticed the opposite. In fact, just last night I was amazed about how my MBP early-2011 was still running on a single charge eventhough I was jumping back and forth between a Parallel's Win7 VM and OSX for hours. I got to thinking whether the ML upgrade had anything to do with this.
I had a somewhat similar experience. I have been getting close 5 hours disconnected from my 2009 13" MBP doing coding/compiling for the past week. In the past I've been getting about 4.
Same here, Mountain Lion has resulted in better/longer battery life for me. I have a mid-2011 MacBook Air 13inch, stock 128GB SSD. Not sure if this is related, but I also recently stopped running Growl and Hardware Growler... -
| Wise, Aged Ars Veteran That's really weird. I have a 2011 MBP (17 inch) with an OWC SSD and a WD 1 terabyte hard drive in it. Feels like I've gained between 30 and 45 minutes of battery life after the upgrade. I use iStat to track it and it feels like I've gotten better life since I upgraded. Seems to handle flash video better (battery life-wise), but Safari 6 is super crashy and buggy. It routinely just quits when playing anything on youtube, and if I switch tabs it goes apeshit and super fast fowards from the time I switched to the time I switch back. It's a funny bug, but really annoying at the same time. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training Did a clean install on all my machines. iCloud and the App store makes it too easy not to . Actually had a weird bug on my desktop where I bought Lion Server, got double charged and when they reversed it they wiped Lion Server from my purchase list but it was still installed. I didn't even want to risk that crap. I did a complete wipe to ML then bought ML Server.
ML is soooooo much better than lion it's not even funny. -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae | et Subscriptor No hard & fast tests, but my mid-2010 17" MBP did just fine yesterday despite my forgetting to pack my power adaptor before almost two hours in the airport lounge, then a 3-hour flight, most of which I worked through. (I keep a spare at my office here in MSP.)
I'm sure that there are some services that use up extra juice, and that some apps are especially likely to look for updates too often, etc. If 10.8.0 is a bit better or a bit worse on battery, however, it's a minor point for most of us. Only these 30% drops, for hero road warriors, is an issue. And those are exactly the folks who probably most appreciate the new features. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training My late '11 doesn't seem to be affected, if it is it's not noticeable. Did a clean install on a new hard drive. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training Thank you, Ars, for reporting this. I've noticed a significant decrease in the battery life (around 50%) as well as the unit running much hotter since upgrading my rMBP to Mountain Lion . Glad to hear it's not all in my head. I look forward to future updates on this issue. -
| Wise, Aged Ars Veteran No battery life issues on a 2009 mac pro! ;-)
The lack of Airplay mirroring, however... that stings. -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae IntergalacticWalrus wrote:Hell, after the horrible letdown that was Lion and the fact that ML basically fixes none of Lion's problems, I plan on not upgrading until I'll stumble upon an application that requires it. I mean why even bother at this point?
Other than the battery life issues (I'm getting a 30-40% decrease), Mountain Lion seems to have fixed the major issues I had with Lion.
However, I can understand that's not the case for everybody. Hopefully things will be better for you in the next release (rumoured to be branded "Snoop Lion"). -
| Ars Praetorian IntergalacticWalrus wrote:HiRez wrote:And this is why you never install an OS X 10.X.0 version. Ever.
Hell, after the horrible letdown that was Lion and the fact that ML basically fixes none of Lion's problems, I plan on not upgrading until I'll stumble upon an application that requires it. I mean why even bother at this point?
Same here. If I have understood correctly, fullscreen mode and spaces remain as unusable as they were in Lion; the painfully slow jarring animations can't be disabled, and fullscreen windows can't be prevented from taking a new space. (Why the hell they ever thought that a fullscreen window creating a space was a good idea, I don't know.) Windows does both fullscreen and multi-screen about 100x better. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training Sleepperi wrote:IntergalacticWalrus wrote:HiRez wrote:And this is why you never install an OS X 10.X.0 version. Ever.
Hell, after the horrible letdown that was Lion and the fact that ML basically fixes none of Lion's problems, I plan on not upgrading until I'll stumble upon an application that requires it. I mean why even bother at this point?
Same here. If I have understood correctly, fullscreen mode and spaces remain as unusable as they were in Lion; the painfully slow jarring animations can't be disabled, and fullscreen windows can't be prevented from taking a new space. (Why the hell they ever thought that a fullscreen window creating a space was a good idea, I don't know.) Windows does both fullscreen and multi-screen about 100x better.
Multi monitors or multi desktops? Multi desktop support isn't built into windows as far as I know and multi monitor support is horrible and up to your graphic driver in most cases not windows. -
| Ars Centurion | et Subscriptor I have a 2011 Air, 13", and the only big performance issue I have had has been a weird lag when opening the laptop. Specifically, it used to just open, the screen would turn on, and then I could immediately type my password. Now it takes a few seconds before the keyboard seems to work, and often I have to click into the password field.
However, I used to have issues where opening the lid would do nothing, and I would have to restart the computer. Now I don't have that problem...
Same time lost I suppose, but for different reasons. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training TempestCore wrote:fsck! wrote:Interesting, I have noticed the opposite. In fact, just last night I was amazed about how my MBP early-2011 was still running on a single charge eventhough I was jumping back and forth between a Parallel's Win7 VM and OSX for hours. I got to thinking whether the ML upgrade had anything to do with this.
I had a somewhat similar experience. I have been getting close 5 hours disconnected from my 2009 13" MBP doing coding/compiling for the past week. In the past I've been getting about 4.
You're doing well. I have the same machine and am lucky to get 3 hours just doing basic websurfing and email. This is on Lion. I am waiting for 10.8.1 before taking the plunge. -
| Ars Praetorian understudyheroes wrote:Sorry, meant multi monitors not multi desktops. It may (have been) up to the graphic driver thus far, but I think Win8 has a degree of built in support...? And with Windows 7's window-moving shortcuts (both keyboard and mouse-drag), further tweaked via Autohotkey, I have found it very easy to throw around and instantly position windows usefully on multiple displays. OS X has nothing for this. Certainly the Lion/Mountain Lion way of blanking out other displays while one is in "full screen" mode would be a disaster, even if the "full screen" mode was worth using in the first place which it is not.Sleepperi wrote:IntergalacticWalrus wrote:HiRez wrote:And this is why you never install an OS X 10.X.0 version. Ever.
Hell, after the horrible letdown that was Lion and the fact that ML basically fixes none of Lion's problems, I plan on not upgrading until I'll stumble upon an application that requires it. I mean why even bother at this point?
Same here. If I have understood correctly, fullscreen mode and spaces remain as unusable as they were in Lion; the painfully slow jarring animations can't be disabled, and fullscreen windows can't be prevented from taking a new space. (Why the hell they ever thought that a fullscreen window creating a space was a good idea, I don't know.) Windows does both fullscreen and multi-screen about 100x better.
Multi monitors or multi desktops? Multi desktop support isn't built into windows as far as I know and multi monitor support is horrible and up to your graphic driver in most cases not windows. -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae I also really like Moutain Lipn--not sure if I have encountered a dramatic loss in battery (on a non-retinized top-end 2012 MBP). Of course, as usual, it is a Mac OS 10.X.0 release, so there are some bugs that need to be urgently addressed in 10.8.1. -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae Did you reset the PMU and SMC after installing Mountain Lion?
Not that it should be necessary – obviously the Mountain Lion installer should handle this – but I'm betting it would resolve your issues. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training I was testing OSX Mountain Lion prior to public release and noticed a similar issue, however I thought it was isolated to my configuration. I did make some adjustments using the command line power management tool and the difference was night and day. I never thought it amy have been a change in Mountain Lion. In any case, given the prevalence of this, I created a blog listing the changes I made and explaining it for those with increased interest.
http://michael.olivero.com/post/2012/07 ... -Lion.aspx -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training I've been having these issues with my Retina Macbook Pro. It's dropped from around 7 hrs to 5 hrs. Has any one else experienced a drop so dramatic? -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae crzy_guy wrote:I've been having these issues with my Retina Macbook Pro. It's dropped from around 7 hrs to 5 hrs. Has any one else experienced a drop so dramatic?
That's pretty much in line with what people are seeing, myself included.
Somewhere around 30-40% seems common. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training I'm using a MacPro (early 2008 vintage), so battery life isn't an issue for me, but it's certainly the case that the graphics card is being used far more. I can always tell when my card's fan spins up, and it's on all the time with ML. -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae GreyAreaUk wrote:I'm using a MacPro (early 2008 vintage), so battery life isn't an issue for me, but it's certainly the case that the graphics card is being used far more. I can always tell when my card's fan spins up, and it's on all the time with ML.
However, laptops with integrated graphics are also seeing the same issue, with similar drops in battery life to those with dedicated chipsets.
This issue is a strange one. -
| Ars Centurion | et Subscriptor Grimmash wrote:Now it takes a few seconds before the keyboard seems to work, and often I have to click into the password field.
Try tapping the tab key. This will highlight the password field. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training Interesting how people and journalists alike assume the problem is specific to MacBooks running Mountain Lion just because they get a visible indication about the battery life on their monitor. The issue might just as well be generally increased power consumption across all lines of hardware but since you don't get an indication about 'battery status' on iMacs people don't notice it as much there. Personally I have experienced that my iMac runs visibly hotter and with louder fans after upgrading to Mountain Lion so I doubt the issue has anything at all to do with MacBook Pros and is rather a software issue, which the indications from Apple support seem to suggest as well.
Last edited by habermas on Wed Aug 08, 2012 3:13 am -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae IntergalacticWalrus wrote:HiRez wrote:And this is why you never install an OS X 10.X.0 version. Ever.
Hell, after the horrible letdown that was Lion and the fact that ML basically fixes none of Lion's problems, I plan on not upgrading until I'll stumble upon an application that requires it. I mean why even bother at this point?
Mountain Lion has a few of its own problems, but nothing compared to Lion. It certainly does fix a lot of Lion's problems.
The worst part is bugs in Safari 6, and occasionally a screen wobble. -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae Apple degrades battery life.
Okay, thanks for that news. -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae I don't know whether it'd hit up battery life—we run plugged in most of the time. But we've noted significant changes in performance, not good. Lots of sloth during the day. Many beachballs at boot. No more "instant off" at shutdown. Finder and Safari? Not quite as springy and pert. So, I wouldn't at all be surprised to know of some extra "cranking" going on behind the scenes. -
| Smack-Fu Master, in training Save your cycles: sudo tmutil disablelocal -
| Ars Centurion | et Subscriptor AngryChris wrote:Grimmash wrote:Now it takes a few seconds before the keyboard seems to work, and often I have to click into the password field.
Try tapping the tab key. This will highlight the password field.
The simplest solution is also the obvious one. You'd think I'd have tried that already... -
| Ars Scholae Palatinae fjpoblam wrote:But we've noted significant changes in performance, not good. Lots of sloth during the day. Many beachballs at boot. No more "instant off" at shutdown. Finder and Safari? Not quite as springy and pert.
That is the exact opposite to what we have seen on a handful of Macs. Things are generally noticeably faster.
Is this just one Mac? Was it an upgrade? It might be worth thinking about a clean install, it sounds like something went wrong.
