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Mountain Lion OS X 10.8.1 Improves Battery Life Somewhat

Friday August 24, 2012 8:16 am PDT by Arnold Kim

Earlier this month, Arstechnica had reported that many users had found a significant decrease in battery life after upgrading to OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

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.

The same findings were reported by many others in Apple's own support forums, and there were some reports that the development versions of OS X 10.8.1 may have addressed this issue.

MacObserver has conducted battery life tests on the final release build of OS X 10.8.1 to see if there had indeed been any improvement. Their testing process included using an Automator script that launched several apps and navigated to websites. The script would cycle this process continuously. The tests were run on a 2011 Macbook Pro. Here are their findings:

First, they were able to confirm the drop in battery life when going from OS X 10.7.4 to OS X 10.8. The drop they measured was 33% (2 hours and 10 minutes) just from upgrading OS X to 10.8. The "No WiFi Icon" was a "fix" of suggested by one of their readers, but showed no appreciable effect. They did find that OS X 10.8.1 (beta and release) builds did improve the battery life stats, adding as much as 52 minutes in their testing. The overall numbers, however, are still well under their battery life measurements in OS X 10.7.4 (Lion).

Apple is currently testing OS X 10.8.2, but there's been no word if that build helps further improve battery times back towards OS X Lion levels.

Top Rated Comments

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DJJAZZYJET

32 months ago

Thats still a big drop. There needs to be some major improvements

Rating: 15 Votes

Krazy Bill

32 months ago

That "Up to 7 Hours" flag Apple claims is starting to look like a Dell advertisement with an asterisk accompanied by 4 paragraphs of disclaimers. :(

I'll keep plodding along in ancient Snow Leopard with 8+ hours.

Rating: 13 Votes

angrynstupid

32 months ago

Too many bells and whistles. The OS is being dumbed down for non-pro users who need useless eye candy to keep their attention.

Rating: 10 Votes

DaveLG526

32 months ago

Forget about the details but focus on how this got out into the users hands with an obvious and significant flaw.

Apple has long been known for good battery life yet the new OS shipped with significant flaw that was found by users quickly. What happened to quality control and customer satisfaction watchdogs within Apple.

The tech press needs to focus less on the "tech" in this story and discover what went very wrong within Apple.

Rating: 8 Votes

lilsoccakid74

32 months ago

Not sure MBP users were looking for a half-hour improvement.

Rating: 7 Votes

Shrink

32 months ago

Too many bells and whistles. The OS is being dumbed down for non-pro users who need useless eye candy to keep their attention.

Yup, all us non-pros are simpleminded monkeys who like shiny things and stupid eye candy.

Yup, we non-pros are all morons and mouth breathers, unlike you super cool, sophisticated pros.

Please forgive us eye candy loving, dopey app using, short attention span morons for ruining things for super pros like you, angrynstupid.

(I must say, your username...well...)

Rating: 6 Votes

jowie

32 months ago

I will go out on a limb. It's MacRumors that drains the battery! Before you go off half cocked, look at what Flash is doing when you load MacRumors. at one point it was using 136% of my cpu. All the ads between the articles are in Flash! If you force quit the plug-in it will extend your battery. Freakn why doesn't MacRumor require HTML 5?

What are you doing without AdBlock for your browser?

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=adblock

I've never seen a Flash ad on MacRumors :)

Rating: 5 Votes

princigalli

32 months ago

Lion = Vista, or Apple Vista
Mountain Lion = Mountain Vista?

Rating: 5 Votes