Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion To Blame For Poor Battery Life?

By all accounts when Apple launched the news update to OS X it was considered a hit, logging more than 3 million downloads in its first four days on sale. However, the love affair with the new operating system might be short lived as complaints are piling up about poor battery performance since upgrading.

All around the web there have been a growing number of complaints from users running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on their laptops. Users are noticing that since they've updated to the new OS their battery life isn’t what it used to be. So much so that in some cases installing Mountain Lion has cut the time between charges in half.

Threads have popped on the Apple Support Communities and elsewhere detailing the complaints. On the Apple support forum a thread entitled “Battery life dropped considerably on Mountain Lion,” has now grown to 42 pages and over 600 posts with numerous users expressing similar concerns over poor battery performance.

For the moment Apple doesn’t seem to be commenting or offering any suggestions as to a possible fix or a potential culprit for the problems. Users on several forums have been putting forward their ideas as to what is causing it, but they vary and often times get discounted quickly by others running different configurations, yet experiencing the same issue.

Chris Foresman, from Ars Technica, did an “unscientific test” on a MacBook Air from 2010 (upgrading from Lion to Mountain Lion). He discovered that under the same circumstances Mountain Lion was predicting 3.5 hours of battery life, while Lion would typically predict 4.5 hours. The difference between the two times is about 20 percent, definitely too high for an OS that’s supposed to improve upon Lion. More alarmingly, Foresman claimed the battery appeared to drop by 1 percent every two minutes.

For now it looks as though users will have to wait and see what kind of rabbit Apple can pull out of its hat for a fix. If we run across more details or a potential problem solver we'll be sure to post it for all of our readers.