The Final Step

In the weeks since the release of OSX10.8 Mountain lion there have been several user reports of significantly reduced battery life after upgrading to the new operating system. Hundreds of posts on the Apple Support forums are claiming between 30-50% reduction in battery life with most reporting that the suggested fixes (repairing permissions on the disk, clearing PRAM, etc.), have little or no effect. Others are reporting no difference in battery life since the upgrade, which has been our limited experience.

Apple has acknowledged the issue and some users have been informed by Apple Technical Support that a fix is in the works. It is unclear as to how many users are affected by this issue but with Apple reporting over three million sales of Mountain Lion in the first four days even one percent of users is a significant number.

If you have a laptop where the battery longevity is crucial you may want to wait to upgrade. Especially since downgrading from Mountain Lion involves significant hurdles. Based on previous Apple OSX releases we would expect to see the first patch to be rolled out through the Mac App Store in the next two/three weeks, but no official timeframe has been reported.