Apple's new OS, Mountain Lion, seems to be causing the same sort of problems with battery life that the earlier upgrade from Snow Leopard, Lion, did. It's just that it's hitting a different set of users now.
You can see the complaints thread here. And the earlier one about Lion here. There's also an extraordinarily minor whine about snooze here.
This is rather more than just a few people whinging (as our friends from Oz would put it) about a small decline in battery life. The actual loss seems to be some 50% of previous life: really quite serious a number when dealing with laptops.
The much more serious point is that no one really knows why the move from Snow Leopard to Lion caused such loss of battery life. Apple doesn't seem to and they've not been able to issue a fix. Now, it could have been just something about certain set ups of the machines which interacted with something else in the new OS. Something which just, you know, happens.
But what we've got now is that the move from Lion to Mountain Lion hasn't fixed this for those who were so affected. But more than that, the move has started to cause the same problems in those who were not affected under Lion. That is, we've had two upgrades of the OS which are causing similar problems for different users.
There's no obvious pattern that has been found as yet for who has been affected and who has not: that's really the worrying point. If it was all users of program "Y" then OK, there's a conflict there which needs to be solved. Or if it were all with some specific peripheral, some particular set up of the OS.
But as yet no one seems to know. And they didn't manage to fix it on Lion either. Not good, not good.
