The upcoming point update to OS X Mountain Lion, 10.8.1, may improve battery life on Apple's notebooks, according to at least one developer with access to the developer seed. Softpedia quoted the unnamed developer, who argued that the fixes coming in 10.8.1 not only "resolve all the reported battery drainage issues" that came with the release of 10.8, but that the improvement in battery life is "quite substantial."
Not long after Mountain Lion's release in late July, user reports began cropping up suggesting that the OS update was draining their MacBook Pro and MacBook Air batteries faster than Lion (10.7). Our own tests showed that this indeed seemed to be the case—while we were regularly able to see 8+ hours of life during regular use on a Retina MacBook Pro under Lion, we were unsuccessful at achieving much more than 5 hours performing the same activities under Mountain Lion.
According to Softpedia's developer source, those differences in battery life are reportedly reversed with the 10.8.1 developer seed. "Until I installed 10.8.1, my MacBook was showing 4h:05m after a full charge," the developer claimed. "After installing 10.8.1 it's showing over 8h."
Apple has been seeding developer betas of 10.8.1 for just over a week, the second of which came last Friday. The company has not said when it plans to release 10.8.1 to the public, but according to our own analysis of past OS X updates, it should be coming down the line relatively soon. Ever since the release of OS X 10.4, Apple averages just over 19 days for the first point release (Lion was the outlier at 27 days). We're now at roughly 27 days since the release of Mountain Lion, so we wouldn't be surprised to see 10.8.1 show up in the Mac App Store sooner than later.
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