Week I brought up the fact that OS X Mountain Lion affects the battery life of Macs and a new study confirm this users issue. Basically, the study says that the owners of MacBook Pros with Retina Display can lose almost 3 hours of autonomy after installing OS X Mountain Lion and everything would be a software problem. It seems that the unjustified loading of the processor, the use of the Nvidia graphics card and the inefficient use of the Internet network would be the main causes that lead to a decrease in battery autonomy.
Our own testing revealed similar (and significant) drops in battery runtime after installing Mountain Lion. In previous tests, we were able to regularly achieve just over 8 hours of use by relying solely on our Retina MacBook Pro's integrated Intel HD4000 GPU. Performing the same "real-world" test using the same software applications and usage pattern, we never got the Retina MacBook Pro to run for more than a few minutes past 5 hours after a full charge.
Typically, the quad-core processor wasn't taxed beyond 5 percent capacity, except for occasional 10-20 percent spikes when loading webpages, reading or writing files, or other activities. Unexpected file system or network access, or less efficient use of the GPU, could cause additional power drain without showing significant CPU use.
Although Apple has not made any official comments regarding this issue, on a thread on the company's form, a user claims that an Apple representative confirmed that an update for OS X Mountain Lion will be published in the Mac App Store and the problem will be solved. Of course, no one knows when this update will be published and for which Macs it will solve the problem, but for now all you have to do is wait.
