Test shows upcoming OS X Mountain Lion version may solve laptop battery life woes
A set of tests published on Monday claim to show significant a boost in MacBook battery life using a new developer build of OS X Mountain Lion, with the latest beta showing an 85-minute increase from the current 10.8.1.
The unscientific test from The Mac Observer pitted numerous revisions of OS X, from 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.8.2 Mountain Lion developer build 12C35, against each other to determine how the operating system effects battery life.
The test used a 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro running a 2.0 GHz i7 processor with 8 GB of RAM, a Radeon HD 6490M GPU and two internal hard drives, an OCZ Vertex 4 64 GB SSD and a Seagate Momentus 750 GB HDD.
Each operating system was tested at full charge, with all applications and services disabled save for Wi-Fi, screen adjusted to 50 percent brightness with display set for continuous use and screen saver disabled. A moderate workflow was simulated using a custom Automator application, which repeated until the battery was fully drained.
Source: The Mac Observer
Using OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard as a baseline, the compiled test data showed a significant hit to battery performance with the introductions of 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion. Upon release, Lion lost over 40 minutes of battery life and took three revisions to regain Snow Leopard power efficiency. In contrast, Mountain Lion saw a huge 105 minute loss in battery performance when it was released in July, with the latest 10.8.1 version moving the OS only 30 minutes closer to baseline.
With OS X 10.8.2, however, battery life is not just brought back in line with Snow Leopard levels, but the OS actually outperforms its predecessor by eight minutes. This marks an 88.5 minute savings in power consumption from the most recent 10.8.1 version of Mountain Lion.
It was previously reported that Apple's Mountain Lion was causing battery life issues for many users, with some MacBook Air owners seeing their batteries lasting half as long as when OS X 10.7 Lion was installed. Subsequent tests of the latest public version of OS X, Mountain Lion 10.8.1, showed Apple engineers were working on a fix as battery life was substantially improved. If Monday's tests are accurate, OS X 10.8.2 will bring further battery life improvements, perhaps besting even the legacy OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
While the final public version of OS X 10.8.2 may not boast power savings identical to the home-brew test, the developer builds are promising and show Apple is taking an aggressive stance in solving the battery degradation issues seen at Mountain Lion's launch.
17 Comments
I still haven't moved my June 2012 15" MBP (non-retina) to ML 10.8 yet from 10.7.4, but if 10.8.2 gets released and the general public consensus is that it solves the battery issues, I'll probably go ahead and update.
The fact that an issue like this can be accidentally introduced, and then take 2 point releases to fix, just shows that the power management subsystem has become so complex no one understands it.
MORE than time. My MBA has been useless for weeks whenever I need to be on the road, which is why I got a MBA and not an iMac...
I don't get this last graph. How is it possible that SSD has less battery life than HDD? Update: I wasn't able to location the power consumption values from Seagate. OCZ, on the other hand, published the following Power Consumption Idle: 1.3 W Active: 2.5 W
[quote name="thunderriver" url="/t/152474/test-shows-upcoming-os-x-mountain-lion-version-may-solve-laptop-battery-life-woes#post_2186023"]I don't get this last graph. How is it possible that SSD has less battery life than HDD?[/quote] NAND does have certain intrinsic benefits over platter drive when it comes to power consumption but it depends on the testing being done. "At the system level, an SSD increases power consumption because CPU and memory utilization rises in response to increased I/O activity (they're not sitting there, waiting on a hard drive to send data). But remember that an SSD-based configuration will always finish those operations faster." Meaning, if you are simply testing the same system with an SSD and with an HDD but not specifically trying to tax the storage for the duration of the battery performance test you could easily have the HDD win if the disk shuts down when not in use. Add to that a system with 8 or even 16GB of RAM you could have a dozen hefty apps open with little writing to the drive. Overall, an SSD will be a far better choice. It clearly has the performance advantage, although it's not being HDDs (at least by a lot) in some areas, but it's so far ahead in others that it's huge benefit for the user. My MBP boot up in 10 seconds and iTunes and Xcode bounce only once before opening.