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.
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.
Comments
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
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.
Uh huh. I'm running 12C35, yet still getting about an hour and a half less run time compared to 10.7.4 on my 2009 13" MBP, so I have no idea what these people are doing differently than I am.
Man I hope this fixes the battery issue. This was the only adverse effect I have ever had with an Apple operating system. I didn't get the extra 30 minutes reported with the first update, so I hope I can reap the benefits of the second. Any increase in battery life from the Snow Leopard baseline is just gravy after that.
Go Snow Leopard!
It's good to see she's still got legs. And holding her own against the new cats on the block.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cash907
Uh huh. I'm running 12C35, yet still getting about an hour and a half less run time compared to 10.7.4 on my 2009 13" MBP, so I have no idea what these people are doing differently than I am.
fresh install. the truth is that i have 0 problems with ML since .0. (besides safari's strange opening animation (it's kind of slow) and the fact that it usually quits for no reason 1 per day).
When I looked for possible solutions or even a recognition of the problem I found the web comments to be either dismissive or overly defensive of Apple.
Anyway, it's good to see there's been some progress around this area.
Holding its own.... On battery life. Features and security it is clearly behind. If SL is the highest your Mac can go- cool. But how people can't upgrade to Lion or ML and not take advantage of iCloud is beyond me...
I agree 100%. I occasionally run older versions from various external drives and it never ceases to amaze me how old and tired a generation or two back OS X seems once you have become familiar with the latests version. ML is absolutely phenomenal IMHO.
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
I agree 100%. I occasionally run older versions from various external drives and it never ceases to amaze me how old and tired a generation or two back OS X seems once you have become familiar with the latests version. ML is absolutely phenomenal IMHO.
this.
it already is so fast, stable, complete and it was out a month ago. amazing OS.
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
I agree 100%. I occasionally run older versions from various external drives and it never ceases to amaze me how old and tired a generation or two back OS X seems once you have become familiar with the latests version. ML is absolutely phenomenal IMHO.
You've got to be kidding. I would have said this about past releases of the MacOS, but ML killed my battery life and also freezes the computer often. I consider it to be an embarassment in the form it was originally released, which was obviously without sufficient testing. I was running Snow Leopard before this (I had skipped Lion). I'm now sorry I didn't stick with it and simply wait for a .2 or .3 release like I have in the past. No new feature nor any speed increases is worth the hassle of the battery discharging so quickly or the computer freezing. I now feel like I own a PC.
Remember the article is about 10.8.2 which is is still in the hands of those of us with developer accounts (unless I missed the release). Given we have had 10.8, 10.8.1 and 10.8.2 coming shortly for the public you are right on schedule to be happy with the .3 release of ML.
Just a bit weary about doing a clean install since I'm relatively new to MAC.
Any suggestions?
Thanks!!!