MacOs catalina drains battery in sleep (MBP)

Great that Apple decided to get rid of the status indicator LED on their machines. So now we are stuck with a macOS update that causes the computer to wake, but you cannot even see when it is happening because there is no LED anymore.

I just purchased a new MacBook Pro 16" and with the preinstalled Catalina I also experience this issue.

And not only there - all my Macs are affected. iMac 27" at home, MacMini at home, MacBook 13", all of them just wake up randomly and often even stay on afterwards. The worst thing is: once the battery of the MacBooks are drained, even the safe sleep does not work correctly anymore. The MacBooks used to dump their memory onto the SSD / HDD to not loose any data once the battery was too low on energy. Now, with Catalina, whenever I turn on my drained MacBooks they have to boot from scratch again.

Sleep mode is completely useless now, I have to turn of all my machines everytime. Especially for the MacBooks this is an annoying issue, and it still persists with Catalina 10.15.3.

Thank you, but prior to Catalina this draining was insignificant. I could leave my Mac sleeping for days with only few percentage of battery drain. Now it completely drains off my battery overnight. This is absurd!

Catalina may well be busy overnight reprocessing your media for some weeks, as has been said countless times. This particularly if you fell for the "Put your photos on iCloud" rhetoric pushed by the marketing department.

If you leave an MBP overnight either plug it in, or turn it off - simple as that. Doesnt matter what they used to do in the old days, it isn't doing it now.

An update to my previous post:

I had the same problem with a new 16-inch MBP. As near as I can tell, now two months later, the issue seems to be related to the items in iCloud syncing with my new MBP. (In my case, these items were mostly photos - to be more specific, Apple-related photos, photos used in the Photos app.)

I'm not sure, but there might be different processes at work between syncing the photos from iCloud to the new computer, and processing those photos (things like facial recognition and perhaps location).

It seemed that syncing the photos happened when the Photos app was running on the new computer. What seemed to work for me was to start the Photos app, set the computer to NOT go to sleep, leave the computer powered on, and let it run overnight (or over multiple nights) to get the photos. (“Getting the photos” will mean different things to different people, depending on your iCloud settings.)

After the photos have finished syncing, then quit the Photos app, leave the computer powered on and set to NOT go to sleep, and let it run overnight (or over multiple nights) to process the photos.

My experience was that it took multiple days (including days to figure this out and try it) for the process to complete itself. (In my case, it was processing about 18K photos.)

Now, I can close the lid on the new MBP without it being plugged in, and the battery has little or no drain the next day.

I'm not sure what’s going on for the folks who can’t (or never have been able to) close the lid on their MBPs without significant battery drain. I’m in the group that has had little to no battery drain for years with other MBPs. I’m glad it works just fine now with this new 16-inch MBP.

Note: There is some speculation on my part about what I think is going on and how someone might try to solve it. I’m only an ‘n’ of one, but this is what I think I did to solve the problem. If I’m wrong, I’m sorry.

Since the latest Catalina updates ive noticed the battery on my MacBook Air (early 2015) has dropped to 25% capacity and the other day it dropped to 12% capacity overnight ( it’s only done 285 cycles so no where near the 1000 it should cope with) . I have tried letting it drain leaving It 5 hrs and then charging. Resetting the Pram. But my battery seems terrible. Pre Catalina it was fine.

why do you leave a mac to sleep with no power overnight? You will surely have read the last six pages.

1 keep it 100% on power for the next week at least

2 have an SSD fitted and 16GB RAM, and enjoy a transformed mac you can turn off instead of sleep.

I found the following solution for me:

1. PRAM / NVRAM reset

2. SMC reset

3. Enter the command sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0 in the terminal

4. Use BetterTouchTool to switch off the WLAN and switch off mail. When the the MAC goes sleep.

Extract from the Catalina manual page for pmset (in terminal app, type "man pmset"...

"hibernatemode = 3 by default on portables. The system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and will power memory during sleep. The system will wake from memory, unless a power loss forces it to restore from hibernate image.

hibernatemode = 25 is only settable via pmset. The system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and will remove power to memory. The system will restore from disk image. If you want "hibernation" - slower sleeps, slower wakes, and better battery life, you should use this setting"

...So it seems that hibernate mode 3 (default on laptops) uses power while in sleep mode to maintain a copy of data in RAM during sleep mode. This would explain why consumes more power in sleep mode than with hibernate mode 25, which doesn't provide power to maintain data in RAM.

The MBP 16 models have 16GB min RAM configurations, which is potentially a lot of RAM needing power during sleep mode. The tradeoff of setting hibernate mode 25 is that potentially much more data has to be read when recovering from sleep mode. Even for an SSD device, that might take longer than a user would like, so mind the tradeoffs.

I think you are correct. Hibernate 25 on a rotating hard disk takes many minutes to wake up in my personal experience.

Converting to SSD makes overnight sleep unnecessary - shut down and start up is much less than a minute in both cases.

All very logical , but with my MacBook Pro from 2013 to 2018 I had negligeable consumption ( go to the office 5 days a as week , same patterns ) and suddenly moving to Catalina consumption when closed changed to the worse , and by a lot .

It is a mbp 2013 13inches 8Mb Ram

with my Mbp 16 inches 16Mb is a bit better , but much more I was used in the past

Catalina may well have changed some default or immutable power characteristics. I haven't been able to compare before and after, as my old 2012 MBPr 15 is now obsoleted by Apple and from what I'm told, not able to run Catalina.

I just set my hibernate mode to 25 on my 2019; I hope to test the drain during sleep mode once again, this evening.

The reality here is that Apple have a major QA issue and are releasing faulty goods. I have already spent time on the phone with support to establish that my screen doesn't reach the advertised brightness of 500 Nits - which I only realised as I have one of the 27" 5K LG Monitors that does, and noticed the difference. One of the main reasons I bought a MacBook is for the quality of the screen, my profession rests on it.

On top of the battery issues. I have set my mac to go into "deep sleep", but still find on some days when I get to my desk that the battery has dropped random percentages, up to 50%. I have also noticed that when running games that the machine cannot charge the battery as fast as it discharges - and this was never an issue with my 2013 MacBook that ran like a TRAIN for SIX YEARS.

Tired of having the Apple brigade throw temporary solutions / workarounds at me and not acknowledging the fact that Apple have issues that need to be sorted out. That they are now more interested in cosmetics than they are in creating the highest performance, highest quality machinery. Make it thinner. Get rid of ports. Put a touchbar on it - that'll sell. None of which I care for. I just want a machine that WORKS, and WORKS.

It has got to the point where I dare to accept an update for the OS as I am afraid of what will happen if I do, which above all, is deeply disappointing. Anyone defending them is doing themselves a disservice as WE ALL PAY A PREMIUM for their goods.

Follow up: with hibernate mode now at 25, set my 2019 MPB 16 on sleep last night about 10pm, no AC power connection, not other ports connected. Resumed almost 9am. 100% power level. Better improvement than expected. I'm guessing the powering of RAM in sleep mode was what was draining the battery so quickly. I'll trying a longer test, 24 hours, over this coming weekend if I remember.

I didn't happened in previous versions of the OS, so it's not a hardware related problem, but a software issue related to it. What I do to minimize the battery drain is to disable wifi and bluetooth before sleep. The lost percentage is around 5% in one night, so it's acceptable for me. I think that this happens because the computer is performing some tasks involving data submission to Apple.