OS Catalina, short battery life on MacBook Pro 15" - 2016

This was part of my solution as well. While looking at the power information in System Information, I found PMSET schedules from an old 3rd party backup tool Intego. Using launchctl utility from Terminal, I cleaned up the LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons for that tool. I then ran the PMSET utility to clear the old scheduled jobs - this was crushing my mac battery, but didn't show up as a problem until the Catalina upgrade. I cannot speak to the correlation, but now I've only used 10% of my battery after an hour! I stumbled upon this after seeing a video about the PMSet utility and battery management.

Hi guys!

FINALLY I might have fixed it!

Still have to test it for a longer period of time, but immediately increased my

battery life by 2 - 2.5X and decreased charge time by 50ish%.

I had the same problem with my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014). My battery under really heavy

use pre-issue, would last 3-5 hours, but after Catalina it burned at roughly 1%

per minute usually 1 - 1.5 hours. My fan was on high (sometimes even in sleep)

and my computer couldn't even keep up with my charger! I was really nervous

because the heat generated by my mac and the heat in the charger seemed

dangerously high.

Solution: It turns out that Parallels Toolbox was constantly running in the background and when I opened up

the Activity Monitor, it was using more energy than all else combined (followed

by Chrome). I had to uninstall parallels toolbox instead of just ending the

application from the Activity Monitor (only need to drag the app from the

finder window into the trash for this one). I was shocked when I learned that

Parallels Toolbox also ran 5 processes called "bsdtar" each running

at 100% CPU. Once I quit each process, my mac improved within ~5 minutes (fan went off/low).

I'm glad I still researched all the tricks to decrease power usage but so far this fix has made the biggest difference.

Guys, I've had a huge improvement both times this has happened to me by opening the Activity Monitor and viewing which processes are using a lot of my CPU. When this happens, my fan runs on high which kills my battery.

Try looking at the processes and do a quick search to see what they're being used for. You can usually troubleshoot from there by killing the process and addressing the underlying cause (program running the process) so that it doesn't repeat later.

Good luck!

Just FYI*.. I never have had anything on my desktop.. and I was still having bad battery drain overnight while my 2015 Air was "sleeping".. I went back to Mojave 10.14.6. I never had any issues on Sierra, High Sierra or Mojave. And NO, I didn't have any weird or 32 bit apps on machine.. and I stayed on it since day after release day so it had what, almost 3 months to "settle down".. Just create a bootable installer and go back, or if you actually did a full TimeMachine backup before you updated, you can use that. Ultimately that's what I did cuz I couldn't figure out how to put back Microsoft Office perpetual license SFW without going to everpay-365 which I didn't want to do. .. Of course, make sure you have data backed up somehow before you do anything. Not gonna update until I see some response from apple on this in some way.. Might not even then.. Not sure I like where this is going. Partitioning to 2 volumes, read only OS and read/write Data. It sounds good for security, but is taking more/all control from user(yeah, not everyone is just the average user), just like iOS on I-devices. Can't do anything unless you can "remove the restrictions"... For Mac this will eventually be like I-devices, can't install any non-app store SFW... Eventually all developers must submit to apple to get installed on Mac. Sorry for the extra commentary.. Just trying to help people make informed decisions...

This worked for me.

I installed Catalina on my Mid-2015 MacBook Pro Retina 15' just a few hours ago, and the battery drained from 100 to 60 in just over an hour or light use. I use Chargeberry to monitor my battery, and it showed that I have just a couple more hours of juice remaining. I charged the battery to a 100 again and then tried the SMC reset. Now Chargeberry tells me that I have 10 and a half hours of juice remaining. (I have been using the MacBook unplugged for around 20 minutes already, and the charge is still at a 100%.)

I had the same problem until I installed Catalina 10.15.2. That fixed it.

I upgraded my 2017 MacBook Pro 13" to Catalina 10.15.2 and WHALAH!! I now have my battery power back to 10-12 hours. Under 10.15.1, it was 1-2 hours, so this is a huge improvement!

I had the problem with short battery life. I installed Catalina 10.15.2 and it fixed it.

I *MIGHT* HAVE FOUND THE CULPRIT: CLEAR YOUR DESKTOP

My battery life has significantly improved after I cleared my entire desktop, which is connected to my iCloud.

But full disclosure, I resorted to doing something pretty radical before that. I was so tired of my battery drains, 1% every 3 minutes, that I went for a complete disk erase followed by reinstalling my OS. Yeah, I was pretty desperate.

Now, I use this app "Battery Monitor" to check how much time I have on my battery, it isn't a great app, but its lightweight so yeah. All this time it would show around 5hrs 40 mins on 90% charge (while I actually got no more than 4 hours). After the reinstall, it showed the same. I was crushed!!!

But then, as my iCloud started reloading itself and I saw my desktop populate, I had this weird idea to move everything from it elsewhere. As I did that, the time on my Battery Monitor began increasing. As I type this now, it shows 12 hrs 5 mins on 82% battery. Even if this means 8 hrs, its still double of my earlier meagre 4 hours!!!

I can't tell if my problem has been solved, it's too soon to celebrate. I'm going observe my mac's performance over an extended period, and will update here in a few days. *Fingers crossed*

I'm not too sure if this applied to only me, but I ended up downgrading from Mac os Mojave back to High Sierra, and now im to scared to upgrade to any of the two because my battery life decreased by 2.5 hours, could barely last the day without the fans heating up either, and my battery is still new. Currently only at about 65 charges. You could try to downgrade it to Mojave using this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plgOsDEhgqE This youtuber explains everything really well, and he did exactly what i did to downgrade it back (in my case, from mojave to high sierra)

Right, me too. I reloaded this Air with Mojave again. My Photos got a stuck on 1 original downloading for over a day so I reloaded it again but from scratch, not TimeMachine backup. All back to normal now! All needed apps reinstalled. Everything working. I'm staying put on Mojave indefinitely. If I had another machine to play with for future updates and see if Apple actually fixes this, that would be nice. oh well.. Good luck everyone.

David,

A local expert on iOS suggested I should uninstall and reinstall Catalina from scratch. Apparently he did it and it fixed the battery problem.

I am about to do this myself, but have to do my back up before deleting everything. Will update my response as soon as I complete the process.

Hope it helps!

Mayu

everyone in this thread NEEDS to contact Apple Support & reference these posts. when I contacted them, they said I was alone & no other complaints had been made. I have since sent link to these posts. But the 1 update since Catalina did nothing to fix this problem.

Glad to know emptying your desktop worked for you alexandru217 :)

It's been more than a month for me since I did the whole reset and also cleared my desktop, and I'm happy to report that I have had no battery drain issues. However, I did not install any of my older apps back (too scared). Safe to say, I'm living pretty precariously :(

That other users have not seen any change even after clearing their desktop may point to the fact that they may have background processes running from other apps which my now minted Mac doesn't have. This is only a theory though.

But another strong theory I have is that the battery drain issue might be caused by how this new Mac version handles iCloud. Clearing my desktop seems to have cleared a great load off the continuous iCloud update process. I thought of this as my iPhone battery life too is a sh*tshow: it does fairly better on 4G than on Wifi, which is completely insane. Only reason can be that iCloud auto backs up or whatever only when on Wifi. I am too lazy to work this out for my iPhone, maybe when I have a lottt of free time, I'll move things here and there, maybe remove a few apps off of my back up settings. BUT that said, there's also the giant issue that during the big-drain phase, my Mac wasn't doing great either when disconnected from Wifi. So....that's a big challenge to the iCloud theory. Unless iCloud is up to some mischief even when offline (conspiracies, conspiracies). Yeah, pretty impossible.

All I know is that I still need a fix for my iPhone, and iCloud is where I should begin, which worked for my Mac.

Also, let's remember that iCloud is not limited to the desktop.

All this makes me very curious to understand the workings of iCloud offline: hidden background processes?