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

I spoke to an Apple "Advisor" a few days ago about this widespread problem with Catalina. She acted like she knew nothing about the issue. Hard to believe!! But she said she would report it and get back to me. Yeah, right. I haven't heard a word. So frustrating!

I have the same problem with battery life under Catalina as noted by other users. Tried doing the reset of SMC. Not sure yet if there is any difference. The battery plus the heat being generated by my MacBook Pro is very odd and has only happened since upgrading to Catalina. Apple's lack of responsibility is very typical of them. Had to replace my 1TB SSD drive for $1500. The whole purpose of selecting that option was to ensure that my HD drive didn't crash. After placing the new HD card in I got a whole 90 day guarantee! Wow, a whole 90 days!

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.

Just tried it.

However, my issue is with the overall quickened battery drain and not just during sleep. In fact, I don't have that 'massive drain while sleeping' problem at all.

So even after this terminal command, which aims to fix the sleep drain issue, my low battery life still remains.

Guess I'll comment on his video to see if he has another fix.

Hey guys! It happened the same with Mojave. I was constantly following the threads for a full year after Mojave came out and there was no fix from Apple. Finally I decided not to upgrade from HS until new MACOS comes out. Now Catalina is out and we have the same problem.

I don't know, but this is not what I expected when I bought a MAC. I was expecting that every update to run smooth and not bother about any OS problems.

I am just trying to understand, do you all have a lot of apps installed? Is your hard-drive full? While installing did you used the power-cord or you installed the new OS while on battery? The battery drain is the same after a week or two, like after the 1st day?

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.

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)

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!

Same problem. No issues with my Mac for the last 4 years. Now all of the sudden after 10.15.2 it’s dying every 5 minutes. **** apple. First they broke my iPhone and iPad with the new ios and now this. Tim Cook needs to fire some people now.

Agree with the last respondent. Shameful behaviour.

Unfortunately, it would appear the the Apple Board of Directors don’t have any metric for customer service. If they did, Mssrs. Cook et al would be looking for other jobs. Good thing Apple technologies are not used as critical components in aircraft.

Hello,

Same problem here.

While before my macbook Pro would just work for (many) hours, I can now see the charge indicator counting down like a bomb in a bad movie. What I did not yet try is to see whether cutting off all networking reduces this battery drain to acceptable levels. Have you tried this?

Best,

Dumitru

Apple computers used to be of excellent quality and excellent user experienced. But at some point they gave up being Apple and became Lenovo wannabees. It started with the system freezes on MacBook Retinas (in 2015, something I had not seen since the BSODs in Windows years ago), then they replaced the magsafe power connectors with fragile USB C in order to get an easy buck from chargers, then this Catalina OS, where the battery drain is not the only issue. I just discovered that the Photo application (which replaces iPhoto) reorganizes the photo library in a way that makes it really difficult to access manually. Not to mention built-in physical obsolescence - the rubber burder around the screen peels off after 3 years of use, and one of the 4 feet has fallen. At some point it will become less likely for me to spend time convincing my employer to buy me hardware that's twice as expensive as other employees', especially if the qualities I'm using to convince them - reliability, durability - aren't really there...

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 too. Once my desktop was cleared, battery usage turned back to normal. I had however, before reading this post/solution, also reset my MacBook Pro to factory settings and reinstalled Catalina...

Thank you, shramona02.