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

This is my experience also! If I shut everything down I can get the battery to last a couple days with the lid closed. Previously, I could easily get a week with my light usage (browsing/email) for 30-min to an hour per day.

I've gone up and down several times.. I went ahead and upgraded to 10.15.3 anyway, as now I have excessive drainage on Mojave as well... This is nuts.. Still there of course. I went back down to Mojave. Still doing it.. I'm starting to wonder if either they did some firmware update on a chip with Catalina(if that's even possible) and didn't tell anyone, or I have an unusual battery issue. Only has 353 cycles on it too, out of the 1000 they claim it's good for.. Maybe I'll spring for a new battery for this 2015 Air and see what happens.. Wish I had one already so I could let everyone know right away if it helps.. I'll let you all know if I go that route. This thing was flawless until I did the Catalina update...

Well, I went back up to Catalina 10.15.3. Still same issue.. I just hit the keyboard on this to check battery %. Here maybe is something significant folks.. Instead of closing the lid, I put it to sleep in the menu and left the lid open.. That was over 6 hours ago. I just checked Activity monitor for the battery drain line over last 12 hours. I saw the significant change at about the 6 hr mark where I put it to sleep, and the line was significantly quite less steep the last 6 hrs. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the way this OS is looking or dealing with the lid sensor... I'll have to try this experiment a few more times to see if this is a pattern.. Fingers crossed. If so, I can submit more helpful feedback perhaps to Apple..

I finally found a solution after a call to Apple, I have had to delete all files in ~library\LaunchAgents and ~Library\LaunchDaemons. This has had some unwanted side effects, but at least my machine now lasts a little longer on battery

What did you do to fix it? I finally got mine to quit draining while sleeping.. I had to cripple the OS features to do it though...dumb.. Can't use find my Mac.. and a few other things.. I forget now what all I did.. oh yeah.. totally turned off Location Services among other thing..I find it hard to believe they can't make this work right like it did in Mojave the first time..

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.

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

Unfortunately, reinstalling OSs is not an option for people using their computer for work. I did it when I had some time (this is how I got to Catalina) now I regret it. And I blame Apple for pushing me into it. Jobs must be rolling is his grave.

Take a look at About this Mac | System Report | Power Under the batter settings is where the found the PM scheduled jobs. As outlined in my post, I killed those jobs and the battery consumption is now back to 'normal'. Hope this helps...

It's a combination of using the pmset utility from the command line (terminal). Here's a primer on using pmset: https://www.dssw.co.uk/reference/pmset.html

You'll need to remove the plist files that create them. I used grep to find those, and then deleted them.

Hey guys, no change in the battery drain issue? not even with the latest update 10.15.3?

My MBA 2017 is still running on HS with 10h+ battery life. I didn't upgrade to Mojave due to a lot of complaints on battery drain and now with Catalina I see the same issue.

Please let me know if you did update a MBA to latest OS version without problems?

I have to mention that my MBA is basic - not to many apps installed, I also use safari for web browsing and most of the time this is what I do on my laptop.

Thanks!

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%.)

Hmm, just upgraded to Catalina last night (April 11, 2020), and here I am to say that my battery was drained on sleep like never before. Researched it and found this thread. Yet *none* of the above comments will fox my issue. What is really going on here? Anyone have any relevant info (not "I suspect", or "I read")? I get that some of you have had success, but it should be obvious that this is a broader issue than previously suspected. So now what?

I am facing the same issue in my MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018), after updating to Catalina 10.15.4. Before that with Mojave life was good, peaceful and not panicked to back the power on. The battery life with Mojave was much much better than Catalina was able to run the system without plugging into power around 10hrs, now within 2 hrs the battery is drained.

I checked the Amperage power in System Battery is always showing -ve either I plugged it to power or not.

Apple please make our life easier and stable, release a new version with fixing all these issues.

It’s a very challenging time for everyone’s ongoing mental health around the world right now. It’s a time to reach out with support and for Apple to show compassion offering hope by publicly stating they acknowledge Catalina incl 10.15.5 has issues, and that they are working on fixing these. I need a workable computer to tend to my late fathers affairs which are not possible on the iPhone.