Level 1

27 points

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

Good evening, I own a MacBook Pro 15" late 2016 and a couple of weeks ago I updated to OS Catalina with also first official update some days after launch.

I noticed that since Catalina runs on my Mac the battery life has decreased a lot, about 80% less than before !

With Mojave the average battery duration was about 10 hours, now not more than 2,5 ! Really unbelievable.

Of course I made a full check up and test's results are ok, also battery is ok because the completed charge cycles are only 210 on 1000 as on Apple official technical support site.

So I can't think about any other explanation if not that this problem has been caused by OS Catalina.

Did anyone else notice the some behaviour after updated to OS Catalina ?

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 24, 2019 9:43 AM

Top-ranking reply

xrisj

Level 1

13 points

Posted on Feb 13, 2020 4:29 PM

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.

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103 replies

Jan 29, 2020 4:37 PM in response to AntoninoSA

Ok everyone.... did 10.15.3 fix it?... Not leaving Mojave till it is...

Jan 29, 2020 11:59 PM in response to leroydouglas

This made no difference to me

Feb 4, 2020 12:02 PM in response to xboxbmliphone

Same for me

Savvy231

Level 1

4 points

Feb 12, 2020 8:42 AM in response to xboxbmliphone

my prob is battery has been well resolved, on catalina, now getting good enough 7-8 hrs ontime with heavy workload

Mar 20, 2020 11:52 AM in response to Savvy231

what MacBook type are u ?

I'm on MBA 2018 cc 187 , is that okay for Catalina ? are the batterie is going to drain

Apr 11, 2020 9:58 AM in response to bipin4718

OK. This didn't work. The battery drained quickly after being stuck at a 100 for a long time.

Catalina sucks!

Jun 3, 2020 9:39 PM in response to AntoninoSA

https://macreports.com/macos-catalina-how-to-fix-your-macbook-battery-draining-problem/

APPLE sent another bug along with the Catalina update to slow down computers, so we can purchase a new one

Jun 22, 2020 12:36 AM in response to AntoninoSA

Problem still remains with 10.15.5. I miss the good all times, when Mac have been good and stable computers...

Dec 31, 2019 4:50 AM in response to shramona02

Well, just FYI*.. Cycles on battery=342.. I closed the lid on my Air last night with 98%, opened it a little bit ago this morning and it was down to 79%.. Same draining as before. Showing no apps with significant battery usage.. So dropped ~20% in 8 hrs. A bit maddening. It's like it really doesn't sleep anymore which is what I was suspecting before. I opened Photos app this morning and let it sit. Used around 100% CPU for about a minute, then pretty much idle.. Has to be a secret process or something not allowing sleep. I'm going to let it run battery out and recharge. Then I may turn off iCloud just to see what happens. I still haven't loaded any apps yet. Only downloaded my iCloud Photos Library.(12,882 pics/vids). I was doing some research the first time on Catalina. Found a couple terminal commands to try that alter a couple settings.

PMSET

New

sudo pmset -b tcpkeepalive 0 (Find My Mac won’t work right)

sudo pmset hibernatemode 25

Original

sudo pmset -b tcpkeepalive 1

sudo pmset hibernatemode 3

Don't think it helped much though, plus really didn't want to leave Find My not working. That's when I got fed up and went back to Mojave. I think I'll turn off iCloud after drain-recharge and see what happens. Edit..I started typing this around 0640 and have been streaming TV while doing it to drain. I'm down to 50% now.. Pretty quick drain..It is running a secondary monitor off Thunderbolt 2 port as well.

Feb 13, 2020 4:21 PM in response to Savvy231

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..

xrisj

Level 1

13 points

Feb 29, 2020 4:01 PM in response to SolarDaveGreen

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...

Oct 24, 2019 9:52 AM in response to AntoninoSA

Try resetting the SMC https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

AntoninoSA Author

Level 1

27 points

Feb 29, 2020 4:16 PM in response to xrisj

How to kill scheduled jobs ?

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