macOS Big Sur battery drain issue

nxahx and @All:

Google Chrome has long been known as a “resource hog”.

However, while that may have been a significant and readily visible contributor, many of us have been trying to help y’all to understand that there are many “housekeeping” operations that “kick in” with a major upgrade of the Operating System (OS): these are indexing and caching operations that help speed up your system, once accomplished.

This was not simply an update, but a major upgrade of the OS.

Not allowing these “housekeeping” operations to complete simply prolongs the natural Energy (CPU, memory, and “disk”) use these operations require.

This is known behavior, of such major upgrades of the OS.

Next time, hopefully y’all will remember this, and schedule such a major upgrade of the OS for a time when you can leave your laptop plugged in, while it does its “housekeeping”.

(However, it could be a long time before we have an upgrade this major.)

Having the same problem. My sister and I both updated our MacBook airs to big sur however she doesn’t seem to be experiencing any of the issues I am. My MacBook gets incredibly hot even with only minimal apps open, the fan runs loudly and the battery drained from 100% to 34% in only an hour. Not sure what the issue is but hoping there’s a fix for it soon.

Welcome, Maaryp, to Apple Support Communities!

Have you read putnik’s recommendations on this matter?

It can be small things, like he recommends, that can make the difference between otherwise similar systems.

Hi @Maaryp and everybody

I discovered that the official Apple support doesn't read these posts!

So I called Apple support in Italy were I live. Well: they told me they didn't received neither one claim nor complaint about Big Drain Sur !!!

So, if we want Apple to solve this problem that we all have, please call the official Apple support.

(and remove Chrome is not a solution!)

I saw Spotlight under 'Using Significant Energy' all the time for more than five days. Removing the Spotlight.plist files and killing the actual Spotlight process via terminal had no impact, so I unticked all categories that can appear in Spotlight as well as adding all drives into the privacy list.

Et voilá 'No App Using Significant Energy' anymore. To bad that it can not simply be turned off and on if you are running the Mac on Battery ... ideally it should do this automatically for all unnecessary processes ...

Guys , for the last week I’ve tried everything to stop the battery draining, without success.

I have stopped Spotlight , I delete Chrome and etc .

Now I decide to downgrade to Catalina. It was better for my 2019 MacBook Air.

I prefer to wait and to see if Apple would fix that. So far so good!

Good luck to you !

@paomug67 I think Apple is trying to pull a fast one because I know that some people have created cases (including myself). While they don't look at these posts, it isn't too difficult for them to do a search for 'battery drain' in their CRM to pull up existing cases. I'm not an expert on CRMs but working in IT and using one, it shouldn't be all that difficult... I started troubleshooting via chat then they closed my case. I then went to Twitter (which is tedious for many reasons) and they never replied back to me after I answered all their questions and validated I had done everything they asked me to do. So my next step is to call a live human.

At @Halliday's suggestion, my final step was to leave my laptop on last night to allow it to finish indexing (even though I don't run enough crap for it to take an entire week!) and this morning I am on 1 hour and 13 minutes and down 19% battery life. It's not great but earlier this week, my battery would drain by about 25% in less than 30 minutes. Final duration is TBD!

Following up on my post from the other day, in which I thought installing the Chrome update and rebooting was a solution.

It was not. I have averaged 6 hours battery life over 2 cycles since then. With Catalina, I had 9-11.5 hours easily.

Big Drain Sur is consuming at least 33% more energy than prior OS versions.

Shameful we are a week out and Apple hasn't said anything about this.

Shame on you Apple - all the lost Carbon/electricity. Brag about carbon neutrality when you want to, but then avoid ownership of quite possibly the biggest mainstream OS energy drain in history.

@medsfacts

Exactly the same for me, after chrome update that better but bad performance comparated to Catalina. And I also have sleep battery drain (5% / 10h). with Catalina I could let my laptop sleeping during one week and my battery don't lose charge.

I managed to fix it by completely reinstalling Big Sur. In recovery mode you can reinstall it and after that, I logged myself out of iCloud on my device and logged back in. before, I saw on my activity monitor that something called secd. was chugging cpu. Now it's all fine. If you try logging out of iCloud, I recommend making sure you're not losing any data, for example on your desktop etc.

after that, I had no more issues whatsoever. It solved the battery, the heat and the fans. Only, the trust in my device is completely gone. Hopefully apple fixes this soon if this doesn't help.

As I noted in my previous posts, I tried clean install, formatted my SSD entirely and installed Big Sur from USB. It helped a bit, but still much bigger battery drain than Catalina.

There is no fix whatsoever, unless downgrade to Catalina which I highly recommend.

With Catalina my MBA 13" lasts again 5h:29m compare to cleanest possible installation of Big Sur with battery lasting 2h:20m.

THERE NO FIX EXISTS SO FAR, ONLY APPLE CAN DEBUG THE PROBLEM AND FIX IT !!!

Fellows, I was able to fix the problem. You have to trust me on this. I erased my 2019 MacBook Pro and did a fresh install of Big Sur. Problem is solved; battery usage is back to normal, over heating is gone, and fan is no longer spinning unnecessarilly.

It stinks that you will have to re-install all of your apps and reconfigure all of your settings, but it works. Do not re-install anything from back-up. You need to totally erase your hard drive and re-install a fresh copy of Big Sur.

I had the same issue. Battery life went to like less than 2 hours, and the fan went on even when just using Safari. It was crazy. A one hour zoom drained my laptop from 100% to 20%.

I think I found the SOLUTION though after calling Apple. Go into your Activity Monitor under CPU, and see what's running the most there. For me it was some sort of demon, with 6 hours of CPU. All I had to do was complete the latest update of Malwarebytes and the the demon was deleted, and the fan immediately slowed and stopped.

Battery seems to be normal now. So I would definitely do this if you have Malwarebytes. If not, still look in CPU and see what's large in there. Hope this helps everyone, as it was super annoying!

Hi!

I am experiencing the same problem, reset SMC and all. In addition now even after reverting Big Sur to Catalina, the problem didn’t go.

my Mac battery now won’t stay an hour before update it could stay 10 hours. It’s so frustrating and quiet annoying. If no fix released soon ......