Hi everyone! After upgrading my MBP 16" 2019 to Big Sur, I am facing shorter battery life than on Catalina. It's worse about 30%. My battery is in a pretty good shape - 58 cycles. Any idea what to do? Will the next update fix the problem? Thanks!
PS: I saw people having same problem at reddit.
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 11.0
Welcome, jonasboor and @All, to Apple Support Communities!
Many of us “old timers” have been trying to inform those that are “panicking” about this, but few are listening, and many simply seem to “listen” to each other “complain”, and “call” for Apple to “take action”.
This is what is well known, by those of us that are “old timers”:
From Andrey Threat’s experience, it appears that there may be a possibility for issues in interactions, through iCloud, with other systems. However, this is still quite preliminary!
You can run Activity Monitor, with the View set to All Processes to see what is running on your system, and how much CPU or GPU or Energy they are using. (Note: it appears that not all background processes have been “instrumented” for Energy use. So, the listing of All Processes using significant Energy is likely incomplete. However, since the majority of Energy use is generally due to CPU and GPU use, these will show up under the CPU tab, in Activity Monitor. That being said, though, the total Energy Impact is not dependent upon having all programs “instrumented” for Energy use.)
The Activity Monitor is a good tool for seeing what is going on “under the hood” of your computer.
Any time you wonder what might be going on, on you computer, that might be affecting its responsiveness, Energy use, Heating, etc.; the Activity Monitor can, usually, help you get an idea of what is going on.
(Unfortunately, if your computer has hardware faults, Activity Monitor is not the best tool for recognizing such issues.)
Exactly ! I never had to charge my MBA 2017 13" after a full day of use, but now, after an hour of use, I'm already a half mark down in the power bar. Apple must fix this issue, else what's the use of pushing an half baked update.
I am experiencing the similar issue, with a 2019 15-inch MacBook Pro with an intel i9 chip on macOS 11.0.1. According to iStats Menu, even if I am doing nothing, the temperature of my CPU never gets below 50 and sometimes spikes to 70 degrees celsius . If I use screen mirroring, it will get super hot and drains battery quickly. If not on AC power, the battery life when I am just editing files in Pages also shows a notable decline. Tried several ways to solve it including boot into safe mode or a hard restart but did not work. Will go to Apple Store tomorrow.
Hi, I have exactly the same model with the same specs as yours. I have tried all the possible fixes found on the internet but none of them work, even booting into safe mode. Could you please let me know what they say in the apple store? Thanks
Well, Andrey Threat, com.apple.Safari.History is certainly not a universal culprit!
In my case, it is running at 0.0 % CPU, with 0.53 CPU Time. (I did reboot about an hour and a half ago, for certain testing purposes. Having nothing to do with any Big Sur misbehaviors.)
It may be active, in your case, due to something in your Safari History.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what that might be.
Have you tried clearing your Safari History?
Hmm. After more testing I am now positive it is safari iCloud sync. As soon as I turn it on, com.apple.Safari.History process %CPU goes 100% and stays at 100% until I kill it draining the battery.
There is a chance there is something in my history that system "doesn't like", but I'd prefer not to clear it, as I'm using it quite a lot in my daily workflow.
Since others, including myself, have experienced no issue with com.apple.Safari.History, the problem cannot be the software, itself, but must be something else that the software interacts with.
Safari’s syncing over iCloud may or may not use that process. I’m not certain either way.
When you wrote «As soon as I turn it on», what was the “it” to which you were referring? Safari? «safari iCloud sync», whether Safari is running or not?
If the latter, then it may not be your local Safari History, but something about what is being synced over iCloud. This could involve your other Safari versions, or something else.
Do you have anything besides other versions of Safari that are being synced with Safari?
(It seems like even older versions of macOS have received Safari updates, relatively recently, though I’m not sure how universal that was.)
It’s certainly up to you whether you clear your Safari History, or not.
It may not be a universal fix and looks like people are experiencing same issue left and right, but battery drain comes from different directions. However I have two more people confirming, my method fixed their battery drain as well.
When I said "it" I referred to turning on and off Safari iCloud sync.
Not sure if it's something on the other Safari, as the only other Safari I have, is on my iphone, and I recently wiped out it's history.
So, I came here to find a solution, meanwhile trying to pinpoint the issue.
Maybe somebody else will find my method helpful as it fixed the issue for me and a couple more friends.
If you are synchronizing between a device with a significant Safari History vs. one with a recently wiped Safari History, I would expect significant Network activity (perhaps more so than CPU use).
If this network use is wireless, especially if not very close to the base-station, that can be a significant power drain, in itself.
Do you see any such corresponding network activity with Safari iCloud sync turned on?
I’ve got iCloud safari sync switched off and I left for work this morning after a reboot at 90% battery life and nothing app wise up and running and the screen shut. On returning from work It was down to 28%.
I’ve never experienced anything like this before only since installing Big Sur.......it’s doing something weird.
Welcome, P B Matthews, to Apple Support Communities!
Please read my recommendations.
The «iCloud safari sync» seems to be a minority issue.
Please follow my recommendations to find out what is actually going on, on your system.
Clean installs of Big Sur have no such problems. (Such has been verified as a fix.)
I previously said that I was experiencing the same issue. I went to Genius Bar and they told me to wait for future updates since my battery draining might be caused by some compatibility issues. Today, I accidentally noticed that a process from "Karabiner-Elements.app" is occupying a great amount of CPU usage (this is an app used to customize keyboard functions). So I tried to uninstall it and it worked. Now my Mac has returned to normal (see pic attached). It turned out that my "Karabiner-Elements.app" was not updated to the latest version to work seamlessly with macOS Big Sur.
So my suggestion here would be to:
First, check App Store for app updates;
Second, check the official website of third-party apps you downloaded from web to see whether they have updated their apps for macOS Big Sur. If not, you can try uninstall them to see whether it will help (if the app is not a must-have for you).
Lastly, if software side is okay, try running system's hardware check to see if there is something problematic.
Hope this can be of some help to you!!
Simply having «had no problems with installing [Big Sur]», P B Matthews, does not guarantee that there are no issues: especially incompatibilities with third-party software.
While there will be updates to Big Sur—as there always are, for all Operating Systems (OSs)—there need be no updates for Big Sur for these particular issues. (There are issues on M1 based machines, for multiple monitors. There seems to be an issue with 2013–2014 MacBooks that was sufficiently severe that Apple disabled the ability to install Big Sur on such, for now.)
As I wrote, this particular issue is simply to be expected, and, unless you have incompatible third-part software, or a triggered hardware failure (as some of the 2013–2014 MacBooks seem to have had), it will “settle down” before too long.
The rest of my long comment (the one with the “bullet” list) is about how you can check your own system to see what is going on, including finding errant third-party software.
Ok I never do this but I was really stressed about the same battery issue after BigSur update. I finally called Apple Support and they were great...my battery and computer were fine. The best they could advice after I told them that on my activity monitor Google Chrome Helper was using tons of CPU, was to delete Google Chrome. I was very reluctant to try this but desperate, so I did. Low and behold the battery was fine and computer not heating up. So I went on Safari and downloaded Google Chrome a new and now it is Perfect!! No battery drain and computer not heating up....
Hope this works for you!
I'm not sure what exactly happened. I deleted Chrome, Updated all my third party software, setup iCloud (which I had not done since installing Big Sur), booted into Safe Mode twice. After doing all of that, and logging in normally, somehow my battery is no longer draining fast and instead of getting 2 hours of battery time, I'm back to getting the 4 to 5 hours I was getting when I was using Catalina. I upgraded to Big Sur on Nov 15th and have been running it ever since. Except for not doing a clean install, I basically followed Halliday's and others advice and experiences. The only thing I can think of is that Activity Monitor doesn't show you all of the energy sapping 3rd party software that may run invisibly in the background and Safe Mode must have some healing affects that Halliday alluded to.
Also, I've been on Big Sur continuously for 30 days now.
But somehow, my seemingly impossible battery drain issue is resolved without reverting to a clean install. Still Voice Control does drain the battery faster than any other app, which I think occurred in Catalina as well, but to a lesser extent. Lastly, AUDIO is somehow completely disabled in Safe Mode. I've reported that to Apple.
Hope this helps the users still having battery drain issues.
I’m most pleased, even relieved, to hear that things are working far more reasonably for you, now, pvmikev1!
(Yes. I did try to express that, apparently, not all background processes are “instrumented” for Energy use. So, using the Energy tab, in Activity Monitor, will be, likely, incomplete, even using an “All Processes” View. However, CPU will still work to see processes that are working your CPUs hard.)
Big Sur battery drain
