MacBook Air M1 battery drain when sleeping

My last update was posted over a month ago. In my case I continue to find that simply refraining from leaving any peripherals connected to the laptop while it's sleeping—including simply an adapter with nothing further connected to it—prevents the significant overnight battery drains that I was initially seeing. It'll usually drain 0–1% overnight when there's nothing connected to it; occasionally 2% max.

Other than that, I continue not to be 'blown away' by the overall battery performance of the laptop, especially in relation to Apple's soaring claims. To be sure, it's not bad, but on the whole I've seen no evidence that it would be possible to get anywhere close to 18 hours as Apple claims. More than anything, it seems to be inconsistent: there have been times when I've watched Netflix for a couple of hours and the battery only drained 15–20%, which seems pretty good; but other times it drains significantly faster than that when all I'm doing is web-browsing, emailing and messaging. Keeping the display brightness modest seems to make a difference. I suspect running Intel apps may also play a role. Overall I continue to believe one of the main issues here is that Apple still has work to do via software updates on this brand new generation of hardware (M1) and software (Big Sur) to optimize battery consumption under a range of specific usage situations.

How many hours your battery lasts? I have a brand new m1 air and on moderate workloads it barely lasts 8 hours. This is almost the same as my old late 2014 air. 15-18 hours were already very optimistic but I thought It would last 11-12 hours anyway. What I mainly use is pages, 5-10 tabs on safari, mail, messages and preview. Also the charger fulls the battery in more than 3 hours. Compared to my old Mac it’s twice as much. I am starting to believe that my unit is defective.

Do you or anyone else have apple watch? I have set mine so it's able to unlock my mac.

I noticed that suddenly while my mac has the lid closed my apple watch says it unlocks the macbook, and it does that often, so I think 1 problem to the battery drain we are having is that the macbooks turns the screen on even though its closed..

Having now been using this machine for about 3 months, overall I can't really complain about the battery.

For me, the draining during sleep issue was fully resolved by never leaving anything at all connected to the USB ports during sleep. Not sure if one the recent macOS updates fixed this issue; haven't tried sleeping with something connected recently.

As for the overall battery performance, I'd say it's 'decent' compared to Apple's soaring claims of 15–18 hours, and actually quite stellar by any other standard. The rumours that the battery performance improves after some time (battery needs to go through a certain number of cycles to reach 'optimal' performance or something) seem to have been true in my case. When I'm not doing anything too intensive, I'd say my battery drains on average ~8% (±2%) per hour, which works out to an average of 12.5 hours of autonomy—can't really complain about that. When I'm doing Zoom, it's closer to 10–12% per hour, which works out to 8–10 hours of autonomy. I'll caution again though that if you crank the screen brightness up to three quarters or higher, it does seem to cause the battery to drain noticeably faster.

Finally, I like how it's learned on its own that I keep it plugged into the AC adapter most of the time and has consequently stopped charging the battery past 80% (to improve its lifespan) unless I tell it to.

I have an issue with the battery capacity on my M1 PRO 16 GB

Design battery capacity is 5103 mah

Mine is showing 98% battery health after only 29 cycles (battery capacity 4787 mah). I am using it mostly with LG 5K Ultrafine monitor (which means the mac is connected to the power most of the time)

My wife has the same mac and it's showing 100% after 90 cycles (battery capacity 4900 mah)

Plus the battery itself never lasted more than 10 hours of light work against promised 18 hours.

The self-diagnostic didn't start. Don't know what to do. Support advised me to reinstall the Big Sur.

This is what I called Macbook Covid Edition

Mac OS Big Sur 11.4

Any thoughts? For me seems like a faulty battery. What is your battery health and capacity?

Guys I found some kind of solution for the drain.

FIrst cancel all scheduled power events via terminal

sudo pmset schedule cancelall

And then change hibernation mode from 3 to 25 via terminal

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

Also disable screen time because this service constantly wakes up your macbook.

Instant wake won't be available, but since the ssd is fast anyway few more seconds when opening the lid will be nothing compared to losing so much battery while the lid was closed.

If you want to revert back, simply choose hibernatemode 3

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

Hi, the same in my case... But it was not like this from the beginning...After I bought it it really was around 4% over the night... May be it really has something to do with connection to external monitor. It was ok before I started to use hub and external monitor. However now the battery drain is high even without the connection to the monitor/hub...on the other hand not always ... Crazy... : (

Sometimes it helps to shut all web browser down...but it shouldn't be working like that anyway... : (

Hi, update from today - Las night I disconnected my M1 MacBook Air from the hub and work for a while just on the notebook itself and than put it on sleep. I have opened it now after almost 22 hours and the battery went from 91% to 88% even with web browser "running"... :)

So it really seems that anything connected to the USB-C port may cause the battery drain problem...

Thanks everyone for this thoughtful discussion.

But how about the battery health itself?

M1 Pro Mac battery's designed capacity is 5103 mAh. Iе degraded to 4500 mAh only after 40 cycles of charging. So, it's currently 90% battery health on M1

I used my mac a lot with LG Ultrafine 5K display, so it's always on charging.

Did anyone face the unnaturally fast battery capacity degradation on new M1 macs?

My MBA has battery health at 97%. I am using it 3-4 hours per day since November 2020. Since it's my first mac product I'm not sure if it's ok to be at that level. Maybe someone more experienced with this can elaborate.

thank you for the input. My wife’s m1 pro still has 100% battery health. I have the same M1 and it started to loose 1% of battery health every 2 weeks after 6 month of using.

I consider some M1 have faulty battery modules but it will be hard to prove it to Apple before the warranty expires 😬

you can check your battery exact parameters by using coconut battery and battery monitor apps

Thanks for the testing. I didn't use mine for 2 days. When I closed the lid it was 100% and connected to my Anker external HD hub that I had a roller ball mouse attached.

It was fully drained upon opening.

I got my Air a few months ago and I have not used it much as I have been in a creative funk.

I am trying to only use the Mac for important creative things for recording, editing and art... as I use my other HP laptop to stream Netflix , Hulu etc to TV via chrome cast and use my phone for a lot of web surfing.

Guess I will charge to 100 and keep the peripherals disconnected and see what happens.

Connected peripherals or not result will be the same. Battery drains because constantly wakes up the laptop to check screen time or for various scheduled events.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/371285/what-are-these-power-events-next-scheduled-events-that-are-showing-up-in

I have the same issue, 18% drop overnight on my new 7 days old M1 MacBook Air. Except chrome browser with few inactive tabs no other application was active.

Everything seems to be fine with battery showing 100% health.

My friend has a similar MacBook and it keeps the charge.

If I don't get any logical reasoning, I will return this to the Apple store

I was having the same problem and ran a few tests, also went to the Apple store to get some advice. Here's what I've come up with:

-It's best to close all CPU-consuming programs before putting the laptop to sleep.

-If you transferred all of your files from an older MacBook or Apple computer to the M1, it's best to manually transfer your data to the laptop, due to the difference in the operating systems. This may or may not (according to Apple) affect the M1's operating system if you have programs that were transfered from the older version of your Apple product onto the new one.

Until now, I haven't had to manually transfer my data yet. Once I closed all my CPU-consuming programs, and put the laptop to sleep, it seems to be draining a lot less battery than previously anticipated.

Hope this helps.