Battery drains 20 percent an hour, EtreCheck says performance is well

Ward16 wrote:

Hey there!

Since I don't feel like my battery isn't performing that well (I get about 5 hours surfing the web on low display brightness), I performed an EtreCheck check. Yet, this check says the performance is good and I don't really understand everything about it.

My notebook is a MacBook Pro 16" 2019, it used to get about 10 hours of battery. The cycle count is 250 and the device is from November 2020. The report is added as additional text. Should I not be worried about the battery or is there anything I could do? I do not leave open many tabs nor programs besides safari.

Thanks in regards!

-Ward

<EtreCheck - report.log>

Both Parallels and Virtual Box?

Diagnostics Information (past 7-30 days):

2022-02-17 14:06:26 prl_client_app Crash /Applications/Parallels Desktop.app

2022-02-15 22:16:27 X11.bin Crash

Executable: /Applications/Utilities/XQuartz.app X11.bin: Cannot establish any listening sockets - Make sure an X serve isn't already running

Launchd: /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.virtualbox.startup.plist /Library/Application Support/VirtualBox/LaunchDaemons

/VirtualBoxStartup.sh restart

To trouble shoot further you can:

—Test issue in another user (or guest user) account Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac - Apple Support

This will tell you if it a universal issue or isolated to your user/admin account. 

—Try a SafeBoot How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support

Takes noticeable longer to get to the login screen, does a 5 minute disk repair before it fully boots up, and certain system caches get cleared and rebuilt, including dynamic loader cache, etc.

Login and test. Reboot as normal and test. Caches get rebuilt automatically.

In Safe mode third party system modifications and system accelerations are disabled, it removes malware, etc hampering smooth operation, however a reboot will put it back to normal mode.

This test will tell you if third party interference; extensions etc are not loaded in safe boot mode.

reference: My battery runtime is low

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204054#runtime

You can also run the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. Unfortunately the diagnostics won't detect all failures.

It is possible you may have more than one issue here. One issue may be software related and another one may be an intermittent hardware failure with the battery.

I've been discovering a lot of very hard to detect hardware failures with these Apple batteries that may never show up as bad in the diagnostics or with a "Service Recommened" or "Service Battery" condition. I have learned a few tricks to help discover these hard to detect battery failures, but to do this you need to have a clean install of macOS since I believe you likely have a software issue of some sort which can interfere with troubleshooting. I run a system stress test with "mprime" (in Torture Test mode, max heat & power option) which will drain the battery as fast as possible usually within about two hours. Sometimes this will reveal a battery hardware failure by either shutting off the laptop when it hits a bad spot, or I may notice the charge level drops more quickly at a certain point (I use the command line to log & monitor the battery charge level so I can review it later). I also leave the display brightness at full and don't allow sleep or dimming of display. I have also noticed that sometimes a bad battery will actually increase its charge by 10% immediately after disconnecting the charger (a 1% or 2% increase may be normal). For example when I disconnect the charger the battery level sometimes may go from 20% to 30%. Sometimes this may be the only oddity I can observe for laptops which users have complained about battery issues.