Updated MacBook Pro to macOS Sonoma, now battery drains quickly

One significant contributor to MacBook battery drain after updating to Sonoma or any other new OS is the background setup processes. These background activities like Spotlight reindexing, Photos synchronization, Time Machine backup operations, emails, messages and other app updates.When your MacBook is working on these tasks, it puts an additional burden on both the CPU and GPU, leading to increased power usage and battery drainage. Generally this battery drain is temporary. The best thing to do is to monitor your battery situation and, if active, connect your Mac to a power adapter, allowing them to complete without interruption. This shouldn’t last longer than a couple of days at most.

I solved my problem: turns out it was widgets in the Notification Center. I hadn't set up any desktop widgets, and since I don't use the notification center I had no idea that the OS upgrade had put a few there (Weather, Stocks, I think maybe Photos). This week I accidentally moved my cursor to the upper right corner of the screen and the Notification Center appeared and I saw these widgets. I removed them and my overnight battery drain has gone from 4% per hour to 5% total overnight.

For anyone still having this problem, this fixed it for me after speaking with Apple Support:

1. Back up your computer. (If you want to, or not if you don't mind the low chance of losing your info.
2. Restart your Mac and hold the power button until you get the boot options.
3. Click Options.
4. Click Reinstall macOS Sonoma.
5. Let it reinstall, and it'll bring you to the normal setup process.

This was done AFTER updating to Sonoma and experiencing the same battery drain problems. Simply reinstalling it AGAIN is what the Apple Support staff recommended, and that's what worked for me. I now get the all-day battery life I grew accustomed on my M1 Air. I hope that works for all of you. If not, I suggest calling Apple Support to see if they have any other options. Best of luck! 😁

I've been experiencing the same problems. Massive battery drain, fully charged battery before going to bed and then battery completely flat by the morning. What I did notice was that I couldn't open my activity monitor. I undertook an internet search to resolve the activity monitor issue. What I found was information that the PLIST file also called the preference file for the activity file may have been corrupted. I then recreated the PLIST file and since then after 3 nights a fully charged battery is now at 85% which is a great improvement. It worked for me, so may be worth a try. This is what I did to recreate the PLIST file. 1. Open finder and click GO on the top finder menu and then select Go to folder from the dropdown list. 2. Copy and Enter ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ActivityMonitor.plist into the search box and hit return. 3. Select the Activity monitor PLIST file and move it to trash. 4. Reboot your Mac and then reopen activity monitor and let the PLIST file be recreated automatically. Also, let me clarify that previous to this fix, my problem with the activity monitor was not consistent. Sometimes it would open, but not very often. When it did, it showed several programmes preventing my MacBook sleeping. Since applying this fix, activity monitor opens and there are no programs preventing sleep. Hope this helps

I have been using Macs for more than 10 years and this is the first time I see battery drainage. And my older Mac which cannot get Sonoma update didn’t have this problem. But both my work m1 Mac and my personal m1 Mac which I bought last year have the same issue - with lid closed battery percentage is at 1% by the morning. This started happening after Sonoma. If I go to System->Battery, Battery Level graph shows drain overnight and Screen on usage doesn’t show anything being used(empty graph). In the activity monitor, I enabled preventing sleep column and monitoring what apps are preventing sleep. Yesterday night I restarted my personal Mac after I disabled web and app activity under screen time and closed the lid without opening the apps. Today it woke up with 100% battery remaining. It could be Google chrome helper or WhatsApp helper or screen time or may be something else. For now I opened Google chrome with my tabs and closed the lid and testing it out to see if battery drain happens after few hours.

I think I may have solved the battery drain issue on my two Intel based MacBook Pros. Both MacBooks are no longer warm when sleeping which was never observed with previous OS versions. The sleep battery drain seems to be acceptable now as well.

Here is what I did:

1 - updated to Sonoma 14.1.1

2 - disable Bluetooth

3 - disable power nap

4 - disable Wake for network access

5 - in terminal use: pmset -g | grep -w sleep

This command will let you know if any processes are running that prevents sleep. In activity monitor I stopped the suspicious looking ones. There was one in particular that was always running even after reboot. If you just turned the power on, you will need to wait for the startup processes to finish.

6 - By repeating the pmset -g | grep -w sleep command you will see that eventually there will be no processes blocking sleep.

7 - To test if it is working, go to Apple and click on sleep. Come back a couple of hours later and check your battery level status chart in the System settings. It should show a very shallow slope on the discharge curve:

I thought I'd posted an update on this, but don't see it. I finally isolated the problem that was leading to me losing about 30% charge overnight - widgets in the notification center. I don't have any desktop widgets, and so I rule out widgets as an issue. But I don't ever use the notification center, and so I had no idea there were widgets there by default (weather, stocks, one or two others). I stumbled upon that this week and once I deleted those my overnight standby battery drain dropped to <5%.

UPDATE!

So I had issued with Sonoma and it would drain my batter ridiculously quick, like 5 minutes and power off after a full charge, notification to say I had to go to get an Apple service repair.

I rang up support and they advised me to reset my SMC by:

1. Hold the LEFT control, LEFT option and RIGHT shift keys for 7 seconds
2. Then press the power key while still holding the above keys, for 7 seconds
3. Release and wait a few seconds before turning on (mine automatically turned on)

This worked and I have had no issues with my battery since. Hope this helps everyone out.

One massively under-appreciated item that runs after a major upgrade is Spotlight Indexing. In activity Monitor, you will see tasks like mdworker and mds using processing power and some I/O.

Initially these tasks are re-computing the spotlight index, which make searching for items on your Mac really fast.

If this activity persists beyond a few hours of awake and not busy time, the activity may be based on the other use for mds and mdworker. These tasks are very important for using Time Machine.

The recommended size of a backup drive is at least 2.5 times the size of what needs to be backed up, for long-term, trouble-free operation. This is now the Trouble implied in that statement. Immediately after a major upgrade, your NEW Full backup needs to go onto the drive where your OLD Full backup and many incremental backups have already sprawled all over the place.

Your system may be working VERY hard to consolidate (NOT DELETE) older backup instances to make enough space for a NEW Full Backup on that same drive. It may take quite a while [of Awake and NOT Busy time] to get the old backup instances thinned down enough so that the NEW Full backup can be added to the backup drive.

If your backup drive is far smaller than recommended size, this can be like two elephants trying to pass each other in a narrow hallway.

things to check for:

• can you do spotlight search? or does it tell you, 'try again later'

-------

system Preferences > Time machine

• Has your first Backup since the Upgrade completed to the Backup Drive?

.

For the people that are having the issues, are you guys using Chrome and also signed in to Chrome so that it is syncing?

I have 5 users laptops who are all having the same issue. They finish work for the day, close the laptop, and go home. When they wake up the next day, their laptop is completely dead, even if it was at 100% the day before. I've gone and check the battery logs and the battery goes from 100% to dead to dead in less than an hour. All but one of the laptops are the 2020 MacBook Pros with the Intel chip.

One of them I completely wiped, put a fresh copy of Sonoma on it, then tried out Chrome and had no issues. Left over the weekend and it went from 100% on Friday to 60% on Monday, which seemed normal. Once I gave it back to him, he signed in to Chrome and then the battery issue started happening again. It seems to be that signing in to Chrome causes the battery issues, but if you're not signed in, it works fine

I had the same problem -- you need to turn off Voice Control.

My computer updated to Sonoma and then my battery would drain 20% in 20 minutes and run so slowly. My bf checked my activity monitor and saw that Voice Control was using 130% of my CPU, basically using all my computer's processing power. To turn it off just go to settings and type "Voice Control" then turn it off there. Since I've turned it off, my computer is not slow and the battery no longer drains so quickly.

Aidenfaru wrote:

1. Thoughtful inquiry: What do you believe your contributions bring to this ongoing conversation? Numerous individuals have vocally expressed that, under typical circumstances, their devices did not experience overnight battery depletion. However, after transitioning to Sonoma without altering their usage habits, they've noticed a substantial increase in battery drain. Understandably, they're seeking an explanation for this shift. Yet, you consistently interject with comments such as, "It's simply a matter of poor usage... if background apps are left unchecked, the battery will inevitably deplete, irrespective of the operating system." What these individuals are emphasizing is that this was not the case with the previous OS.

You are also overlooking the fact that maybe, just maybe, one or more of your third party apps is not behaving properly with macOS Sonoma. Very few people in this thread have actually mentioned doing anything to eliminate this possibility by uninstalling third party apps. Some developers of third party apps may take weeks or even months, or even longer before they make their apps fully compatible with a new major OS release.

I'm not saying that macOS is not at fault, only I haven't seen too many people go through all the work necessary to prove it. Just going back to Ventura is not enough since a third party app may be incompatible with Sonoma. All going back to Ventura proves is the third party app doesn't have a problem with Ventura.

Furthermore, as you mentioned earlier, your battery usage is approximately 6 to 7 hours, which, for M1 or M2 users like us, is subpar. on ventura, we were accustomed to enjoying an average battery life of at least 12 hours.

Many times I don't even get 6 hours battery life even on my Big Sur M1 MBPro. In fact my battery charge dropped over 10% in less than an hour while just shopping online, checking my email, and viewing these forums. Is macOS at fault here?

I support thousands of laptops for my organization and I can tell you from personal experience things are not always what they seem and it is difficult to properly troubleshoot issues. I see threads like this on this forum and I see so many people without a clue on how to properly troubleshoot their computer issues. So many people don't want to do the work necessary to attempt to figure it out and just want to jump on the blame bandwagon without proving that a default clean install of macOS without any third party apps installed and without restoring from a backup still has the same battery draining issues. Like I mentioned in another post, I was helping a co-worker who is an IT tech to look for a battery drain issue and it was difficult to identify...took me a while to identify an issue. I'm a tech with over 20 years experience supporting computers and was assisting another tech who should be able to figure out the problem. Guess what? It was not macOS, but some setting and configuration issue involving iCloud and their photos. Even a clean install of macOS may still have resulted in the same issue. I guess it could be considered the fault of macOS. But the real moral of the story is it was not easy to figure it out.

But very few people here are actually trying any of the suggestions both @chdsl, myself & perhaps a couple of others presented. All I see is a lot of blame on Apple without showing anyone doing more than reverting to Ventura & assuming it proves Sonoma is at fault. I believe I did read where one user actually did some work and discovered a third party app was at fault....congratulations to that user actually taking the time to do the hard work. Now I'm not saying you are wrong, I just haven't seen enough proof in this thread to make that assessment. This is from a person with over 20 years of experience. And no, I am not defending Apple here, I am defending traditional troubleshooting practices and not jumping to conclusions and the blame bandwagon without doing due diligence.

I had this problem and it's fixed by reinstalling Sonoma OS.

My battery consumption used to be 10% / hour pre Sonoma, and then 25% / hour with Sonoma. I reinstalled Sonoma as told by Apple genius and the problem is now fixed.

damianrobinson wrote:

1. For anyone still having this problem, this fixed it for me after speaking with Apple Support:

Back up your computer. (If you want to, or not if you don't mind the low chance of losing your info.

2. Restart your Mac and hold the power button until you get the boot options.

3. Click Options.

4. Click Reinstall macOS Sonoma.

5. Let it reinstall, and it'll bring you to the normal setup process.

This was done AFTER updating to Sonoma and experiencing the same battery drain problems. Simply reinstalling it AGAIN is what the Apple Support staff recommended, and that's what worked for me. I now get the all-day battery life I grew accustomed on my M1 Air. I hope that works for all of you. If not, I suggest calling Apple Support to see if they have any other options. Best of luck! 😁

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately this did not fix the problem for me, but I'm glad some people are finding solutions that work for them.

abeagler wrote:

• I've posted a few times in this thread, but just wanted to summarize various things I've tried that have not worked. As context, I'm in a 2020 Intel MBA running Sonoma 14.1.1 with no external peripherals attached, and I see battery drain during standby of about 3-4% per hour. If I turn off wi-wi overnight the battery drain is zero, so I've been trying to figure out what's using the wifi overnight:

It is so refreshing to see someone actually trying to investigate the issue and provide details on what has been tried. So wonderful to see. And thank you.

Things I have not yet tried:Things I have not yet tried:

* Full, wipe-hard-drive-and-start-over install of Sonoma

• Downgrade OS

• Turn off iCloud drive

• Delete Microsoft Office apps (need them for work use)

iCloud drive would be my first choice here. Or any other cloud based service.

If you have enough free space on your internal boot drive, then I would suggest creating a new APFS volume within the same hidden Container as your main OS. Give it a unique name like "Clean", or "Sonoma", etc. Creating a new APFS volume within the same Container tends to act like a partition, but it does not have the risk of modifying the drive or putting any limits on its size. A new APFS volume will share the storage pool used by the main OS, but each will be completely separate. Then install a fresh copy of Sonoma into the new APFS volume so you can test it without affecting your main boot volume. When you are done testing the clean install of Sonoma, just boot back into your main OS volume so you can delete the new Volume Group associated with the clean install of Sonoma.

You can also do the same with Ventura if you want. Having Ventura & Sonoma sharing the same APFS Container is not a problem.

Not sure I want to go through all the hassle of wiping the hard drive and starting over just to add back one app per day. Seems like it should be comeone's actual paid job to fix this.

I haven't seen any signs that Apple has even acknowledged any battery drain issues with Sonoma so hoping for a fix from Apple is probably futile until someone can prove to Apple that Apple is at fault. Or open enough support tickets with Apple for them to take notice. In the mean time, people can provide Apple with product feedback here:

Product Feedback - Apple