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Updated MacBook Pro to macOS Sonoma, now battery drains quickly

I updated my MacBook Pro this morning to macOS Sonoma. Everything was good at first and I really like the look and feel. But as soon as I took it off my charger to go to some meetings the battery dropped from 74% to 44% in about 5 minutes. Then as soon as I turned on WebEx the battery dropped from 44% to 7%.


Anyone else having battery drain issues with macOS Sonoma? Is it maybe just temporary from all the background activity similar to the phones?


[Re-Titled by Moderator]

MacBook Pro (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Sep 27, 2023 12:36 PM

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Posted on Oct 31, 2023 6:55 AM

There are too many people complaining about this issue all over the world on many websites. What was mentioned is true about what causes the drain but for us who reinstalled and reinstalled both Ventura and Sonoma, we are not dumb to not know the difference. 20+ hours reading PDFs on Ventura to 6-10 hours on Sonoma doing the same is too significant to ignore. I think it's an insult to our intelligence thinking that many of us do not know what we're talking about when apple techs keep making suggestions about this and that without addressing the issue. the problem is common out there across the internet and a simple google search of "Sonoma battery drain" will show that.

266 replies

Nov 28, 2023 1:02 PM in response to Richard_vw

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.


I was curious about this and issued the pm set command on my MacBook Pro as is, without disabling anything, just to see what would come back as an obstruction to the MacBook Pro sleeping.


The bluetoothd process was the sole return.


I’m wondering if Sonoma has an issue disabling bluetooth when Mac is asleep. Don’t know enough about this, but thought to share.

Nov 29, 2023 7:25 AM in response to Richard_vw

UPDATE: Last night, before putting my 2019 Intel Core i9 MacBook Pro running Sonoma to sleep for the night with a 100% battery charge, I unplugged the power adapter, quit all my running apps, turned off just Bluetooth (left WiFi on). As a final step, I ran the "pmset -g | grep -w sleep" command, just to confirm that no processes would impede normal sleep. Nothing came back. I closed the lid and went to bed.


I opened the lid this morning, expecting to find a dead laptop & depleted battery, which has been the case since updating to Sonoma.


My MacBook came back on, with a battery charge at 97%. FIRST TIME this has happened since the switch to Sonoma.


I typically disable both "power nap" & "wake for network access" anyway, so this conforms to your results.


I never had to switch Bluetooth off with Ventura.


I will repeat tonight, but I'm optimistic that this circumvents the battery drain issue for me, until Apple provides a fix for this. Thanks again!

Dec 2, 2023 1:30 AM in response to markvasile

It's now been over a week since my last update that my issue had resolved. Last night I also updated to 14.1.2 and all is still ok with the battery.

As I previously mentioned Power Nap and Wake for network access is off and my bluetooth left. I also now leave several apps opened as well and battery drain overnight is a few percent.


I know this will not help a lot of you but certainly in my situation it looks like background re-indexing of Sonoma may have been my cause and that it eventually settled.

Dec 4, 2023 11:30 AM in response to aaredd

I had battery drain issues for like 6 weeks after installing 14.1.1, but since I installed MacOS 14.1.2 the battery-draining-while-closed issue seems to have gone away. I might want more time to say definitively that it solved the problem, but over the course of a few days my battery drain seems much better. (late 2019 MBP)

Dec 6, 2023 6:28 AM in response to alperevren

I've posted before that I saw improvements to battery drain like alperevren has seen. Checked to ensure no processes prevented sleep. All good, but then... One of my Intel MBP totally drained battery overnight again :-(.


So one cannot trust sleep for long periods of time otherwise it will cause issues with battery life. I have never had this issue with any previous OS on the many MPBs that I have owned. It totally renders this product as useless, because it cannot be relied upon when you need to work on battery power.


I would urge everyone to go to the support page and log the issue with them.


I pity anyone with a brand new M series machine that is seeing this poor performance. If I got s brand new machine and had battery discharge rates as described above I would be heading to the Genius Bar.

Dec 7, 2023 6:32 AM in response to AppleAnswerDude

I've the same issue, but even when its plugged, I used to work on two monitor setup without any battery drain during development all the time while the charger is connected.


Suddenly after I've updated to Sonoma, the battery start to drain bloody fast to 80% and then stay at 80% as long as I've the charger on


Sonoma has a problem regard power consumption and need to be really addressed.

Dec 15, 2023 5:55 PM in response to AppleAnswerDude

Since I have Apple Care+ for my 4 year old 13 inch MBP, I decided to get a new battery while I had the chance. A new battery comes with AC+. My old battery was, as others noted, worked normally on Ventura, but not in Sonoma. However, with the new battery, while better, I was still experiencing too much battery drain after being asleep.


So, I went into settings and toggled OFF:


1.

"Allow notifications when the display is sleep"

"Allow notifications when the screen is locked"


and


2.

I enabled power naps "Only on Power Adapter".


After doing this, I now get a 10% power drain in 12 hours of sleep, which is much improved. Still, I'm not sure if it's my imagination or not, but I am thinking that I used to get next to zero battery drain while sleeping the same amount of time with OS Ventura.


Anyway, you might try the 2 things I mentioned above.

Dec 30, 2023 5:15 AM in response to AppleAnswerDude

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.

Updated MacBook Pro to macOS Sonoma, now battery drains quickly

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