Updated MacBook Pro to macOS Sonoma, now battery drains quickly

Just an update

I contacted Apple Support and was given a case number. In the end I was asked to do a time machine backup and to arrange a full disk wipe and re-install of Sonoma run tests overnight with lid closed to see behaviour before then imporing my time machine backup. We could then see how things were and if still an issue try and identify software causing the issue.

At this time due to workload & committments I could not take that time out but they advised there was no rush.

However, In preparation I started backing off almost 400Gb of data I had on my machine before I intend to do my Time Machine backup. I then done a backup & prepared a Sonoma USB.

In the few days I was working on this I then tried closing lid overnight with nothing running on desktop at all and I awoke to 98% battery. The next night I left Chrome running with 4 tabs open and woke up to 97% battery.

Last night I left Chrome, Whatsapp, Terminal, Messenger & xCode sitting there and still awoke to 97% battery.

So for me it looks like isse is resolved. Although I had previously made the power nap, wake for network type changes, perhaps in my case there was a lot of background indexing going on.

Hope this helps someone

No - I did not do a disk wipe and re-install. It may be pointing to the background re-indexing that the Sonoma update needed to do as suggested by someone previously on this thread.

That of course is not to say there are other issues that may be causing this for others but the above post was my experience.

kearney273 wrote:

I did a full disk wipe, and reinstalled Sonoma from a USB boot drive and my battery is still markedly worse then Ventura

Did you test the clean install before installing any third party apps or restoring from a backup, or connecting with your AppleID/iCloud? If not, then you most likely just brought the problem back.

iCloud has definitely been implicated as one culprit for battery drain for some people, but any third party app could be at issue as well. Even the default Sonoma wallpaper has been implicated in battery drain so I would suggest turning off the dynamic wallpaper option.

FYI, you can create a new APFS volume and install macOS into that new APFS volume so you can test the system. This will act very much like a clean install for most cases although it won't help if the file system is at fault, or any system related items hidden elsewhere on the boot drive (for the latter, usually only Apple Silicon Macs).

Because of this issue Apple owes me a new sofa, LOL. Here's why. I left my laptop on my leather sofa and covered it with a blanket accidentally and next morning my laptop was glued to the sofa leather because of the heat. More heat got trapped because of the blanket. I can see the discoloration on the sofa where the laptop was lying overnight. Kinda ruined my sofa.

I would resist suggestions, even coming from Apple, to do clean wipes and resets of your devices. Apple recommended I do this when my iPhone was suddenly hanging up calls. I asked for alternatives. The Apple Store Genius Bar didn't have one, so I came home and searched and searched on Communities and found how someone noted by turning off Siri's ability to hang up calls in accessibilities, it solved the problem. It took several days of looking.

Same thing here. Keep looking at people's suggestions before performing a dangerous maneuver like erasing a Mac and starting over.

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.

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!

It's been several weeks and I still have my battery drain completely almost every time I leave my laptop closed for a few hours. I pull it out of its zippered case and find it hot with the fans running. If it was just indexing associated with the new install, it should have been done by now.

I can confirm this has nothing to do with any background process. I have left my Mac on for days just to make sure it finished whatever it needed. I can watch my batter drop 1% every 5 minutes or so. With zero activity.

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.

With light browsing and web programming I cannot use my M1 for more than 3 hours. The battery drop in the Battery graph (System Settings) is outrageous. I can't do anything but reformat and install the old OS.

@apple please make an announcement when the battery drain has been fixed.

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)

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.

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.

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.