Updated MacBook Pro to macOS Sonoma, now battery drains quickly

I seem to have cured the problem on my 2020 MacBook Pro. I have done several things. First, turned off all background tasks (System settings - General - Login Items). I have been turning them on again one by one as apps let me know that they need it, but still more than half are off. That made a great improvement, but I still had excessive drain occasionally. Then I reset the PRAM, and since then I have had no trouble whatsoever.

It is true,Sonoma drains battery significantly faster than Ventura.I'm using an M1 Mac.it's unacceptable.I'm going to "downgrade" to Ventura, but if Apple fails to address this issue in next versions of Mac OS,I will switch to a Windows laptop.

how could this be bad battery when the same machine was working perfectly fine with previous software?!

I'm using a less than 1 year old M1 Macbook Air.the battery drain since I updated Mac OS to Sonoma is significantly worse than Ventura.

This is very late but I just came across your post. Thank you for an extremely thoughtful and very nicely written comment. How I wish most of the folks that "look for points" here had the same insightful arguments. Your post also shows that it is possible to keep a discussion going in a highly civilized manner. Thank you!

Even, I am also facing the same Issue. Post Upgradation Battery Drains very quickly and Laptop gets so much heat up. Never expected this type of services from Apple. I feel day by day apple product's quality is degrading. Company was at different level when it was under Steve Jobs.

Hi everyone!

After updating my MacBook Pro 16 Touch Bar to Sonoma I had this issue too, during sleep the laptop was overheating and in the morning the battery was drained.

During the past 4 months I have tried every suggestion found on the internet regarding the battery drainage. Several time each method. Nothing worked for me.

Then I decided to reset my Mac and clean install Sonoma. That worked, the battery is fine again, not draining anymore during sleep and I can work 4-6 hours unplugged, depending on the complexity of the project.

I hope this will help some of you having the same issue.

Best!

HI Catalin, what do you mean by "reset and and clean install"? What exactly did you do? This issue is driving me nuts and I can't believe Apple has released such a piece of garbage. I never had this problem before until I made the stupid mistake of upgrading to Sonoma... Also, see my post below (Mar 6, 2024 8:33 PM).

Hi! I was just as mad as you are, I know the feeling. The steps I took: I googled “how to restore MacBook Pro 16” Touch-Bar to factory settings” and followed the instructions in one of the posts. I can’t remember exactly the process, as I am not a tech person. But I found it easy following one of the descriptions. It was something like restart, hold a key pressed (don’t remember which one, maybe R?), enter in recovery mode, delete all settings and content (this after I saved all my content on a different machine), then install Sonoma on this machine, from the same recovery mode. It took about two hours. Now everything goes smooth and the battery is back to the performance I was used to. Hope this helps.

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

Glad you brought this up because it's something I mentioned in a previous post. Signing into Chrome is the only thing I've noticed to be related to this problem. It may not happen right away, though and it's frustrating. Sometimes, if I'm not signed in, I can work for hours or stream video for a long time. And here's the weird part: sometimes, even when I'm signed in, things are normal for a long time (like today, for example). But, suddenly, something triggers this odd behavior: the laptop starts heating up badly and losing power at a fast pace. The only thing to prevent it from shutting down is to quit Chrome. Why the incompatibility? Is it Apple? Is it Google? Is it Apple trying to force us to use Safari (which, by the way, I tried and failed: when streaming video, the laptop would go to sleep as per normal energy preferences, which does not happen with other browsers (the idea is that you can watch video uninterruptedly, no?). Anyway, going back to Ventura might be the temporary solution. One can use Recovery to install previous OS versions without having to wipe out the entire disk.

Thank you, it worked fine for me (MBP 14" with M1 Pro, battery health 86%). 11 hours on single charge, still 18% remains, and the chassis remains cold. There were 7-8 hours from 100% to 10% on Sonoma before, with sometimes slightly warm chassis, but with "No apps using significant energy".

Looks like now my laptop lives more than lived new on Ventura (10-11 hrs from 100 to 10%).

A very odd thing, but from now I will reinstall OS from time to time.

For info, my typical load: Firefox, Logic Pro, OBS (seldom), Pixelmator, Photoshop (seldom), VLC, Telegram, Final Cut (seldom).

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.

i thought I was going crazy.

before I could put my mac in my laptop sleeve and leave it for days in sleep mode and when I opened it I would be shocked that it’s still on nearly full battery.

updated to Sonoma and now it won’t last overnight in sleep mode anymore.

I'm also having this issue after Sonoma