Updated MacBook Pro to macOS Sonoma, now battery drains quickly

I may have had a breakthrough: last night I turned off wi-fi before putting the computer in Standby, and today for the first time since Sonoma I woke up to 100% batter after 8+ hours of Standby. No idea what the computer's been trying to do with wi-fi - something iCloud related? - but looks like, for me at least, that's been where the problem lies.

Happened to me after 7-10 days after upgrade to Sonoma. Pretty random one as Activity Monitor shows nothing from drain perspective. And as mentioned by other drain battery in ±2 hours from 100% to 0% on MacBook Pro M1. Restart of the Mac helped and now it's as before :)

This looks very promising. I charged my 14" Macbook(M1) to 100% at 11pm, turned off wifi and put it into standby. Today at 6am it still shows 100%. Because i'm at work now, i'll look at the battery status again in the evening.

It is interesting to see how your MacBook(M1)'s battery fares in the evening today, as it is just sleeping and without the wifi connection. Even while sleeping, the MacBook is working, so the battery is not at rest. As wifi is not connected, most probably no open apps too, maybe it's better to just shut off the MacBook for the night. In your way of usage, you are opening your MacBook only in the evening, so it would be really rested being fully off for nearly 15 hours daily. In my Intel MBP 2018, the booting is just a few seconds, and it has a nice booting up sound too. And, the rested battery seems to have better capacity.

By the way, if the MacBook is shut off, whether the wifi is on or off is not significant.

ok, that's your kind of working. But with all OSes before Sonoma i could just close the display and work again at the same workflow before i left; my Macbook acted like a tablet - just open the display and you are where you left before.

I'll see if there's a different with different apps with and without Wifi on.

I don't want to argue with you on this optimised battery charging matter. If your "workflow" has to go on working in the night, sure, keep the notebook on. But, if that is not the case, you can always restart the app(s), and they will be where the "work" was left the other day. MacBooks are modern, and it won't give shock/stress to the batteries, nor to the logic board, ram etc. It boots up quite nicely, with nice sound, and all you have to do is to put your finger on the sensor. Anything that's rested would work much better than that's tired. I found my MBP's battery capacity had gone up by ~3.5% after good night's rest!

I'm using Sonoma, by the way.

Not all apps retain their state well when doing this, but beyond that, I find that the OS likes to litter previously open Finder windows somewhat randomly across my desktops. (e.g. I keep a few tabbed Finder windows on each desktop which relate to the type of work I do on each, and on restarting, I have to move them around)

Yeah, that I get. What I mean is the *location* of these Finder windows, and which Desktop they show up on, is unpredictable on restarting the computer. Or rather, inconsistent.

Kind of a tangent to the overall thread, but just pointing out one (of many) reason why "just shut it down when you're done with it" isn't really a viable option as a workaround to this battery drain bug.

Finder opens right in the middle of the screen, or where I leave it when I am working. It doesn't matter where it opens as far as it works. The Finder works in Sonoma, as it did in Ventura and in Monterey. By the way, all apps open where I leave them on the screen when I work/use the MBP.

On the question of the "battery drain" it most probably happens due to the incorrect usage, I suppose, not giving enough rest for the battery and the MacBook. Sleeping while connected to power is not resting, even if the MacBook is quite cool in the morning. Apple never advocated that you should keep the MacBook connected to power all the time. Apple had created the optimised charging mode for those who do.

That's definitely not the case, or consistent.

Similarly, working with audio apps, there are many things which don't persist on restart (recording audio into a temporary buffer, which evaporates after startup, and many many more things like that).

But again, this is largely irrelevant to the discussion.

This leads to nothing, because the standby draining is only a side effect. The main issue is, that when i use my macbook for programming the battery drains from 100% to 8% within three hours. That's the main issue!!! Before Sonoma i could use it at least for one whole day, most of the time even longer, before using a charger.

I think we are on a good way: Using my macbook without wifi leads to a normal battery usage like before Sonoma. But that cannot be the solution to use it without wifi.

trashcoder wrote:

This leads to nothing, because the standby draining is only a side effect. The main issue is, that when i use my macbook for programming the battery drains from 100% to 8% within three hours. That's the main issue!!! Before Sonoma i could use it at least for one whole day, most of the time even longer, before using a charger.

Programming is mostly writing, and a bit of testing whatever you've done, so why should it take so much energy? Maybe, something else is eating up the energy, such as a 3rd party modifier app(s) or an antivirus app running in the background.

trashcoder wrote:

ok, again:

Wifi on: Battery empty within three hours

Wifi off: Battery not empty within three hours

Chances are one or more apps are accessing the Internet and causing the laptop to work harder. iCloud and other cloud file syncing services are a possibility as are any other online apps such as e-mail apps and web browsers & social media apps. You would be surprised how many apps go online to check for & install updates in the background & are constantly transferring data back & forth.

i didn't installed anything new. I don't use anti virus apps.

Cleaning/optimizer apps and third party security software are also known to cause these issues as well.

File sharing & BitTorrent apps will also cause a lot of activity & battery drain.

Have the same problem. Shutting of wifi before going to standby solves it for me.

With wifi on my battery drains like **** when going to sleep and is empty next morning. With wifi off, behavior as usual. Have Sonoma active for 2 weeks. Not sure what is happening when wifi is on during standby, but it sure is taking all the energy from my battery in Sonoma.

Interesting that it is narrowing down to wifi being on.

There's probably some broken telemetry in there that is just gobbling up battery the whole time.

Is anyone using/running little snitch or something similar to see if it's doing anything over network while "asleep"?