Updated MacBook Pro to macOS Sonoma, now battery drains quickly

I'm facing same issue.

Device: MacBook Pro 16inch 2021 (M1 Pro)

Problem:

Before updating to OS Sonoma 14.0 I was able to use my Mac without charging for 6-8 hours and I have never noticed my MacBook heating.

After updating the OS to Sonoma 14.0 I can use it barely for 3 hours (In sleep mode it is also loosing charge). Also MacBook is getting heated even when it is left in sleep mode for couple of hours.

This is already second week that I'm facing this issue. So I don't think that this is caused by indexing or other background tasks (which are supposed to take place).

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.

Please read that old thread. on battery draining of a M1 MBA started on Jun 7, 2021. This problem was happening through Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura regarding the battery drain of M1 MacBooks. It goes on for 12 pages. "Me too" there was 742. This problem is not just a Sonoma matter, but could be a M chip matter with MacOS generally. There were people complaining of battery drain in M2 MacBooks too. It had been happening all those years.

Sorry but All is started anter Sonoma Upgrade ****

And I say it again: Maximum Capacity or Battery Health to 98 % in 4 months not normal in my usage habis. I have 4 different generation MBPs and this Battery aging not normal.

I found a solution for my MBP M2 Max 2023. Maybe it's a bad idea but not worst.

Still full now after 17 hours of sleep. (Not shutdown, just closed lid to sleep)

as I understand, Google Chrome Assistant (Renderer) and WhatsApp Assistant (Renderer) wake up macOS while it is sleeping. Yesterday I turned it off before the lid was closed.

And I ran a few commands on "pmset -b" (about "Find My Mac" this might be a bad idea but I had to try it)

I'll try * Helper closed AND "pmset -b" values is "1"

• Probably, Google Chrome and WhatsApp are usual suspects about battery drain on my Macbook.

[Edited by Moderator]

dkkishor wrote:

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.

Oh, these "helpers" are the culprits. They help to drain the battery working in the background.

dkkishor wrote:

After disabling screen time and restarting my laptop, I haven't hooked my laptop to power in 2 days. Tried some suggestions from this site.

Good job! I'm glad to see someone actually do the hard work of proper troubleshooting.

It's definitely an OS problem and nothing to do with Spotlight. I disabled every entry in spotlight and my battery time on Sonoma was between 6-10 hours. On Ventura I got 20+ hours. Both tests used just reading PDFs with screen brightness set 1/4 way

Removed a few more apps last night and left MBA in standby, same battery drain issue. Apps I removed were mostly minor, most notable was an app store install of NordVPN. Night before I shut down 1Password. Again, in both cases I restarted after uninstall. When I restart and check activity monitor nothing is listed as running other than system services.

Absent any clear evidence that third-party apps are running, my gut feel is that iCloud is trying to do something, so tonight I will remove iCloud account from Photos app and see if that has any effect.

I know where you can find the actual values of the battery state and I regularly check this values.

I have several Apple devices and on two I recognized that the value of the battery capacity significantly decreased after updating to Sonoma, iOS and iPadOS 17.

Sure I let the devices some time for background processes to normalize. Then check last_value_MaximumCapacityPercent

On one device my battery lost 12% on another 5%. Just by updating to the latest OS release. Three other devices were not affected.

The lower the battery capacity drops, the faster your device will need to charge.

I see this as a serious Apple OS software issue.

PS. One could think that this is intended. Build in some code that reduces battery life. In the 1920th GE and a German company were the first to…

[Edited by Moderator]

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.

Same here. I know there are battery drain threads after every single OS, but it's the first time for me. After upgrading my MBP (16", the last Intel based) battery is draining quickly. The worst is: it's draining during sleep. I used to leave my MBP on sleep and even after a couple of days, the battery sank only a little. Now? I left it at 40% yesterday at 10PM. I opened it now at 8PM today (22 hours later) and I'm at 10%. That's 30% over 22 hours.

Please fix this

There isn’t a problem my friend! As I said, if you simply UNPLUG all external cables, your battery will not drain. If you leave cables in overnight, even if what they are connected to is powered down and unplugged, the battery will drain! There’s no problem, no big deal, not complaining, just giving a solution to a problem everyone is having.

HWTech wrote:

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.

Thanks. Documented a few things here and there in this thread, but this was the first post to consolidate.

* 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.

Yeah, I just need to check on the implications of turning it off (preserving stuff on local drive) and later turning it back on. I don't want to create duplications or multiples of files, and i need to figure out what the implications will be for other stuff (keychain, photos, etc).

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.

Thanks, this wasn't an option I was aware of (I'm no power user). Not sure how much drive space I'd need for this, but I may not have enough - computer only has a 256GB drive, and I'm using 64GB for a Bootcamp partition. Looks like I have about 80GB free at this point, though I'm sure I can free up more if needed.

At this point I'm returning toward a clean reinstall of the OS as I don't actually have all that many apps installed, and my documents are in iCloud, but it's not clear to me how to do that while preserving the Bootcamp install of Win11. But, I'm just starting exploring that.

I did already submit feedback to Apple a few weeks ago. But, beyond that, I don't have much mental bandwidth for being a troubleshooter. I switched from Windows to Apple several years ago because I was tired of having to be a Windows expert to troubleshoot problems. I just want it to work.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts. I'll likely just go with shutting off wi-fi every night until I have a week where I can take a few days to try more major steps.

According to your "best battery live", during sleep, you loose about 10% battery capacity within 6 hours! This would mean 40% in 24 hours and 80% over the weekend. This is far away from a proper sleep! But on sonoma there is a new wake request during sleep called CSPNEvaluation. There are many other wake requests as well but you can get rid of all of them by correct "pmset" settings exept for the new CSPNEvaluation introduced in Sonoma. You can do "pmset -g log | grep CSPNEvaluation" to find out how many times your Mac wakes up due to CSPNEvaluation specifically, or you can do pmset -g log | grep "Wake Request" to find out how many times your Mac was waking up during sleep. What is really missing is the possibility to configure your machine such that sleep really means SLEEP!

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.