MacBook Battery drains quickly post Sonoma update

I have this exact same problem. The worst Mac update ever. I never experienced this kind of battery problem with any other updates. Apple better address this problem and fix it.

Hi,

I recently updated my Sonoma 14 to version 14.3 and I've been experiencing significant battery drain that I haven't encountered before.

The Problem:

Day 1: I used my MacBook normally and closed the lid before going to sleep. When I opened it in the morning, the battery had gone from 100% to 1%.

Days 2-3: I repeated the same scenario, but the result was the same. I also tried closing all programs before closing the lid, but the battery drain continued overnight.

Attempts to Resolve:

I updated to Sonoma 14.3.1, hoping it would fix the issue, but the battery drain persists.

Concerns:

This battery drain issue is concerning because it could impact the overall health and lifespan of my battery.

I urge Apple to address this issue promptly, as it likely affects a significant number of users.

There's likely nothing wrong with the hardware. My MacBook Pro was working perfectly fine ... absolutely nothing changed ... except the install of OS Sonoma 14.3. That's when it all changed, as described by others here. Totally frustrating.

I have one very simple request from Apple.

As a long term user, i don't need more apps, more emoji's or more waffle, all i need is to be able to use the full battery life that is recommended for my machine and not a massive drain after updating, it's not fair!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Every time there is an update, the internet is awash with battery drain issues among other things that worked fine before the update, so come on Apple, it's time to give us what we pay for: battery life unhindered by updates please.

Ps, im only loyal to a brand while it treats me well.

Thanks for the advice, unfortunately it didn't help at all. I did all of that, put my Macbook to sleep overnight to test, and woke up with 1% battery. Like I said before, I've never had this problem before ever. It's absolutely ridiculous.

B0G4 wrote:

In addition, I took the 2020 MBP to Apple store - it got all the TLC from the gurus and they found zero HW issues. Also confirmed that my OS power settings are correct and stated that I should not be experiencing this behavior.

Alas, me being a SwE, observing the behavior and hearing the Apple store tech's feedback - I am almost 100% certain that this is SW issue - but with no confirmation form the company and really straight up denial of its existence, the confidence inspired in the brand wanes and wanes.

(hopefully at least one Apple PM reads the thread [lol])

I agree, 100%. I'm a retired SWE (xoogler), and to me, this really smells of a serious bug in Sonoma's sleep management. (For reference, I'm calling this state "hot sleep".)

I've tried various things:

• resetting SMC
• turning off "optimized battery charging"
• turning off power nap
• turning off "wake for network access"
• setting the various Google Chrome optimizations, so inactive tabs stay idle

...etc., ad nauseum.

I've spent hours on the chat and phone with first and second level Apple support agents. Their suggestions have not been useful. They wanted me to reboot in Safe Mode, which is a rather fragile configuration (e.g., audio went dead almost immediately) for operating for days on end (which is how long it can take me to repro the problem) -- and it would not really identify the culprit anyway!

Next, they wanted me to do what you just went through -- go bring the laptop to a store. I'd have to leave it with them for days, and who knows whether they could or would repro the problem in an admin user account. (And my Apple Care subscription expired a couple of months ago, so this would presumably be an expensive vacation from my laptop, and they don't even offer loaners!)

There ought to be a diagnostic flag that could be turned on, to log activity. SOMETHING is waking the processor up when it should be sleeping. There should be a record of WHAT that is, in some log. I asked whether someone might like to review my log files? Nope! (I've browsed various logs, and so far, nothing jumps out at me.)

Then I got the bright idea of recording the output of "ps -AjmS | sort -r -k 9ps -AjmS | sort -r -k 9" just before going to sleep, and just after waking up from a power-consuming sleep. I set this up, and it took a couple of days before I finally captured the output before and after a "hot sleep". And, unfortunately, I don't see any particular process that accrued more than a few seconds during the hours of hot sleep.

So, some process that doesn't show up in "ps -A" is active during this hot sleep mode. That's odd.

I guess the next thing I ought to try is to set up wireshark to see whether perhaps there's some unwelcome TCP/IP traffic going to/from my laptop during hot sleep.

I find it hard to believe that Apple engineers haven't identified a cluster at this point.

QUESTION: Has anyone else noticed the following? One thing I have definitely correlated with this "hot sleep" phenomenon is that, not only is the laptop warm (and the battery run down, if disconnected from AC), but also that...

• The display does not automatically turn on when the lid is open. I have to depress the power/fingerprint button to get the display to turn on.

This behavior ONLY happens when the laptop has been hot sleeping.

Are other folks also seeing this?

Is this some dirty way of trying to make us all move from Chrome/Google to Safari?

> and they keep running in the background on Sleep Mode.

The root of the problem is that Apple does not offer owner of computer any option to disable all activity running in the Sleep mode to make the machine actually sleep instead of sleepwalk and waste energy. It is a design problem of MacOS.

Just spoke to Apple support (same issue here on multiple MacBook Pros after 14.3 install). From the Activity Monitor, clicking on the Energy tab, you can see which software has been draining battery in last 12H. In my case, it was browser related (I don't use safari). They suggest to use Safari since other browsers have not yet been updated to 14.3 OS and they keep running in the background on Sleep Mode.

Similar here, didn't start until the latest update a few days ago, 14.3.1, mine dies overnight, seems ok running on battery during the day and does everything it should but when on battery overnight with lid closed wake to find totally dead or maybe 1% remaining, have tried closing all apps before closing lid, have also completely wiped macbook and installed fresh version of macos but no different, mine is a 13" 2020 macbook pro and have had no problems until now, next step is to wipe again and try fresh version of ventura I guess but would rather not go down this route really............

Sonoma 14.4 it not work!!!

I close the lid at 6 p.m. and open it again at 9 p.m.

Since updating to the new version, the battery drains much faster than with 14.3.1.

This is a battery level and the screen time.

I suggest waiting for the public version.

I hope Apple can fix this issue as soon as possible, as it affects both the battery cycle and overall battery health.

Spoke too soon. Back to square one. This OS is junk. Sorry I ever installed it. I have tried everything except reverting to the previous OS, which I think I'll need to do.

I have the exact same Macbook as you, and I decided to not revert to an older OS because it is a LOT of work. The most recent thing I did was change a setting in Chrome (three dots in upper right-hand corner/settings/performance/power/turn on when my computer is unplugged. ... went two nights without any power loss, and I did not close Chrome. Fingers crossed.

Hello all,

I've been busying myself away for a while trying to debug the issue and/or find a cure for the issue.

TL;DR; QUICK "SOLUTION" 

Open a Terminal and type 

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

I have been problem free for over a week now. The battery does still drain a little bit, e.g. 5-10%, but that's acceptable to me.

I hope this continues to work and I also hope it works for you as well 🤞

LONG STORY

As it stands I have tried a LOT of things and none of them worked:

* Disable "Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices"

* Disable Wifi

* Disable Bluetooth

* Remove all background items

* Disable all battery settings from System Prefs -> Battery -> Options (Slightly dim display... (Off) , Enable power nap (Never), Put hard disks to sleep (Always), Wake for Network Access (Never)

* Disable hidden power management settings using pmset: ttyskeepawake=0, tcpkeepalive=0, proximitywake=0, womp=0

* Removing all Google products (including Chrome) and ensuring all background tasks (launchagents/launchdaemons) were uninstalled. Reason for this is that lots of people report Google updater being a sleep preventer. ASIDE: I've officially been an Edge user for 2 weeks now 🤯

* I have tried using the SleepAid app. Alas this effectively crashes when the battery dies. It doesn't have the ability to diagnose this specific issue.

* Removed as many possible apps and other garbage from my Mac as possible

* Tried sleeping with the laptop lid open

* Tried sleeping using software, e.g. the Apple menu -> sleep

* Confirmed that there's nothing in Activity Monitor marked as "Preventing Sleep" other than WindowServer (which I believe is normal when you are using the Mac)

The only useful place I can get information from is using the system logs from the Console.app. If you filter by the keyword "PMRD" then you can see all power related messaging.

I have even spent time debugging the kernel using DTrace and the source code for the XNU kernel

It's worth noting that I can definitely see differences between logs when the problem occurs and when it doesn't. It seems to me that sometimes when you try to sleep, something goes wrong right at the moment of trying to sleep your laptop (e.g. when you close the lid). In other words, your battery’s fate is sealed from the moment you try to sleep. The annoying part is that it's impossible to check if this happened without unsleeping the mac. If you observe the problem, you change it and thus have to sleep again (a Heisenbug).

Other observations:

* (I think someone else mentioned this) When the problem occurs, if you try to wake your mac up with the keyboard then it won't wake. You need to press the power button to wake it back up. Normally, a key press alone should wake it up.

* Apple changed power management code in the XNU kernel for Sonoma. There was nothing obvious that could explain the issue off hand, but I strongly feel that this is a software bug in the kernel rather than some hardware fault or some bad state our Macs are in. Seems like a race condition in the sleep logic where a driver says "hey, I can't sleep". Sometimes that happens at a good time and sleep still occurs, other times it doesn't.

hibernatemode

Anyway, silliness aside, what is hibernatemode all about?

macOS has 3 hibernate modes 0, 3 and 25 (weird numbering right?):

0: Sleep everything but leave your RAM powered on

3: Sleep everything, leave your RAM powered on but also backup RAM to disk in case of a power failure

25: Sleep everything including RAM. Copy RAM contents to disk then power off RAM as well.

The only impact of switching to mode 25 is that your mac isn't as snappy when you wake it up. It takes a second or two to respond. This however is a worthwhile price to pay given your battery won't be dead every morning.

CONCLUSION

This is not a fix, it's a workaround. God knows if Apple will ever fix this (or even acknowledge it).

If the issue comes back again then I have a handful of ideas for other things to try, but frankly I'm close to being out of options. Keeping my fingers crossed this works.

Even if this works for you, can I recommend that everyone submits a bug report via Feedback Assistant please (if you haven't already)? Do it the morning after a battery death - so you'll need to set hibernatemode back to 3 to do that. I'd suggest linking to this post in the bug report.

Beyond that, I might take my Mac to the Apple store but I'm expecting to be told it's due to water damage and I need to spend $1000 on a new motherboard 😂😢

Beyond that, the only other thing I can suggest is that we start methodically capturing how many of us have the issue and see if there's enough people to pressure Apple or even consider threatening with class action. I'm not hopeful though.