MacBook Battery drains quickly post Sonoma update

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.

I did some more research from Apple's support page (macOS support for MacBook Pro), and I ended up starting my MacBook in recovery mode (Apple gives instructions on how to do this based on which computer and processor you have) and then reinstalling Sonoma 14.3. There is a warning to make sure that your computer does not shut down or go to sleep during the install, which I think was the case when my computer did the original update (it went to sleep, lost battery, and then continued after I plugged it in and woke it up). So, after reinstalling the OS, I used it a bit, made sure all the battery settings were correct (power nap on adapter only, low energy mode on battery), I turned off all app notifications so they wouldn't run in the background), I let it sit (unplugged) until it went to sleep by itself (by that time I had used 2-3% battery), and the next day I opened my computer to a battery with 97%. Fingers crossed, but I think the careful reinstall of Sonoma 14.3 may have done the trick. Before that I had also tried another support suggestion (clear the SMC), but that did nothing.

I have a MacBook Pro 2019 with an Intel i9 processor running Sonoma 14.4.1. I have experienced the same sudden battery drain since soon after I first installed Sonoma--many, many months ago. I don't remember which version I had installed when it first began. I have gone round and round trying various things. But recently I have found one thing that seems to work consistently: I manually disable the wifi. I've tried this over the last four days and it seems to work. I'm curious if it works for others, too. I realize this isn't ideal but it's better than finding a dead battery. Below are a few of the things I've tried:

• Perhaps six or seven weeks ago, I reinstalled Sonoma and this cured the sudden battery drain until about a week ago. I reinstalled Sonoma yet again, but this time it didn't fix the issue.
• With the goal of disabling wifi & network activity with the lid closed, I tried setting "Enable Power Nap" and "Wake for Network Access" to "Only on Power Adaptor" and "Never" but with no effect--the battery still drained precipitously when not in use.
• Manually disabling wifi is the only fix that seems to work consistently (albeit for only 4 days or so) now that the laptop is draining the battery again in sleep mode.

From this with wifi enabled overnight:

To this with wifi disabled:

It's purely a hypothesis on my part, but it seems that there must be a lot of network activity going on in sleep mode. Is an iCloud update failing and retrying over and over--even though network access has been "disabled"? I hope Apple can fix this. Given the number of us that are suffering, I'm surprised that it has been around for so long.

Update on my previous post. Went back to Apple store after I backed up my Macbook (I was still getting occasional and unexpected battery drains), they did a clean re-install of Sonoma 14.3, this was three weeks ago. The issue has been resolved, no more battery drains, this was on two Macbooks (both had the same issues after the 14.3 upgrade). The drain and overheating problem arises after doing an upgrade, if you do a clean re-install of the OS (which means wiping the hard-drive) there are no issues whatsoever, we are now have a perfectly working Macbook.

Coletrain1970 wrote:

I’m having the same problem, my computer over heats and the fan is often on full, the battery drops to 0% over night in sleep mode - Sonoma is a disaster- please fix !

I strongly suggest that you apply HormyAJP's workaround by opening the Terminal app and running

     sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

...to switch your laptop from normal sleep to hibernation sleep.

But first, I would also strongly recommend that you, after reproducing this "hot sleep" problem, submit a Feedback report to Apple, using the Feedback Assistant tool that you'll find in Applications/Utilities. I submitted mine with:

Title: "Power consumption during sleep"

Area: "Something else not on this list:"

Type of issue: "Incorrect/Unexpected behavior"

The more people who submit Feedback reports about this problem, the better our chances that Apple will finally take note of this OS bug and address it.

I also experienced the same battery drain issues after updating to Sonoma (14.5) and after quite a bit of research and some studying, I resolved it with a series of bash commands.

My goal was:

[both on battery and with the power adapter]

• disable both powernap and automatic wake-ups
• enable standby mode

[on battery]

• use hibernation mode with greater energy savings
• disable tcpkeepalive
• turn off the screen after 10 minutes of inactivity
• automatically sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity
• automatically hibernate the computer after 60 seconds of sleep start

[on power adapter]

• use hibernation mode without energy savings
• keep tcpkeepalive active
• turn off the screen after 30 minutes of inactivity
• no automatic sleep
• no automatic hibernation

All these settings in sigle shot:

sudo pmset -b hibernatemode 25 && sudo pmset -c hibernatemode 0 && sudo pmset -a powernap 0 && sudo pmset -a proximitywake 0 && sudo pmset -a ttyskeepawake 0 && sudo pmset -a standby 1 && sudo pmset -b tcpkeepalive 0 && sudo pmset -c tcpkeepalive 1 && sudo pmset -b sleep 10 && sudo pmset -c sleep 0 && sudo pmset -b standbydelayhigh 60 && sudo pmset -c standbydelayhigh 0 && sudo pmset -b standbydelaylow 60 && sudo pmset -c standbydelaylow 0 && sudo pmset -b disksleep 10 && sudo pmset -c disksleep 30 && sudo pmset -b displaysleep 10 && sudo pmset -c displaysleep 30

In addition I have cleaned my SMC few times

left ctrl + left option + right shift + power key

and reset the NVRAM

option + command + P + R

Last night before closing my macbook screen I had 100% charge with the wifi turned on and dropbox app in the system tray. Today after 9 hours I reopened the screen and I had 100% charge :)

I have the intel chipset right before the M1. I was having the same problem with 14.3.1 as soon as I downloaded it, it drained my battery in hours even with me not touching or using my laptop. Once I downloaded 14.4 all the problems went away.

fpagani wrote:

Update on my previous post. Went back to Apple store after I backed up my Macbook (I was still getting occasional and unexpected battery drains), they did a clean re-install of Sonoma 14.3, this was three weeks ago. The issue has been resolved, no more battery drains, this was on two Macbooks (both had the same issues after the 14.3 upgrade). The drain and overheating problem arises after doing an upgrade, if you do a clean re-install of the OS (which means wiping the hard-drive) there are no issues whatsoever, we are now have a perfectly working Macbook.

What was the process? Recovery mode to install OS and then Time Machine to restore your apps/data?

I had the same problem and this is what I did to check it and to solve it:

I check the wakeup logs with:

log show --style syslog | fgrep "Wake reason"

and found out my Mac wakes up every couple of minutes due to: Dark Wake 

After reading a bit more about it here is what can be done to to prevent it (or at least reduce it)

Force powernap (although in the battery setting it is defined never to wake up I check pmset -g and found out that power nap was still set to 1) so do: sudo pmset -a power nap 0

and then another thing that wakes up is the tcpkeepalive that is used for "find me" when the Mac is asleep

so if you are not worried about you Mac being stolen you can do: sudo pmset -a tcpkeepalive 0

After those two steps after 12 hours sleep the consumption was 4% instead of 40%

System Settings > Login items > disable and delete everything that's there > shutdown your MacBook, wait a while and reboot it.

The idea is to not to have any 3rd party apps starting at login and/or running in the background eating up energy.

Also, if you have and 3rd party modifier apps, such as Cleanmymac, any antivirus apps, any VPNs, all kinds of auto-updaters, uninstall them. Then reboot.

After an update to 14.4 it started draining overnight again, what I have found is that it seems to do this with another browser installed, even if the browser process is not running! I have tried this with Chrome and DuckDuckGo, if either of these are installed on mine my battery drops to 0% overnight with the lid closed, if I have no other browser installed the battery is still at 100% in the morning, the battery indicator shows a sudden plummet from 100% to 0% at the time of opening the lid so it is not recording the drain properly, I am still trying various things but so far the only consistent-ish thing is with no other browser installed all seems ok........

I would still check with pmset -g if your power nap is set to 0 (even if on your UI it is set to off it still might be 1 like it was in my case) then you can turn it off with: sudo pmset -a power nap 0

ycyclop wrote:

I would still check with pmset -g if your power nap is set to 0 (even if on your UI it is set to off it still might be 1 like it was in my case) then you can turn it off with: sudo pmset -a power nap 0

I checked. It's set to 0.

So, next thing:

It used to be that if I restarted my laptop, it would resist the "hot sleep" phenomenon for awhile (hours or days). But now, a restart doesn't help at all anymore. And there are absolutely NO syslog entries during the period that the system is sleeping! I therefore started to wonder whether I don't have some sort of hardware issue.

So I created a new user; logged out of my account and logged into the new user account. And in a brief test, it seems not to be exhibiting this "hot sleep" behavior. I'll verify this by letting my laptop sleep overnight while logged into this new, empty user account.

If it remains cool, this does suggest that some bit of software I've got installed is somehow involved in this problem. But, with NO syslog entries during the sleep period, something fishy must be going on. I've already determined that there aren't any processes accumulating more than a few seconds of processing time during sleep. This says that something that is not being logged by the OS is drawing power. I wonder if GPU operations are logged anywhere. Or any other coprocessors, for that matter.

This is just extraordinarily frustrating.

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.

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?