MacBook Battery drains quickly post Sonoma update

Check if your MacBook’s battery has degraded. In Settings > Battery > Battery Health. If it gas, you might want to replace it. See this link for more information: Batteries - Service and Recycling - Apple

...and I just reproed the bug and submitted a feedback. I would encourage everyone else here to do the same. I recorded it under

Title: "Power consumption during sleep"

Area: "Something else not on this list:"

Type of issue: "Incorrect/Unexpected behavior"

Here's how I described the behavior:

"Ever since updating to Sonoma, my MacBook Pro has had instances of excessive power consumption when it’s supposed to be sleeping. It doesn’t matter whether I put it to sleep by closing the lid or by invoking the sleep button (on the Apple menu or in the Touch Bar). Sometimes it sleeps properly, consuming almost no power, and sometimes it is consuming enough power to make the laptop very warm. It doesn’t matter whether the laptop is powered via USB or unpowered, drawing from the battery. If the latter, the battery energy is drawn down rapidly.

In the attached instance, the MBP was connected to AC power, and was quite warm, even though the battery was at 100% when I put it to sleep.

The other behavior that correlates 100% with this “hot sleep” condition is that the display fails to turn on when I open the lid, nor does it turn on when I press any keyboard key other than the power/fingerprint button.

This has been going on for months, ever since I updated to Sonoma.

I am a retired software engineer, and I am very eager to assist in diagnosis of this problem. I am not the only one who is experiencing the same behavior.

I should also note that I have seen this behavior even after having logged out — so it’s unlikely to be associated with any user software I’ve installed.

Finally, I will point out that many others are experiencing this identical issue. Please refer to the following threads in the Apple Support Community:

MacBook Battery drains quickly post Sonom… - Apple Community

Updated MacBook Pro to macOS Sonoma, now … - Apple Community

Battery drain on macOs Sonoma - Apple Community

Sonoma 14.2 Problems Battery Life Time an… - Apple Community

Battery draining and overheating - Apple Community

We are desperately hoping that you folks will identify a cluster and address this problem in an update VERY SOON. Please feel free to contact me directly at my email address (deleted) or by phone or text to (deleted). As I said, I’m VERY EAGER to help squash this bug!

HormyAJP wrote:

I'm glad it's not just me experiencing this. It's been a massive problem for the last month or so for me. Battery drains almost every night. I often find my laptop buzzing away and really hot when inside my bag.

As far as I can tell I _think_ it's mostly Chrome causing this, but I could swear I've also had VS Code and maybe other programs cause it.

Are we clear whether the expectation is on Apple to fix this or individual software manufacturers?

IMHO this should be Apple because their OS should respect my wish to have the laptop dormant when it's asleep.

Don't hold your breath. If anyone at Apple has identified this as a common problem, that fact has not propagated to any of the tech support agents I've spoken with, or if it has, they're not acknowledging it.

I did a chat with Apple Support that went nowhere. Then, after trying a few different things (reset the SMC, turn off battery optimization, ...) and taking a few more days, I tried a phone call to Apple Support, and managed to get an escalation to a second level support person. The outcome? He suggested:

• Try booting in "Safe mode" and operating that way, to see if the problem returns. My problems with this suggestion: First of all, it can take days for the problem to return, and when I tried running in Safe mode (suggested by the chat support agent), I immediately started having problems, such as the audio system going dead. Second, and more importantly, it was very unclear how Safe mode could isolate the problem, since I only enable software that I need, anyway. By the time the problem comes back, I would have enabled pretty much all the stuff that's running in normal mode, so how would this identify the culprit?
• Try wiping my drive, installing a fresh copy of Sonoma, and most importantly, NOT restoring the user partition from my Time Machine backup. Presumably, this would mean installing fresh copies of all non-MacOS apps, and selectively restoring needed data from Time Machine. And then see if the problem comes back. This seems like a LOT of work (multiple days), and again, it's hard to figure out what this tells me, when the problem resumes.
• Make an appointment at the Genius Bar, and let them have my laptop for however many days or weeks. (I allowed my AppleCare contract to expire last year, so I suspect this would be a rather expensive way to be without my laptop for a long time.)

With MacOS being a UNIX-derivative OS, event logging is incorporated heavily into the system. There are all sorts of log files in /var/log, and I would be surprised if there weren't some flags that could be set to turn on even more diagnostic logging. All I want to know is WHAT is waking up my processor when the laptop is supposed to be sleeping. A sleeping computer should only be refreshing RAM, updating its RTC, and waiting for interrupts from the lid switch, the network interface, the keyboard, the USB, etc. A log entry could easily reveal whodunnit. But no -- I brought this up with the senior Apple tech support agent, and he said they just don't do that. I find that extremely surprising. The log files are probably screaming out the answer.

So, for now, I just restart my machine every day. Ugh! I may end up poking around the log files a bit more, to see whether anything jumps out at me.

Update: I still have the problem. It did seem to go away for a while - and I almost got excited that it was fixed - but alas it's back.

Interestingly, I just caught my laptop burning up in my bag. I opened it and checked Activity Monitor and top to see what was causing it. Xcode was going wild:

• XCode:
  • 12.72 GB ram
  • 14 GB bytes written to disk
  • 124.9% CPU
  • 122.2 Energy Impact
• XCodeBuildService
  • 10.5 GB ram
  • 20.8 GB bytes written to disk
  • 104% CPU

The odd thing is that I haven't used Xcode today. It reopened automatically this morning because my machine shutdown unexpectedly last night (due to - no surprises - the battery dying). I haven't actually done any coding today so it should have just been sat there idle doing nothing.

Note that there was zero network activity for Xcode so it wasn't trying to call home and do anything either.

Once I closed Xcode the fan died down and usage went back to normal (although I haven't sent my Mac to sleep yet).

What I find odd about this is how inconsistent the causes seem to be. It's hard to isolate a specific cause.

I _might_ have a theory about this (although I've thought that before). If you're having the problem then maybe you can help me validate the idea

• Open a Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
• Type systemextensionsctl list

This will list any system extensions installed on your machine. It will either show "0 extension(s)" if you have none, or a list of extensions. For each extension it will show you the bundle ID of the extension - which should give you a pretty clear indication as to which app installed it. Can you let me know what you see? If you're concerned about privacy then feel free to omit the bundle ID of the extension and just tell me if you have any extensions at all.

What I'm hoping to see is that everyone with the problem has a system extension installed. If not, then my theory is debunked.

Assuming this is correct, then I would suggest the following steps to try to remedy the situation:

• Identify which apps installed the extensions
• Uninstall the apps (which "should" uninstall the extension)
• Run systemextensionsctl list again to confirm that the extensions have been uninstalled. Note that it might say something about needing a reboot to fully remove the extension - this is fine.
• Reboot
• Run systemextensionsctl list again to confirm that the extensions have really been fully uninstalled
• If you can live without those apps for a while then test your machine without them
• If you really can't live without those apps then reinstall them. If my theory is right then I'd guess that simply uninstalling and reinstalling "might" fix the issue.

If for some reason you can't uninstall the extension then I can help more with that. Also, if the theory is correct I can give more information on sys extensions, but for now I'll just shut up.

Exact same problem, very frustrating. 14.3.1 just released, hopefully sorts the problem...

MahfuzulAhsan wrote:

14.3.1 just made it worse for Macbook Air M1

Can you explain how?

FWIW everyone, I updated with the latest installment Sonoma 14.3.1 and it seems to have resolved my battery problems on the MacBook Pro, 13-inch 2020.

Hope it works for everyone else too!

I did a clean reinstall of Sonoma and this helped immensely to resolve the battery drain. I also close all apps before sleeping.

You can select it from System Settings -> general -> software update, underneath automatic updates...

If I type the actual word the post gets deleted by apple :-)

Updated!

I updated the Sonoma 14.4 beta version today.

Tomorrow, I will tell you the result of whether this update resolves the battery drain issue.

I have now tried many different configurations versions of MacSO\Browser and for me it seems that the only way to stop this happening is to NOT have any other browsers except safari installed, even if they are not running the battery seems to drain completely overnight, the battery monitor does not show it slowly discharging but plummeting from 100% to 0% at the moment the lid is opened so I can only assume it is misreading this so for the moment I am living with Safari only and it seems fine, this, for me, has been the only combination that seems to work as expected all the time......

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 have personally experienced that Chrome consumes a lot of battery. So, I switched to Safari and sometimes used the Brave browser. If you are not using Chrome or the Podcast app, force close them. Right-click the app icon on Dock and select Quit. Also, you may try restarting your Mac to clear any bugs and optionally enable Low Power mode.