M3 Air Battery Drain

I didn't migrate any data over to my new MacBook Air 13" M3 (I like to start fresh) - but I'm experiencing the same thing. I had incredible battery life for the first few weeks, then yesterday it took a serious nosedive. I shut everything down last night and re-charged. I was cleaning up my gmail folders when the battery life starting diving - I'm wondering if a virus or background process snuck in? I've checked the Activity Monitor and CPU usage - but everything seems normal there. This morning, the battery has drained 7% in 40 minutes and I only have this window open with this tab. Any thoughts?

A new Mac may be doing a lot of house keeping behind the scenes. For example, Spotlight will be indexing the drive, and if you are using any cloud based services, they may be syncing files to the system. If this is the case, then things should settle down once they have completed their initial major scans.

Make sure all your third party software are completely up to date and are actually compatible with macOS 14.x Sonoma and an Apple Silicon M-series Mac.

Hey there, I bought the new MBA 13 inch 2 days ago and I have been facing the same issue right from the first day.

At first, I thought the battery would last for around 12-14 hrs on full charge as per claimed by apple but I am getting around 5-6 hrs of battery life on normal usage life safari and stuff. The battery drains around 15-20% in an hour of usage.

I am not sure of what's happening here cause I read somewhere that the MacBook learns our usage patterns during initial stages.

Moreover, I have read that the new software update has caused this problem as well.

Let me know if this problem is resolved.

Thank you !!!

Two things.

1) After moving into a new computer it isn't uncommon for it to spend a lot of time indexing the data as well as syncing with iCloud, especially if you've moved lots of data from another computer. If you have a TimeMachine drive connected it will also be backing up. For this reason, I've learned to leave my new notebook plugged in over night to let it work all this out.

2) You may be experiencing a runaway process. Launch the Activity Monitor and click on the CPU tab in the top of the window. Then in the columns where the processes are listed, click on the %CPU item so that the carrot is pointing down. Now you can see the processes from highest CPU usage to lowest. Under normal circumstances you'll see the top processes switching in and out with none of them being higher than 30 for more than a second or two. In the bottom left of the window you'll see a box with System, User, and Idle with numbers indicating how much of the CPU is being used by the OS, how much by your running apps, and how much the CPU is idle. Right now I have a few background apps like Mail and PasteBot running as well as my browser. Idle percentage is over 90%, OS is 2-3% and User is 3-12%. If you see a high process number staying high in the list or a high number in System or User in the box you probably have a runaway process.