My MacBook battery drains alot when shut down

kingyaw7 wrote:

When my battery is full and I turn it off as in shutdown the battery will reach zero in 3days, I think it is a software issue because it started happening after updating to 14.4.1

Are you sure the laptop actually fully powers off? I have seen computers get stuck or stalled during a shutdown. With the recent Macs, it is very hard to confirm complete power down condition. The best way is to press the Caps Lock key so that the Caps Lock LED is lit before you select "Shutdown". When the laptop powers down completely, then the Caps Lock LED should go dark.

All the things I mentioned in my previous post which can wake a laptop can also power on the laptop, so make sure none of those things occur after a successful power down.

If the laptop is fully powered down and is not accidentally powered on afterwards, then software won't be the cause of the problem. If the laptop is fully powered down & you get severe battery drain, then check to see whether you the laptop scheduled to power on. See this Apple article for checking if the laptop is scheduled to power on automatically:

Schedule your Mac to turn on or off in Terminal - Apple Support

You can use the following command in the Terminal app to see if any schedules are configured:

pmset  -g  sched

Otherwise I suspect the laptop is powering back on due to a key press, a press on the Trackpad, connecting/disconnecting any external device, or movement of the Display lid. You can try checking the macOS System logs to see if any activity occurred between the time you powered down the laptop and the time you powered it back on. Unfortunately this is not as easy to do as it should be since the Console app does not always show the user all available system logs, nor do the system logs always contain data. You may need to use the Finder to look for all the system logs at "/private/var/log" and you will need to right-click or Control-click on any system logs ending in ".gz" to select the Console app to open them. There is also a command line "log" utility which will show a different view of macOS activity.

There is a huge difference between sleep and powering off the laptop, and there are different expectations on battery drain between them.

The computer should only very slowly drain power when completely powered off. More than likely if the computer was powered off either the laptop never completely finished the shutdown process due to a software issue, or the laptop did power off & the laptop was accidentally powered back on from pressing a key or Trackpad, connecting/disconnecting an external device, or the lid of the laptop opening a bit to trigger the automatic power on.

As for the battery draining during sleep.....this is complicated because macOS will keep waking the laptop to perform maintenance tasks usually associated with third party software or with cloud file syncing services such as iCloud. I just recently had such an issue with one of my organization's Macs which I could not identify the exact reason for the drain, but did confirm it was some sort of software or configuration issue since Safe Mode did not drain the battery as much and booting from a clean install of macOS (no restore from backup or AppleID/iCloud or third party software) had minimal battery drain during sleep with default macOS settings.

Some other things that can affect sleep are the laptop is not actually entering sleep mode because:

• Software issue is preventing sleep
• Faulty Lid Angle Sensor or sleep sensor (hardware issue)
• Laptop was asleep but was woken by a key press, pressing of the trackpad, connection/disconnection of external device, etc.

Try selecting "Sleep" from the Apple menu to see if you encounter the same issue as this would help eliminate a faulty Lid Angle Sensor or Sleep Sensor.

Hi!

You should check your Mac's battery health:

1. Open System Settings
2. Click Battery > the information icon next to 'Battery Health'

If the battery health is lower than 80%, you should get the battery replaced.

You can check if you have 3rd party background apps are running. Go to System Settings > Login items > disable and delete all that's there and reboot.

Also, if you don't have any work running, it is better to shut down the MacBook, or otherwise plug it in for the night while it is sleeping.

Intel Macs used a System Management (micro-) Controller to manage certain always-on functions like Main processor-clock speed regulation, power-button press detewction, Main Processor power-up and power-down, temperature sensor reading, fan speed regulation, power adapter and battery charge level, and setting the green or amber LED in the MagSafe connector (when present). These functions were controlled even when the computer was nominally OFF. Some Power was consumed when nominally powered off, but it was small enough to be considered negligible.

Apple-silicon Macs have moved most of these duties to one the low-power 'main' processors, and will consume some power even when nominally off. All those jobs still have to get done when nominally OFF.

It is possible that Apple may have changed what processor, and when, and how fast, and how much power is consumed, when the system is nominally OFF.

Since the nominally-Off power consumption level was never published, an increase in power consumption in a recent upgrade to MacOS is not likely to be considered a Bug. It it were identified as a Bug, the likely resolution would be to revise the documentation to reflect the actual use of power when nominally OFF.

Best advice is to NOT anguish over internal power consumption, charging and discharging. All that stuff is a job for a computer. When AC power is available, plug in your Mac.

When you set your computer down in one place, connect it to AC power.

That computer is a battery-CAPABLE device. It is not optimized as a battery-operated device. (It is NOT an iPhone.)

In general, you should ALWAYS connect AC power when it is possible to do so, and only run on batteries (which could be somewhat slower) when no AC sources are at hand. Your Mac will NEVER over-charge.

Best advice is to NOT anguish over internal power consumption, charging and discharging. All that stuff is a job for a computer. When AC power is available, plug in your Mac. it will NEVER over-charge.

You can also do this in Activity Monitor. It's really helpful to find which processes take up the most processing power and memory and then removing them, if possible.