Macbook Pro battery drain while off

Question

Level 1

4 points

Macbook Pro battery drain while off

It appears some update in the last few months causes the battery to drain while off. There has been much discussion but - Specifically. There are no configured background process. Log dumps do not show it powering up. Batt health is 100%. No MS office products are installed. The unit with caps lock on shows fully powered off. The battery is at 100% and I put this infrequently used notebook away. I came back most recently from using it on Saturday (today being Thursday) and the battery was down to 57%. when I last charged it and reviewed the problem my battery was at zero and the unit would not boot. All the comments about - "well plug it in..." are great but don't cover the basic issue. I have six computers and this is just one and I don't need the notebook every day or even every week. But, having the battery go dead is surely bad for the unit and there is no reason for the unit to lose 8% or so per day while fully powered off. Comments about this is an Intel thing do not seem valid as my 16.5" i7 LG notebook goes for months with less than 10% drain. (touch start features in modern computers mean not 100% off) but still this 13" Macbook seems terrible in this regard and did not do it a year ago.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 15.2

Posted on Dec 19, 2024 11:12 AM

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Answer 1

HWTech

Level 9

61,808 points

Dec 19, 2024 7:15 PM in response to Techedge01

Search for "boot_" in the system logs to find when macOS boots. I don't recall if this also works for the output of the "log" command. The command line "log" command is the only way to gather logs these days since what Apple stores in the traditional system.log is barely showing any details these days.

You can also use the following command to find when macOS starts or wakes from sleep (note there are two spaces after "start " & "wake ":

pmset  -g  log  |  grep  -iE  'start  |wake  '

You can also check for any scheduled events:

pmset  -g  sched

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Answer 2

Techedge01 Author

Level 1

4 points

Dec 20, 2024 11:38 AM in response to HWTech

HWTech - thank you for the specifics. The system's last entry from the log was 12/19 @ 12:34:59 and lists sleep/wakes since boot at 12:34:59, dark wake count in this sleep cycle: 0

Next is today 11:05:34 (just a minute or two ago) Start, powerd process is started which is the last entry. So, it does not appear that it woke up for anything in the last, almost 24 hours.

The 2nd cmd you listed shows no schedule events.

I used to have a Forticlient on the unit which was centrally managed but removed that yesterday, just-in-case.

Battery shows only a modest 3% loss over 24 hrs while being "off" Oddly, the sys settings battery section last 10 days shows last charged to 97%. Maybe I'm miss-reading this be yesterday it said last charged to 57%. Neither is correct and yesterday I took a picture from my phone just to be certain of my recollection. That picture showed the battery screen showing fully charged. I even left it on the charger for 10 minutes after I shut it down, again just to be sure that I had in fact put the notebook away fully charged.

Nothing terrible about 3% battery loss last night, but still very odd that it runs down while being "off". I'd pull the battery if I could when setting it aside for weeks as I sometimes do. Each use case is different, but I'm recently retired from IT and thus don't need to use two notebooks as often. For reference my 2nd notebook is an LG 16.5", 2560x1600, i7, 16g, 1tb ssd and it lost 3% while off after about 6 days. So, some loss perhaps is baked into the hardware. Still, kind of tough on the batteries to go dead like this.

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