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Mavericks MacBook Air 2013 Battery Draining

Hello,


I recently installed Mavericks onto my Macbook Air 2013, Haswell, 128GB i5 model

I find that the battery drains very quickly; in general it only shows an estimate of less than 6 hours with just Chrome open. Before it used to be 10-12 hours+. I used to not notice when the battery percentage would go down; now every few minutes I notice it slowly decreasing.

I read that the computer needs time to index the hard drive but I do not see the Spotlight indexing.

What is going on? Does the computer need to go through one cycle of almost draining the battery from full in order to accurately preserve energy?

The computer went from 100% to around 78% over the span of around 2 hours... not good.


Why is my computer showing a decrease in battery life when Mavericks is supposed to increase it dramatically? Typing this message in a span of 10 minutes already dropped my battery life around 1-2%. (No hardware problems; flawless on Mountain Lion)


Thanks,


Sam

MacBook Air, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Posted on Oct 23, 2013 9:43 AM

Reply
361 replies

Oct 23, 2013 5:59 PM in response to scintoon

Yeah, I'm seeing a shortened battery life on my Macbook Air 2013 13" model.

My config is 256GB HDD, 8GB RAM and Core i7.


On 10.8 I had at least 10 hours consistantly, up to 15 hours on a good day.

Now the most I've gotten from Mavricks is 8 hours, and as low as 6 hours...


No idea what is going on. This is stupid, and Apple should figure this out.

Oct 24, 2013 3:11 AM in response to scintoon

Yep, me too. Haven't been through a full discharge cycle yet but it's showing 6 hours remaining with the battery fully charged on my Macbook Air 2013 13"; down all the way from around 13 hours on Mountain Lion.


I really hope that it's something to do with Mavericks being recently installed. Because the minor improvements are so not worth half the original battery life.

Oct 24, 2013 5:24 AM in response to scintoon

I have the same issue. 15" 2012 MBPr, 2.4GHz, 16GB, 512SSD, NVIDA GT 650M 1024 MB. Upgraded from Mountain Lion to Mavericks. I typically get in the 7 to 9h range. First usage on Mavericks unplugged, I went from 100% to 11% in about 4h. Coda 2 and Safari being the only things open. Geektool also running in the background, updating a few desktop widgets.


I'm going to let it run all the day down, then charge it back up and hope that that helps.


In the time it took me to type this, it went from 12% to 7%.

Oct 24, 2013 12:50 PM in response to Maxim__

Hi All,


I also am experiencing the same issue - I upgraded my Macbook Air 2013 (8GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, i7 1.7GHz) to Mavericks last night and noticed when I unplugged my power cable that the Time Remaining reported at 6 and a half hours despite being 100%.

I assumed it was a calculation bug but quickly found it was in fact only about 6 and a half hours before the battery was discharged down to 5%. Tried this morning again and found same battery life (unplugged at 10am, was drained by 3pm).


My usage pattern involves keeping multiple programs open: Mail, Calendar, Chrome (multiple tabs), iTunes, Messages, Notes, Word.

This pattern hasn't changed since I got my Mac in July and I would consistently get 11-13 hours battery life.


I thought Chrome might be the issue (many people above are indicating they use Chrome, so I'm going to switch to Safari and see if that remedies the problem and post my findings here.

Mavericks MacBook Air 2013 Battery Draining

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