Mavericks MacBook Air 2013 Battery Draining

A two hour drop is quite significant. I'm assuming you've checked your activity monitor to make sure nothing funky is going on...Other than that, I would just make sure you're quitting your apps because in Mavericks apps are run differently...but if you're really getting a two hour drop with and you're sure your usage is the same and nothing is sucking up juice in the background, that is way cray!

Yes everything checked, Spotlight barred from searcing external drives, switching between Safari and Chrome to eliminate that, no anomalies in Activity Monitor, but battery still draining in 2-3 hrs.

tut

After much more testing on 3 new machines, 2 macbook Air and one 1 macbook Pro,

...I dont say this lightly, but yes,..there is beyond any possible doubt that Mavericks has a flawed "time remaining" readout.

Eliminating all variables of tasks, brightness, spotlight, and checking battery temp on all 3 units and performing NVRAM and SMC resets, there is no question that a flaw in Mavericks exists which causes a faulty "time remaining readout"

As I have already verified many times on 2 diff. machines, SMC reset brought battery indicator from 4+ hours "remaining" (at 85% charge) to instantly 10+ hours remaining......

...however upon

A: opening flash video or

B: performing 2 other energy intensive APPS,

.....both Macs immediately went from 10+ hours remaining down to 3 or 4 hours remaining on the same amperage remaining charge levels

verified same on a third Macbook independently of the 2 (however on the Pro the initial and changed results were different to reflect the Pro battery vs. that of the Air)

all during this time I was verifying amperage remaining on coconut battery.

Verified this fault 5 times now on 3 different machines and eliminating ALL variables.

This is a fault that obviously is known and is being worked on for a fix.

Recommend anyone ignore "time remaining" estimates as wholly inaccurate currently

➕This (faulty time remaining) has NO bearing on the actual battery life, and certified just under 13+ hours of use on 2 macbook Air down to 12% remaining according to 3 battery indicators

1. Mavericks resident batt. indicator.

2. coconut battery (coconut doesnt estimate time however but mAh)

3. Battery time v 2 (mAh and % remaining, not time remaining)

*For those receiving ACTUAL LESS battery life, other variables are in play.

Peace 😊

I would not mind so much that the time remaining was faulty, it is the fact that the actual battery life from fully charged to shutdown is now less than three hours.

tut

hello,

did a battery check after installing os x mavericks on my 13" macbook air 2013, 1.3 ghz, core i5. Results are given below:

1. Wireless web incl browsing on the web and viewing numerous videos - 8h 11 mins

2. Logged off twice in between - 3h 18 mins

3. music play while logging off again - 37 mins

4. shutdown twice in between the whole process ie restarted my mac twice.

during the test the battery went from 100% to 5% when i put on the charger again. the only app used was safari and notes during the period and ofcourse i tunes when music played. i don't know how the results were prior to getting mavericks. but these are the test results. i expected to get 10 hrs atleast on the web considering logging of the machine twice. any observations?

I also got serverely reduced battery life when I upgraded to mavericks.

It was only like 2 days old (1 week old now) - reduced from like 18 hours when using lightly, to like 7 (9 MAX) - never near more than 10 since mavericks, and that with like nothing running.

Want to do a "trilogy" movie test and see if it survives Phil's (was it Phil Schiller?) batman or Dark Knight trilogy. I doubt it'll make it half way.

Steve

kernel_task is very low level stuff: its not an app but the OS that uses it.

In my case, it starts using 100% of CPU when I unplug my headphones from the audio jack, so I'm guessing it has to do with the audio drivers.

When this happens I usually just restart my computer. It's a few seconds of hassle but it's worth the hours of battery life you get back.

I don't know about the battery, but I'd be suprised if the computer didn't automatically shut down the hard drive right before the energy ran out or something.

I mean, on HDD whenever my battery ran out the computer didn't die, but hibernated. If I was in the middle of something it would pause for a few seconds before shutting down. Clearly it knew it was about to die, dumped the RAM to the Hard Drive, shut down the disks to avoid damage and then died.

I wouldn't be surpised if something similar happened with SSD. It's just too unlikely that it's so easy to corrupt files.

Now, about battery health I don't know. That could be a reason why you wouldn't want to completeley drain the battery.

It's not BOOM, or a specific app, it's audio in general. I get it when I unplug my headphones. It's probably just a faulty driver or something.

I'm seeing the same issue. My 11" 2013 macbook air (base model) has poor battery life after mavericks install. It says I only have 6 hours remaining when I 96% battery and I am only using itunes fro music and chrome for facebook.

My new, 2013 MacBook Air is draining batterty life after installing Mavericks. I'm actually on the phone with Apple right now. They're looking into it and I'm talking with a senior adviser.

I'm sure this is a Mavericks issue as this has never happened before. My computer will be charged at least 50% or so and I'll close it and it'll have drained completely by the morning. This has happened at least a couple of times since the install.

I had it completely charged today, 100%, unplugged it, left it for the day. Came back home, opened it up and it said 100%. Closed it for a few minutes. Opened it up and it said 67%. Odd.

So, now I'm on the phone with them again! I suspect they're just learning about this issue. I even told them about these forums!

I wonder if this is only a macbook air issue.

Adding a voice to the same issue. I noticed the battery life significantly draining faster. Using Safari and watching lecture and listening to it via headphone. Screen is also dimmed to less than half. If I was using macbook air for video game, I would not complain. However, I'm using macbook air for work, and when it functions sub-par to expectation per advertisement, it is very disappointing.

Besides this post, I was not able to find this issue addressed in any other websites. Where are all the techies? Please make this issue more public so that Apple would address the issue as priority, rather than trying to develop flashy, eye-catching, albeit useless features. The program features are good enough. Just make them work as you guys say it should work.

RedActor wrote:

My new, 2013 MacBook Air is draining batterty life after installing Mavericks. I'm actually on the phone with Apple right now. They're looking into it and I'm talking with a senior adviser.

I'm sure this is a Mavericks issue as this has never happened before. My computer will be charged at least 50% or so and I'll close it and it'll have drained completely by the morning. This has happened at least a couple of times since the install.

I had it completely charged today, 100%, unplugged it, left it for the day. Came back home, opened it up and it said 100%. Closed it for a few minutes. Opened it up and it said 67%. Odd.

So, now I'm on the phone with them again! I suspect they're just learning about this issue. I even told them about these forums!

I wonder if this is only a macbook air issue.

You are not the only one with this issue. I have seen a lot of other forums about this "bug" and a solution can not be found. The problem is that some MBA 2013 (maybe pro's too) have a sleeping bug problem. When the MBA tries to go into deep sleep, after 3 hours of sleep, something keeps waking it. That will drain the battery very fast and after some hours your battery will be dead while the lid closed. My gf has the same problem after updating to Mavericks. Before the update there was no problem at all. Maverick reinstalls and recalibrating battery etc are not working. We both have the same setup MBA i7 8 GB only I have a 256 GB ssd and hers is 128 GB.

I think you have the same deepsleep problem and you can test it out with the following commands:

pmset -g log

This will show you the wakes after you have closed the lid and reopen it after some hours.

syslog | grep "Wake reason"

This will show you the reason why it won't go into deepsleep, but this will only give

Aw kernel[0] <Debug>: Wake reason: ?

pmset -g assertions (or

pmset -g assertions | grep "SystemSleep")

This will show you if something prevents the system going to sleep at all.

I hope Apple comes with an update for this problem.

Mine has recently been behaving the same with draining whilst asleep, that on top of the 2-3 hours I am now getting from the battery.

tut

Thank you.