Mavericks MacBook Air 2013 Battery Draining

In my case, my Carbonite app was draining the battery due to background uploading while on battery. When I disabled the App, my battery life slowly improved to where I now have 72% showing on the menu bar with 7:40 remaining.

I had recently transfered my Carbonite acct to my laptop and it was slowly uploading the HD contents to the Cloud.

Tommy

just bought 2013 MBA 13, after few hours of using I've updated to Mavericks and then it says about 6:37 hours on 100% charge and after that it increased to more than 9 hours on 96%, I can't estimate real battery life, because had only 1 day with it and all work was separated, probably it didn't calibrate yet.

Also turn Bluetooth off - only turn on when needed

OK, guys. After many calls to Apple, I finally had to back up my data to time machine, erase my HD and use the Migration Assistant to transfer my stuff back to my HD from my backup.

Now I have great battery life.

My apple advisor speculated that there may be a bug in the software and a clean install is necessary.

So far, so good. We'll see if it lasts.

My problem was that it kept waking up when in hibernate mode and drained the battery.

So, for what it's worth, a fix.

How much time was your battery lasting before? How much did it increase after?

Is watching videos supposed to affect significantly the battery life?

It would be anywhere from 50-100% charged and by the morning it would be dead. Seems to only happen when the kid was closed.

Yesterday, it was at 100% and this morning, when I opened the lid, it was still at 100%. So, big improvement there.

And when I'm working on it, it's been lasting quite a while.

Let's hope this lasts!

Hi everyone,

I had this problem too, on a MBA 13 2013, after I upgraded to Mavericks. After trying the standard gamut of suggestions (resetting the SMC, deleting unnecessary apps, switching off Powernap, fixing disk permissions), and getting useless advice from three different Apple support techs, I finally found a fix that worked for me. All credit to Apple support tech #4, Phillip, wherever he may be.

The problem was a software conflict between Mavericks and Avaast antivirus. Presumably there will be other third-party apps that aren't yet streamlined for Mavericks, and those might also be causing a similar problem. This was diagnosed by going

Apple icon --> About this Mac --> More info --> System Report --> Software (drop-down in the left menu) --> Logs --> Power management logs.

Once that log is loaded, you can run through it and find the time when you last tried to put your Mac to sleep. If any apps are keeping the system awake, they should pop up in the log. Look for patterns; recurring activity from the same apps. If you can see anything like that, go and take a close look at the suspect app(s) and check their preferences to make sure they're not set to update every 5 minutes, or whatever. In my case, once I opened Avaast, it was obvious that it just wasn't working properly and needed to be deleted. Once deleted, the battery problem went away. Whereas previously it would drain from 100-->0% overnight, last night I put the machine to sleep and 7 hours later woke it up to find it still had 100% battery charge. Such a relief!

Good luck!

MacBook Air 13 Mid 2012, 250 Charge Cycles and service Battery!! :\

kyuubi_1692 wrote:

MacBook Air 13 Mid 2012, 250 Charge Cycles and service Battery!! :\

Counting charge cycles means next to nothing

Cycle counting doesnt amount to much at all except in LONG TERM.

I can, on purpose if so inclined, kill a battery in 100+ cycles or less due to mistreatment

People with 300, 200 or fewer cycles after 2-3 years have their Macbooks always plugged in and on charge which isnt a good thing at all.

Keep it plugged in when near a socket so you keep the charging cycles down on your LiPo (lithium polymer) cells / battery, but not plugged in all the time. When not being used for several hours, turn it off.

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

"Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time."

General rule to remember of Lithium batteries is:

Never drain them LOW & dont always/often store them HIGH

While cycle count is commonly seen to be the “miles” on your Lithium Ion pack cell in your Macbook, which they are, this distinction is not a fine line at all, and it is a big misconception to “count charge cycles”

*A person who has, for example, 300 charge cycles on their battery and is recharging at say 50-60% remaining of a 100% charge has better battery usage and care than another person who has 300 charge cycles at say 15% remaining on a 100% charge.

DoD (depth of discharge) is far more important on the wear and tear on your Macbook battery than any mere charge cycle count. *There is no set “mile” or wear from a charge cycle in general OR in specific.

As such, contrary to popular conception, counting cycles is not conclusive whatsoever, rather the amount of deep DoD on an averaged scale of its use and charging conditions.

(as a very rough analogy would be 20,000 hard miles put on a car vs. 80,000 good miles being something similar)

Amount of deep DOD (depth of discharges) matters, not charge cycles except in long term ideal treatment of a battery

meaning as per Lithium batteries 'riding' a battery harshly into the ground every 'mile' accounts for far far more wear than gently 'riding' a lithium battery many many miles.

While I understand what you mean by Charge Cycles not being the "miles" for the battery wear and tear, but its only been 13 months ( yes, right after my warranty ends) with the MBA .

And having used a MBP for 3 years with 600 CC and still no sign of service battery as well as a decent 3 hr battery life, I can surely say that the cause of the service battery is the Mavericks update. The problem occured within a week after the update. The battery life was much better and there was no Service battery warning before it.

Not only that, this problem started a month ago when I contacted the customer care. They simply asked me to do an SMC reset, which removed the warning for a day. The full charge capacity of the battery has been decreasing ever since. Within the next few months its going to reach a level where I won't be able to run the notebook without the power plugged in.

I am not sure there is a mistreatment as you mentioned that can cause such a poor battery life in 13 months. Actually just 1 week , since everything was great before the upgrade.

I just got a new rMBP 13" and the battery life was 5-6 hrs. I stopped using Chrome and switched to Safari, battery life jumped to 11 hrs! In the energy monitor I found that Safari can go into App Nap mode and draw 0.1 energy, but Chrome always stayed at 13 energy even when I minimized it.

There's a bug report for Chrome asking them to use Mavericks new energy efficient APIs. Until they do that it will burn your battery life super quick.

I can confirm that Mavericks v 10.9.2 beta fixes the battery issue in Macbook Air mid 2013. At 100% battery shows 20:00 hours remaining. So go ahead and installa that beta, If you aren't a developer it doesn't matter, i'm not a developer too.

Everything works.

Hi I am new to Mac and would be grateful if you can advice as to how to install the 10.9.2. Sorry if this has been repeated before.

Thanks in advance.

Also I have seen issues with wifi after upgrading to OSX : are you experiencing this as well?

Please don't hijack this thread- if you would like to get more information on this, please start a discussion. I sometimes have this issue too! 🙂 And btw, all you have to do is download it off the app store (search for it)

No i'm not experiencing any wifi issues, Wifi works fine (macbook air 2013). Well 10.9.2 isn't in the App Store right now (it seems only 10.9.1 is avaliable). If you are not a developer just google "OS X 10.9.2 13C44.dmg" download, install the update and enjoy great battery life in Mavericks.

Regards.