Yosemite Battery Drain

Thank you Diane for your feedback.

I do not want to be the party pooper but if you go there just for the battery issue, you may be loosing your time... I've been to the Genius Bar once and at the end, the employee (who was really trying his best) wrote a case to be sent to engineering (apparently). The special diagnosis tools they used didn't highlight anything abnormal, and we tried a fresh install of Yosemite, PRAM and SMC, etc but nothing solved it. Nothing new that what we already know.

Then I spent countless time on the phone with another (also very helpful) senior technical advisor but nothing managed to help my case. This issue really is most likely to be software related and has yet to be acknowledged by Apple who's the only one potentially able to fix it; until then, we can only deal with workarounds as we've been doing...

If you have any luck thought, it would be much appreciated if you take the time to come back here 🙂. Thanks again for your help!

I'm quite sure they'll have nothing positive to add either. I need to do it because of the logic board issue. An ongoing record of my trials and tribulations. They came really close last time to just giving me a new laptop. Unlike others I've had positive experiences with this issue. I'm sure it's only because I caught it one week before my warranty was up. My claim is that this is the result of the last repair. It will go on the records at lease. I'm going in with some graphs from the AM like we have already posted. A good visual if nothing else. I sure hope they get this fixed fast. I'm going to do one more test....working on a large document, running iTunes and iPhoto slide show and see how fast it goes. After that it's back to working on my mac mini Yosemite issues.

What exactly is implied with the specs say "up to 7 hrs of wireless web"? That quote is from the specs on my laptop. I don't live by an Apple store but there is an Apple seller in the area. Of course he had never heard of this problem but thought that perhaps my battery needed to be replaced since the laptop is now 4 years old. For all the time it's not worked it should be considered no more than 3.5 years old. He also said that they never did go much beyond 6 hrs. With or without use? I assume he meant without a lot of stuff running. I am highly resistant to having the battery replaced if that is really not the issue.

Hey Guys Just want to throw some updates,

I had some problem with my Maverick OS So I Erased my HDD and did by mistake a clean install of Yosemite 10.10.2 .

I just want to come back here and say that after a clean install (erased my HDD) the battery is lasting for 6 hours.

with mavericks it lasted almost 9 hours, but still 6 hours is pretty good, much better than 3 hours I had with 10.10.1.

I don't know if resetting the PRAM and SMC going to do any better, but my plan is to keep it that way for 2-3 days, then reset the PRAM and SMC and try to see any difference. at the end of the day I know i'll revert to mavericks since I like my 9 hours battery better than visuality .

i'll update after i'll finish with my testing, and see maybe it's "somehow" fixed.

Good for you but it did not work for me. Downgrade to Mavericks (clean install) did not work neither whilst my battery counts only 100 loads and was working fine before upgrade to Yosemite. Worst is that battery keeps draining while in sleep mode and fortunately not whilst off. It seems that Yosemite installation changed something in the hardware that cannot be changed over.

Hope Apple will fix this quickly now as this is very annoying to have a short battery life (2hours max).

Thank you for your feedback, Moheny. We appreciate people coming back to give their insight after testing 🙂.

I had a similar experience with a clean install of 10.10.2. When I started it after the reinstallation I could read up to 9 hours of battery life. So happy I was. But then after a couple days, it got back to 3 to 4 hours... I don't know the reason why. Tried to go back to Mavericks, issue still there, so why keep Mavericks? Tried to reinstall 10.10.2 the same way (clean) twice, but still 3-4 hours max. I hope you'll get luckier than I am.

It took me about 4 min to write this post and I went from 93% to 90% already... I'll go back to the Apple Store and ask to get the issue solve by any mean and keep you posted guys.

Hey Fabricedid,

I was thinking the same thing. Maybe Yosemite, on particulal hardware configurations, somehow damaged the battery (or some other piece of hardware for all I know) and now it is permanently damaged. I was against the idea that changing the battery would solve the issue since I've always defended the idea that this issue is software-related.

Maybe it is time for a battery replacement. But what if the issue reappears the same way? Then we'll never know !

I eventually went back to Mavericks (where I was getting 9-10 hours initially) and it seems like Yosemite did change some firmware or whatnot as now whenever I go back to Mavericks after a full wipe etc I now only get 3 or so hours no matter if it's Yosemite or Mavericks.

I tried to book into a genius bar but apparently they're booked out for the next 3-4 weeks :/

I'm not slagging Apple, these things happen, but this is one big drop of the ball (in my circumstances anyhow)

That is very interesting Walry. I expect that the Genius guys will be busy for quite some time now that Apple has agreed to fix all the logic boards that have been failing. I'm one of them and will be scheduling as well.

No you can take it in for free and they will run some tests. However this is, to them, a new or unknown issue so don't expect much. It would also be considered a no warranty service in your case. The look at it and the test is free if they say, determined you needed a new battery that would be on you.

hey guys,

Some interesting stuff I found.

*There's a new update from flash which probably is more compatible with Yosemite, I found a huge difference between now and then (surfing the web, youtube sites, etc.).

*The Main problem that people already issued here is, that for some reason most of the softwares are not compatible with Yosemite, which are the reason for killing your battery. for example, Running BitTorent taking more resources on Yosemite than in mavericks. So your options is to stay with Yosemite until all those 3rd parties will be update or to go back to Mavericks.

*The last thing is the WIFI. everybody should test there computer with bluetooth and wifi off, and just use safari (with the updated flash of course) and see how much time your battery show. I was shocked today when the monitor shows me 9:30 hours left.

Overall I find 10.10.2 much better than the 10.10.1, The battery not lasting as mavericks but it's tolerable.

today I tested my laptop again and i've got almost 7:30 hours with safari and some programs running (android studio for 40 minutes at least).

// I did not reset the SMC and the PRAM since I don't believe I'll benefit from it, still will look for it in the future after i'll have better stats.

// Even tho there's no need to calibrate your battery, I've emptied it until my mac went off and then charged it over night.

// I did a clean install, Format completely my SSD and didn't use time machine to restore things back, I just has one folder with all my stuff in it.

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Last thing, If your computer still suffer from battery issues and there's nothing left for you to try, I would consider to try the new beta , 10.10.3 Beta 2, that just has been released today, and it's for the public as well (According to apple).

this is the info about the new beta from osxdaily:

" Presumably, OS X 10.10.3 will also include other bug fixes and improvements to OS X Yosemite, though none are specifically mentioned in the release notes accompanying the download. Some Mac users running Yosemite have been bothered by a continuous stream of bugs or difficulties with the OS X release, ranging from wi-fi and network challenges to broader usability concerns "

fixing the wifi and those bugs could be our answer to this horrible issue.

please if anyone did update to 10.10.3 Beta 2 please update here.

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Dear Moheny, Thanks for your feedback. However I have tried with no other software than Yosemite and had exactly the same issue. Moreover this would not explain why we also have the same issue when we downgrade to Mavericks. I do believe that something has changed in the firmware/hardware that cannot be reversed back until Apple find a fix. For your information I do have 4 macbook and macbook pro at home (all family) and it is only mine that did not successfully grade to Yosemite. I am now with a less than two hours battery whilst I had 5 before (Macbook pro mid-209, 250GB SSD and 8GB RAM with a brand new battery) and it is very annoying.

I will try the 10.10.3 beta 2 upgrade and will update here.

"Moreover this would not explain why we also have the same issue when we downgrade to Mavericks."

On my end, downgrading from Yosemite to Mavericks helped getting back my battery to 8 hours.

It may indicates that you are suffering of an issue which is different because it is also affecting your battery on Mavericks.

msenard wrote:

On my end, downgrading from Yosemite to Mavericks helped getting back my battery to 8 hours.

Same here. I went back to Mavericks permanently. It took a couple of days for the displayed remaining time to calibrate, but now I'm back to roughly 7-8 hours.

What concerns me is that my battery health is down to 98% as shown by Battery Health app, and that's after only 12 charge cycles!

I'm still struggling with this Yosemite OS, having 5-6 hour of batter with mac pro 13 inch (late 2013).

I'm going to wait for 10.10.3, and it's not going to fix the problem, I will go back to mavericks permanently.