Yosemite Battery Drain

I think you should end the 2 movies with lot more battery... around 30-40% I think. I say this because I used to watch 2 movies with a total of 4h and using wifi to check my facebook periodically almost all the time. ps: 90% of brightness all the time and headphones.

Today I tried an mp4 HD movie, Back to the future II size 4 gb and also connected to wifi at 85% of brightness. I watched the whole movie and at the end I had 68%. So with that I will be able to watch 2 more movies of the same size. So I guess my battery life is fine now.

What kind of battery life are you all getting with wifi/bluetooth off, and brightness turned down to lower levels? Battery life still seems to be a problem for Yosemite. Trying to see if it's worth installing a new battery in an old 13" 2009 MBP for an upcoming flight.

Well, the computer had a good battery life while on but for some odd reason when sleeping the computer spend more battery than awake so I going back to mavericks. I might upgrade when the next os comes out

Please tell us if your downgrade to Mavericks did fix the battery drain issue. In my cas it did not and I haven't found any solutions to that problem neither did Apple reply to my messages. With approx. one hour battery on my Mid-2009 Macbook Pro (with a new battery), I can't use it as a laptop anymore and it is very frustrating.

Good luck with the downgrade and keep us posted

I ended up backing up everything, formatting the hard drive, and doing a fresh install of Yosemite. My previous install was an upgrade from Mavericks to Yosemite. Maybe something doesn't transfer over correctly when you upgrade. I do see an improvement in my battery life after doing a clean install. It's not fantastic, but I can get several hours out of it before having to plug it in.

One thing that seems to be affecting me is Firefox and Chrome seem to have a huge energy and memory impact on my system. I am forced to use Safari. I can have the same windows open in Safari as I do in Chrome, and Safari uses less memory and less energy. My Activity Monitor would show Chrome's average energy impact at 50.58, while Safari's average energy impact is at 12.06. Firefox would also be up in the upper 40s to low 50s for average energy impact. Maybe plugins in those browsers are buggy or something.

I'm not a big fan of the Safari browser but using it over Firefox and Chrome seems to be helping to preserve the battery life on my system.

Interesting, as I'm experiencing poor battery life even after doing a clean install of the latest version. If I don't check "Reduce Transparency" option in Settings/Accessibility, I can literally watch the battery drain before my eyes when surfing the web with Safari!!! (again, no Flash plug-in installed to blame, either.) Moving from HDD to SSD has not helped, either...

That is weird. After doing my clean install, I didn't check the box to reduce transparency. My transparency is still on. While on battery, I also push the screen brightness down to 50%.

Stupid question but I have to ask it. Before reinstalling Yosemite, did you go into Disk Utilities and erase your hard drive prior to the install?

I'm running a 2011 Macbook Pro 13' with 16GB RAM and 480GB SSD and a brand new battery.

I should also mention that I created a bootable USB with the Yosemite install. Booted my laptop into recovery mode, erased my hard drive through Disk Utilites, and installed Yosemite from the USB.

I erased/formatted a new SSD and installed from a bootable USB as you did. I manually re-installed my apps (no Migration Assistant used).

One difference is that I do not generally dim my screen very much while on battery (depending on lighting). However, my screen illumination settings are unchanged from Mavericks.

Only two factors have changed on my set-up; SSD replaces HDD, and the Yosemite OS. And typically, I hear that we're supposed to expect improved battery life with an SSD.

SSDs should improve battery life. I've always seen an improvement in my experiences with them.

Upon my initial setup of Yosemite, I did not enable FileVault and my location services are also disabled. I left those things off based on recommendations either from this thread or a different one.

I don't have a ton installed on the laptop. I have Office and a couple dozen apps, no apps currently running.

I've been on battery since 7:30 this morning and it's now 12:00. I didn't start this morning with a full battery, maybe 92% i think. The laptop really isn't doing anything labor intensive either. I have Safari running with 6 tabs open, Messages, and Activity Monitor. With my screen brightness down halfway, I still have 20% battery left. It is not getting constant use and I do leave it sitting idle from time to time.

It looks like a lot of people are having this issue but there are different reasons why. Making it very difficult to troubleshoot.

I've been on battery power for one hour now and I'm down to 45%. Apple needs a better solution than the "Calibration". I didn't have this problem before and I have a SSD which should help preserve battery life. This thread is 5 months old. Ridiculous!

Thank you for this post... I was just about to upgrade to Yosemite, but because I am getting used to the fact, that Apple makes some important things worse lately, I decided to google for "yosemite battery" and found your post with huge "me to" replies... Upgrade? No thank you... On my Macbook Air, having long battery life is the most important for me. 😟

Update 10.10.3 installed today April 8 2015, seems to have fixed Yosemite battery issue on my MacBook Pro Retina 13" late 2013. At 87% battery it now estimates 8h 17min remaining, while I'm on WIFI and using Safari. And transparency is not turned off. Initial Yosemite upgrade dropped my battery-lasting down to under half of what Mavericks gave, and before installing the update today I guess I'd only be give 2-3 hours of runtime at 87% charge, and the counter would also estimate such a low time.

I was on the phone with Apple today before knowing about the update, as I could not resolve the battery drain issue in Yosemite 10.10.0-2. I was on the verge of accepting to send in the machine for service and repair, but then I saw the update in App Store and chose to install it first. Apple Customer Care (Norway) were helpful and willing to take it in for service (Norwegian consumer protection laws gives 5-years of free-service-rights), but now I might not have to.

I'd love to hear from others if this update have helped you, and I'll post again if the battery estimation is trying to lure me.

I think the problem has been sort-of solved for me by Yosemite version 10.10.3.  estimates 10 hours of battery life on the 2013 MacBook Air while watching videos. Now, my laptop is 1.5 years old, so the battery capacity has degraded slightly. It is at 92.5% original capacity and been through 270 cycles.

DETAILED ANALYSIS

I watched 1 hour and 8 minutes of video continuously, with 2-4 minutes in between on Safari and lost 13% charge. The video files were uncompressed @720p in mkv format. That equals to roughly 8 1/4 hours of video playback compared to an advertised 10 (for the 13-inch 2013 MacBook Air that I have). Other variables are Wi-Fi: on, brightness at 5 points and no downloads/time machine backups running; No external hard disk connected either. Previously I used to get 4-5 hours of playback (ceteris paribus) so battery life has definitely improved. Rate of charge loss ~1%/5min. Previously, my laptop would become warm while watching movies (downloaded, not streamed), but now it seems to be at par with ambient temperature. Will also perhaps, make a long term usage update down the line.

Suddenly while looking up the meaning of a word by doing the triple-finger tap, my keyboard became unresponsive altogether. New bug discovered, anyone else having this? I had to reboot twice while writing this post because the keyboard stopped working. -_____-

I can understand your feelings...

There is one more thing to notice in my case, full charge my Macbook tells me that I have 3H40 minutes remaining but in reality I loose about 2% per min i.e less than one hour with a fully charged and new battery. And I will also loose battery whilst on sleep mode whilst before Yosemite this was not the case.