My 4-month-old MacBook has dramatically reduced battery life. Why?

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Level 1

81 points

My 4-month-old MacBook has dramatically reduced battery life. Why?

According to the Battery info, my condition is Normal (90% of original after 70 charge cycles), but I am now getting about 4:30 (wi-fi browsing, text editing, email) on a full charge. I confirmed this twice today (long work day), both times were almost exactly the same.

When I first got this in late July, it would almost never run out of juice. Four and a half hours before I've even hit the 6-month mark seems like a huge drop-off. I'm going to reach out to Apple Support, but I know that officially my battery is "normal," even though its performance is declining noticeably and rapidly.

I don't see any obvious battery-drain culprits, other than Safari if I let too many tabs bloom.

Sometime this weekend, I'll test it on a fresh user account, just in case there's something about my account that is draining the battery more than usual.

Anyone else have any luck getting a replacement battery on what's still a very new computer?

Thanks!

Posted on Nov 25, 2015 6:24 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,541 points

Nov 26, 2015 9:13 AM in response to Tim Windsor1

Apps can affect Mac performance, battery runtime, temperature, and fan activity - Apple Support

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Answer 2

ljmjag

Level 1

20 points

Nov 27, 2015 8:49 AM in response to Tim Windsor1

I have the same issue. Battery life has taken a severe hit such that for the first time since I stopped using windows laptops, I am constantly concerned about running out of power on battery life. I would estimate that the battery degradation after approximately 6 months is almost 40%. From 6+ hours of real use to under 4 hours. Standard usage - couple of safari tabs, word processing, sometimes iTunes and checking RSS feeds on Reeder. My brightness is set to about 60% and I see nothing unusual on Activity Monitor (not that I am an expert). About 45 cycles on the battery and I'm a professional who uses the machine to supplement my work which is normally on a desktop. No gaming, no bluetooth headphones, no watching movies, just occasionally streaming by music library from iCloud through iTunes - but even that is not extensive.

No idea what has occurred and I am coming from a macbook air 11" mid-2013, which did not experience the battery loss that the macbook has experienced.

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Answer 3

ljmjag

Level 1

20 points

Nov 27, 2015 9:23 AM in response to ljmjag

The only thing that seems to be going on excessively is "launchd" seems to be running at 75% of CPU quite a bit. Anything I can do to figure out what it is doing and how I can make it stop/slow down?

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Answer 4

kirkmc

Level 1

50 points

Dec 7, 2015 3:10 AM in response to Tim Windsor1

I'm having the same problem. My MacBook is my second computer, and I don't use it much, but I've been using it a lot in the past week. I'm getting perhaps 6 hours of batter life, without using a lot of apps. One thing I notice is that two processes, mtmd and mtmfs pop up frequently, using 100% or more of CPU (of a core) and do so for a while. When I check Activity Monitor, and look at Energy, the app listed as having the highest impact is Time Machine, way above Safari which is the second. These two processes are apparently related to Time Machine, and have something to do with creating local snapshots. But I'm only using the MacBook at my home office, so it's on the network where my Time Machine backup device is located.

I've contacted AppleCare, and spent a lot of time on this, sending them logs and other data, and I'm waiting to hear back.

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