macOS Mojave battery drain

The answer to the battery issue may well be rolling it back to Yosemite. I have issues on High Sierra and have not upgraded to Mojave, because the issue just got worse.

We are all missing the genius Steve Jobs and his mastermind team.

I'm having the same problem. I'm noticing it loses battery quicker even when I close my 2015 MacBook Pro 13" Retina for it to sleep. I came from Yosemite just yesterday (Dec 3rd 2018) Someone mentioned it may be due to dark mode. I'll have to try light mode. But tbh, I wouldn't be surprised if this was intentional from the demons at Apple.

@ Rayyan M

I doubt it's intentional. If Apple were trying to obsolete older MBPs, people with newer models as recent as 2017 wouldn't be reporting this issue here. They are.

You can try turning off dark mode, but I believe I've seen other reports on this thread from folks trying it and saying that hasn't helped.

The people at Apple aren't demons, by the way, although there are lots of daemons.

I didint have that app citrix that someone else up here pointed out but what I did is I went back to macOS Sierra – version 10.12, and that fixed my issue on one of computers and the other one is simply brand new and i dont have a time machine point I could use to go back!!! whats worst is my wireless devices completly stopped working now I need to have my mouse and track pad bplugged in at all times !! GO APPLE

Dear Apple community users,

FWIW, I am not a professional user of a MBP with Mojave 10.14.3 but I have the following experience (sorry for the log list J):

·      When I bought my Macbook Pro early 2015, it came with El Capitan installed.

·      I upgraded to Sierra without any performance problem.

·      When I upgraded to High Sierra I got a better performance but the battery drained 25% faster.

·      Upgrading to Mojave did not improve the battery drain.

·      I am only using Mail, Safari, and occasionally Word and Powerpoint.

·      I am not using iCloud, Bluetooth or any other extension to the system.

·      My storage usage is only 30GB from the 250GB available.

·      My battery cycle count is only 155.

·      None of all the suggestions for improvement that were made on this forum or others resulted in any improvement.

·      The only thing that changed with High Sierra is the file system that is now APFS !!

Can somebody of you, experienced user, who may have a good contact with the Apple development, get confirmation that this may be the reason for the higher battery drain ?

Or check that users with the old file system do not have the same bad experience ?

Should this be the case we can all stop nagging about it and only hope for an Apple fix in the future.

Or revert to Sierra, as was already suggested, and lose some of the nice new features in the new releases. 

Have been following this thread for sometime now and most people seem to feel it's a problem with Mojave and not the new ADFS hard drive format.

Are we all agreed ?

If so how does one go about a fool proof backwards update to High Sierra ?

If this would solve everyone's problems surely this is the way to move forward (by moving backwards ;-0 )

Then we can boycott Mojave until Apple sorts itself out.

I find it hard to understand why Apple has not chipped in and added something to this discussion.

Sadly I feel Apple have lost the plot and from being the world's leading computer innovator have slipped into producing expensive electronic jewellery.

David,

For me the problem of unusal battery drain started with High Sierra(HS) and if you look at the forum of HS you will see as many complaints about this topic as with Mojave. I am not talking about the battery drain during Sleep, that may be another problem, because I mainly do a shutdown when not using my system.

However I also noticed a strange behaviour of the battery charge indicator, that is, I can shutdown at e.g. 45 % and at restart it shows 48% and everytime I shutdown at less than 30% it comes back at 15% at startup the next morning.

Can we trust the battery charge monitoring process ?? Is the battery charge really what it indicates ??

Could be that the battery is still charged when the process warns us to recharge.

I agree that Apple should put their act together unless they do not care about loosing some customers in the end.

In general however moving backwards is not a good option !

like I said my mac is 1 month old xD and that very issue is only reason why I got an updated version of mac xD i Thought it would fix problems with my previous mac lol get the irony ? just imagine how many more people like me are out there lol im guessing for now your only solution is to go back to (safe-sierra) and in some cases High sierra although with high sierra it varies from person to person

Things start to get strange:

I've done new battery tests, here a recap:

TEST 1

MacBook Air 2018, Mojave Latest version, battery 5 cycles of charge. Brightness 50%, volume 50%, Wi-Fi on

Battery: 100% and put in standby by clicking "sleep", and lid closed.

11:30 pm 100% of battery

08:30 am 93% of battery

08:30 am 92% of battery, Wi-Fi Off Bluetooth Off

06:45 pm 88% of battery

So, even with Wi-Fi off, it consumed 3-4% of battery

TEST 2

MacBook Air 2018, Mojave Latest version, battery 7 cycles of charge. Brightness 50%, volume 50%, Wi-Fi on, Bluetooth off.

I played a 1:45 minutes long 4K video with VLC, stored in the hard disk.

5:08 pm 100% of battery

8:08 pm 56% of battery

11:08 pm 7% of battery,

00:08 1% of battery

The battery lasted about 7 hours.

TEST 3

MacBook Air 2018, Mojave Latest version, battery 8 cycles of charge. Brightness 50%, volume 50%, Wi-Fi off, Bluetooth off.

I played a 2:30 minutes long 1080p video, stored in the hard disk.

10:04 am 100% of battery

10:18 pm 2% of battery

The battery lasted about 12 hours.

TEST 4

MacBook Air 2018, Mojave Latest version, battery 9 cycles of charge. Brightness 50%, volume 50%, Wi-Fi on

Battery: 100% and put in standby by clicking "sleep", and lid closed.

11:00 pm 100% of battery

07:30 am 100% of battery

and the results #4 is the strangest result obtained so far because I've changed nothing from the previous tests (software or hardware) and the background processes were exactly the same.

The only different thing is that for the tests #1, #2 & #3 the MacBook was in the living room, 2 meters far from my router, for the test #4 it was closed in a locker in my studio, 15 meters far from the router.

I don't know what else I could try.

Nice summary.

I am now on my 5th MacBookPro 2018 model. The epiphany I had was that all previous models shipped with High Sierra. I exchanged for a model manufactured after Mojave and with Mojave native on the laptop. I figured this would 'solve' the problems. No such luck. The battery life with standard use is lousy. Just now I have gone from 100% to 58% in 41 minutes.

I will contact Apple again and see what they now say.

When I ran the others in only High Sierra, the problem was minimal.

I probably wasn't clear.

Apple knows that they have a problem with battery life + with Mojave installed on their MBPros-2018s and more than likely other machines. It does not matter whether it is preinstalled or an upgrade.

I have a MacBook Air 13" early 2015. I started having the same battery issue sometime after the Mojave update. Took it into Apple and they said the battery had been used up and would have to pay to have it replaced. I decided I'd wait and see what transpires. Last time this happened to my iPhone 6s and I replaced it with a new iPhone X in January 2018 and about a week later they announced there was an issue with the batteries and would replace it at a reduced cost of $29; that was too late for me with my newly purchased iPhone....

We've had 6 MacBooks (1retired & 1 damaged) between my kids and myself and mine is the only one that's having this issue and the only air. My mom has an air newer than mine and she began having this battery issue also after the Mojave upgrade. 2 of my kids have MacBooks older than mine and they aren't having battery issues. I have around 3900 hours on my air with the battery issue and one of my kid's has around 9000 hours on his late 2012 MacBook pro with no battery issue. I see others on this thread with MacBook pros are having battery issues as well but maybe it's not an issue with the older Macs?

This thread is long and there are lots of people who have checked the box that they are having the same issue so hopefully Apple will have a resolution soon!

@texncali

My MacBook Pro is a mid-2012 that I bought from Apple in 2017. The battery was new and had a fantastic lifespan on High Sierra. I could work all day without needing the charger. Then I installed Mojave.

The first time I started up my MacBook on Mojave, the battery drained at a rate of about 1% per minute. After about 4 months, it now drains at about 1% every two minutes. Thus the issue seems to have resolved by itself partly, but it's still there and I can't use my MacBook without plugging it in every 2-3 hours.

Apple advertised Mojage as a performance upgrade, but it turned out to be the opposite. I can't go back to High Sierra because I would lose too many files between the backups. For the past 34 years I have believed Apple is always better. This time, I regret believing Apple's promise that newer is always better.

Today Apple is doubling down on that promise on allnofbits devices without a clear effort to follow through by patching Mojave's obvious battery bug. Speaking as one loyal Apple user, this has been one major withdrawal from Apple's brand bank. There may be bottomless cash, but the goodwill is "draining as fast as a MacBook battery on Mojave."

Hi, I am on 10.14.4 with my Macbook Air 2017 and all is ok for the battery. No battery drain at all. Some problems with few apps but after to upgrade these problematics apps, all is now ok. Not like more here, I never had battery problem with my MBA 2017 (with any version of Mojave since the first). I always made a backup from my High Sierra system before to go to Mojave. May times I returned to this back up for (like I said) problem with apps but never for a battery drain.

So for me (and some of my friends with no problems too). It's up to you to try but don't forget to have a backup not far if the update cause a battery drain. ;-)

I have not heard anything. I tried 4 brand new Macbook Air 2018 laptops and they all have the same battery drain issue. Everybody is finding these complicated workarounds but why do people have to do engineering level work to fix an issue on a brand new product???

My battery lasts only 4 hours under normal use (which my 2014 laptop handled easily). The new Macbook also heats up and the fan goes on just while browsing Facebook.