macOS Mojave battery drain

OK - a couple of days on from my last post (and a week since the upgrade) and it seems that contrary to my last post, I'm still affected.

The last two nights sleep lost 5% and 15% respectively (as opposed to <2% before Mojave). The MPB isa been on a lot over the weekend and a few hours each. night (all on mains) and sleeping a lot (off power) between.

Activity monitor last 12h shows the drain in the graph at the bottom of the energy screen but the process list above does not give a clue as to the power hungry process.

Something IS going on beyond the normal upgrade post processing.

x64uk wrote:

(...) Activity monitor last 12h shows the drain in the graph at the bottom of the energy screen but the process list above does not give a clue as to the power hungry process.

Indeed, the Activity Monitor isn't of any help here. It's useless!

What's your Terminal > pmset -g > standbydelayhigh current value?

Cheers, Meshua.n

Just turn off / deactivate the GPS function to solve this issue.

After almost 30 years of using Microsoft Windows, I fianlly bought my first MacBook in May. I have been very happy using a Mac laptop and swtiching from Windows, becuase I don't need to stand Windows' clumsy input, constant updates and reboots. However, this upade of Mojave really racks my faith in Apple. As one of the largest companies in the world, you only roll out a few models of laptops and PCs every year. Before the release of any major updates of the OS, did the programmers really run the program on the old and current models? Because you Apple only have quite a few models, compared to Windows PCs and laptops from its contract vendors, I do believe that it is not really a task to do a trial run on all the models that you are selling. When I updated my MacBook on Septermber 29, I found this battery drain issue, and I didn't expect that the MacBook I put in my backpack was so close to a melt-down. It was so hot that I could not hold it in my hand, and the battery was totally drained from 100% to an automatic shutdown while it sit in my bag when I wast out. I was really upset about this! Becuase I was afraid that the battery inside would get burned and my bag would start a fire.

Could you guys take an update seriously?

I am a user from Taiwan. At first, I was looking for a solution to this issue. I probably solved this problem yesterday because of my right guess. When I turned off GPS on my MacBook, the battery issue seems gone. Later, I found more than three hundred people have this problem, too, so I hope my message can help you guys a bit.

If anyone wants to forward my previous message to Apple Support, you are welcome to do so. In fact, I was really upset about Apple on the weekend!

Also having this issue. Put the Mac to sleep with 40% and woke up 7 hours later to a completely drained MacBook Pro 2016 (Touch Bar).

With High Sierra I never had this issue, it may have drained 1% during the same time frame.

Hi I'm having the same issue! I recently downloaded MacOS Mojave on my MacBook Air 2017, and the battery life has reduced drastically. Even when I leave it in sleep mode it uses a lot more battery than the previous system. For example, after being charged and left for the night at 100% in the morning the battery was at 72%. This had never happened before since I usually use it like this. Additionally, when I'm using it the battery seems to last half of what it did. Has anyone found any solutions to this? I tried rebooting it and using the commands suggested in this thread but it didn't really help.

dinecko wrote:

dinecko wrote:

Now change the settings by these commands, one by one:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

sudo pmset -a standby 1

sudo pmset -a standbydelaylow 60

sudo pmset -a standbydelayhigh 60

Hi dinecko,

I appreciate that you are trying to help, but telling people to change their power management settings without explaining to them what the commands are actually doing is probably a bad idea.

From the pmset man page:

hibernatemode supports values of 0, 3, or 25. Whether or not a hibernation

image gets written is also dependent on the values of standby and

autopoweroff

For example, on desktops that support standby a hibernation image will be

written after the specified standbydelay time. To disable hibernation images

completely, ensure hibernatemode standby and autopoweroff are all set to 0.

hibernatemode = 0 by default on desktops. The system will not back memory up

to persistent storage. The system must wake from the contents of memory; the

system will lose context on power loss. This is, historically, plain old

sleep.

hibernatemode = 3 by default on portables. The system will store a copy of

memory to persistent storage (the disk), and will power memory during sleep.

The system will wake from memory, unless a power loss forces it to restore

from hibernate image.

hibernatemode = 25 is only settable via pmset. The system will store a copy

of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and will remove power to memory.

The system will restore from disk image. If you want "hibernation" - slower

sleeps, slower wakes, and better battery life, you should use this setting.

standby causes kernel power management to automatically hibernate a machine

after it has slept for a specified time period. This saves power while

asleep. This setting defaults to ON for supported hardware. The setting

standby will be visible in pmset -g if the feature is supported on this

machine.

standbydelayhigh and standbydelaylow specify the delay, in seconds, before

writing the hibernation image to disk and powering off memory for Standby.

standbydelayhigh is used when the remaining battery capacity is high, and

standbydelaylow is used when the remaining battery capacity is low.

What you have suggested is possibly a workaround.

@meshua.n ("What's your Terminal > pmset -g > standbydelayhigh current value?")

86400, but really that's irrelevant. I have no interest in making ad-hoc settings changes as a temporary mittigation. If I really do decide that a mitigation is warranties, then I can always shutdown the mbp rather than sleep it. The only downsides are a short delay during boot and the lack of keyboard illumination in the pre-boot OS.

What I am interested in is an understanding of what's actually going on, or information about debugging the issue.

For example, the premise that post upgrade processes are consuming resources would be such information, but in this case the symptoms seem to be lasting too long and are too erratic for me to have too much confidence in that being the cause. Unfortunately the fact that this seems to be happening under the radar as well (the activity monitor not implicating a particular process) makes me think it's not a conscious process that is causing the issue. For me it's also erratic (the system slept for about 11 hours whilst I was at work and only lost 2%).

Some 'me-toos' on this thread my also be suffering drain form other more explainable causes.

x64

The instructions you sent may resolve the power management issues, but what about the rapid draining of the systems when in use? My 2015 MacBook Pro drains to 13% within three hours; I never tested it but it usually lasts throughout the day. It is also noticeably warmer. Is there a procedure to revert to the previous version?

Yeah, you're right. I meant Location Services. I just learnt that MacBooks do not come with a GPS.

After an overheating incident due to a sudden power drain on Sunday, I canceled dynamic desktop, quit all the apps, uncheck "reopen windows when logging back in," and then rebooted the latptop twice. After the restart, I disabled Locations Services in the System Preferences. My guess was that any location services or hidden GPS activities would run in the background and could be the culprit of any extra power consumption. After I deactivated the function, my MacBooks seems fine now.

You have to reset the PRAM;) I had the same problem ... in practice if you update without reinstalling from scratch, when it goes into stop, the PC continues to work as if it were not in a stop... after that work then

I do not know how to downgrade to High Sierra, but I will tell how I did it.

I erased the whole SSD by accident. And I reboot my MacBook Pro 2018, found a global sign spinning there. I connected my Mac to wifi and it automatically download High Sierra for me, which was my open-box system. My hypothesis was that there may be some auto-recovery method out there in Apple's system which assists us to find out the original system installed in the macbook we use.

Anyway, that was how I got my High Sierra back, typing with High Sierra right now.

Do you have solutions with problem macbook air 2017 like me? My battery have a bad condition: replace now. Because im upgrade to MacOs mojave. And im new use my macbook 3 months. That hurt me. I feel bad for upgrade mojave. Help me

Since updating to MacOS Mojave on my Macbook Air, I am too having a battery consumption issue.

When closing the lid, I am losing about 20% battery capacity overnight (8 hours).

This was not an issue for me before the Mojave update.

Apple, please fix. Thanks.

I too am having an issues with massive battery drain on my 2015 Macbook Pro (15" i7). Battery cycles are under 200 and on High Sierra I could usually get 5-6hrs with moderate workload. Now my battery drains within 1-2 hours using only email and web browsing. On top of this the Macbook Pro is running extremely hot and the fans are running almost consistently at full speed.

Borderline unusable in this condition unless I dock the machine and only use it as a desktop.