macOS Mojave battery drain

Had the same issue, resetting my SMC seems to have cleared it up.

10.14.1 is out. I updated today at work, left around 5:30PM with my late 2013 13" MBP at 100%. I just opened it (10:16PM) and it was still at 100%. So far so good.

10.14.1 solved this issue. Had left sleep this morning, at 7am with 100%. Wake up at 8pm with 99%. All back to normal.

10.14.1 fixes my problem too. no drastic battery drain.... everything fine.

It might be the dynamic desktop background (the sand dune that changes time of day). I changed my bg and the battery improved!

i read it is because of the dark mode feature. The LCD works more on dark mode... not really sure but are you using the dark mode feature? IF you did, does switching to light mode fixes the issue? I am just curious.

In order to downgrade to High Sierra you must have the High Sierra installer .app. If you don’t then you can get it back if your MBP came with High Sierra (2017 or 2018) by rebooting the Mac and holding down Shift-Option-Command-R together and let go when you see the Apple logo and progress bar. You should first check that High Sierra will be installed by choosing reinstall macOS. If yes, cancel the installer and go to disk utility/mount the Macintosh HD volume only and erase it. If you have an SSD select APFS and GUID. Exit disk utility and select reinstall macOS. Don’t reboot your machine! If you made a mistake and didn’t erase the drive properly you may end with a flashing folder and fixing this is more complicated if you don’t know what you’re doing!

Here is Apple’s tutorial for this. It repeats what I said. Go over both before doing it or keep it open on your phone or tablet while doing it so that you don’t mess up! Good luck!

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!

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.

If resetting the PRAM and SMC does not fix things, it is probably a software issue, probably some older software that does not play nice with Mojave.

In that case, backing up and doing a clean install *should* help (it apparently has for some people, but not all, as there seem to be different causes for this; some mac models appear to be affected more than others). When something affects everyone, it is a bug; when affects a significant minority, like in this case (yes, most people do NOT see the problem), it is harder to pinpoint the cause.

slce said:

I read it is because of the dark mode feature. The LCD works more on dark mode... not really sure but are you using the dark mode feature? IF you did, does switching to light mode fixes the issue? I am just curious.

Absolutely not true. The light for the LCD comes from a light panel that illuminates the entire screen, all the time. While you can vary the brightness of the backlight, dark pixels versus light pixels have absolutely no effect on power usage. Dark pixels merely don't let as much light THROUGH the display to your eyes.

This light panel is also why the Apple logo is illuminated on certain Apple laptops.

Note that this is not true of OLED displays such as the iPhone X or the Apple Watch.

I noticed a battery reduction of 1% in 2 hrs with "Dark (Still)" while a reduction of 2% in 1 hr with "Dynamic Desktop", both in sleep mode. This indicates that the "Dynamic Desktop" is consuming approx. 4 times energy than "Dark (Still)" even in sleep mode.

The drain issue still happens once a while, even though I turned off the location services, so it is not as easy as I thought. After struggling for a week, I finally reinstalled the masOS from an erased disk.

If this issue continues on and off, or bothers you, just like it bothers me and scares me into placing my MacBook on the desk, used to be in my backpack, overnight everyday, I suggest backing up all your files and having a clean installation, or turning off your laptop before bed.

After five months of happy time using a MacBook and a major update, I can't believe I need to turn off my laptop and reinstall the OS just like using Windows. [sigh] I only installed 7 apps on this laptop for light work.😟

I’m having the same issue with my mid-2014 13” MacBook Pro running 10.14.

I’ve tried the pmset -g suggestion back a few pages, but nothing showed up as a possible culprit.

This battery drain is absolutely ridiculous though. Mine drains a lot faster than it used to while using it and while it’s sleeping. Very disappointing.

Edit: Those instructions aren’t correct. You’re supposed to enter:

pmset -g assertions

I did that and mine shows three causes.

- sharingd

- hidd

- VLC

I also went into Activity Monitor. Under “Preventing Sleep” shows hidd and VLC. I’m not sure if either of those affect sleep when I close the lid, but everything should be put to sleep when I close the lid.

The obvious one to address first is VLC, so I’ll quit that app before putting my machine to sleep and see if that helps. I have my doubts it will.

Well I thought I had sorted it by resetting the battery/memory by holding down the control, shift, option and power keys then release the first three at the same time, it got me straight back up to 10.5 - 11hrs on full charge but I did an experiment last night. Put MacBook to sleep at 2220 on full charge and did not open until 1020 this morning, battery at 72% and only showing 4:31 of time remaining on Activity Monitor. I am going to do the same tonight, but this time just closing the lid, rather than putting to sleep to see if this makes any difference. I have also stopped using a dynamic desktop, quit my Dropbox working in the background and will turn the wifi off. Really hope Apple sort this soon, this is becoming ridiculous