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battery in MacBook Air m4 draining extremely fast

S

sovre

macrumors member
Original poster
I purchased my MacBook Air M4 15" in September last year. Since then I have used it almost exclusively on power, as I use it as my home computer connected to an external monitor.

It never occurred to me to test the battery as I've never had a defective battery in a laptop before.

However, I just recently began using my MacBook on battery while outside the house and was surprised to find that my battery is draining extremely fast. It is draining on average 20% every hour. It's 4-5 hours before the machine shuts down, if I don't connect it to power.

I am not viewing video or using any processor intensive apps.

At first I was running both Brave and Safari web browsers, as well as Word and Obsidian. So I decided to experiment by closing both web browsers and only using these text apps. Not running any web browser has not made much of a difference however.

I don't see any actual percentage displayed for display brightness anywhere, but judging by the slider, it looks like my display brightness must be between 60-70%.

For those of you using the same machine, what is your typical battery life?

Information I've read on the web, people talk about getting 1-2 days of battery life with their Mac laptops, making me think something must be seriously wrong with my machine's battery. Is it possible I received a machine with a defective battery?

What should I do next to troubleshoot this issue? Is there a way I can get more detailed statistics on battery use for my computer. Is there a way view all processes, including background, to see how much battery they are using at any given time?
 
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Settings > Battery > Battery Health > (i) button. What is Battery Condition and Maximum Capacity? Is Optimized Battery Charging enabled?

Settings > Control Center > Battery > enable Show in Menu bar. Once enabled and on battery power for some time, click on the menu bar icon. It should show you a list of applications "using significant energy".

Launch Activity Monitor and select "Energy" tab. Sort by "12 hr power". This will show you processes using the most power in last 12 hours. Now, obviously you would have to have been on battery power for the metrics to be mostly accurate but it should give you a sense of which processes are "power hungry".
 
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Bigwaff said:
Settings > Battery > Battery Health > (i) button. What is Battery Condition and Maximum Capacity? Is Optimized Battery Charging enabled?
Click to expand...
Normal
100%
Optimized charging enabled

I have battery in menu bar enabled but it shows no apps using significant energy
 
Bigwaff said:
Are you currently on battery and witnessing it "draining extremely fast"?
Click to expand...
Yes, seems same as always. I just started using on battery a couple of hours ago. I am looking at the activity monitor and I don’t see anything hogging energy there right now yet time remaining is listed as 3:49 hours.
 
Bigwaff said:
Launch Activity Monitor and select "Energy" tab. Sort by "12 hr power". This will show you processes using the most power in last 12 hours. Now, obviously you would have to have been on battery power for the metrics to be mostly accurate but it should give you a sense of which processes are "power hungry".
Click to expand...


This is good advice.

Also I would download Coconut Battery and get a second opinion.
 
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If you have installed any Adobe products, especially Photoshop, look for an Adobe app running all the time sucking as much CPU it can get. I found one, but unfortunately don’t remember the name, and deleted that app. That solved my problems.

Adobe thinks they own every machine and treat the machine as such.
 
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If you're on 26.4, you could be having the issue i've been having:

forums.macrumors.com

Something (negative) i just discovered today

Namely, that this (M4) Air's battery is ****. That about covers it. - 100% charged; i unplugged it just to test, had never checked this. - (not including background processes), only two programs left open: Firefox, on an empty, blank tab, nothing open, no downloading, nothing at all, minimised...
forums.macrumors.com forums.macrumors.com
(you posted your thread a day after i wrote that one)

Leaving that aside, truth is Tahoe is a resource hog.. i thought there was the usual hyperbole in those kind of statements (new OS version, new complaints), but in this much at least, they sure are on point.
Without changing anything in your routine, in what runs in the background or foreground, a simple comparison between Sequoia and Tahoe might astound you 🙂
Edit: Temperatures too.. see how colder it runs on Sequoia, versus how it runs now; you can do that through terminal, but if you want it more detailed, there are apps for that; would recommend TG Pro.

Personally, i have an updates-related experiment i'm running, waiting for 26.5 to become available to see if it worked or not.
After that? Going straight back to Sequoia and staying there. Nothing but issues and resource hogs on this OS version.
 
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Hey guys, wanted to give you some updates in reply to your posts.

First let me say that unfortunately nothing has changed with my battery situation. I just unplugged it and looked at activity monitor and it's telling me I've got 4 hours.

Apple says the battery is supposed to get 15 hours wifi browsing, 18 hours video streaming.

First let me say I am not on Tahoe. I have delayed upgrading precisely because I've seen many people saying it decreased their battery life. I am on Sequoia 15.7.1

I did not find any real resource hogs in activity monitor with the exception of Brave Browser, but I tested my battery life with Brave closed and it made very little difference.

anyway, on the 12 hour tab Brave rates at 20 in energy use, a few other apps are between 1-4, and there are a bunch under 1. I don't really know what those numbers mean, but I don't see any huge energy hog there.

I also ran Coconut battery as suggested, and it does give me different stats than the Apple System, but not that much different. Apple system says battery health 100%; coconut battery says 97.4%. Right now Apple System tells me I have 88% battery left, whereas coconut tells me 83.1%.

I contacted Apple Tech Support about this, asking if there could be a problem with my battery and if I could bring it in to have it looked at. The rep told me there was nothing wrong with my battery if it is registering as 100% and says "normal." She said the problem is that I'm not running the latest OS but running a really old OS (15.7.1) and there have been many upgrades since then. I personally find that hard to believe since this machine shipped with Sequoia and the battery life times Apple gives did should logically be valid by Sequoia. It also doesn't make sense to me that I would literally lose 67% battery life compared to apples quoted times just because I haven't upgraded my system.

The problem is since Apple is blaming it on my running an older system, it seems I won't make any progress with this case, unless I upgrade and see the battery life is still just as poor as before - because then they will have to acknowledge there's a deeper problem.

I also learned that apple is now soldering these batteries into the machine (unbelievable!) so there's no way I can easily switch out the battery to do a comparison.
 
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sovre said:
At first I was running both Brave and Safari web browsers, as well as Word and Obsidian. So I decided to experiment by closing both web browsers and only using these text apps. Not running any web browser has not made much of a difference however.
Click to expand...
"Text" app or not - any 3rd party app is going to be a likely culprit.

sovre said:
I just unplugged it and looked at activity monitor and it's telling me I've got 4 hours.
Click to expand...
The "Expected time" is based on history, so not something you can really rely on. If you change something, that will affect ACTUAL battery life but the Activity Monitor won't pick up on that until you use it for enough time.

sovre said:
I contacted Apple Tech Support about this, asking if there could be a problem with my battery and if I could bring it in to have it looked at. The rep told me there was nothing wrong with my battery if it is registering as 100% and says "normal."
Click to expand...
There's very likely nothing wrong with the battery. How's local storage? If you have less than 15% of your storage as "Free" space then that's likely contributing. If you have less than 5% free, it's DEFINITELY contributing.

sovre said:
She said the problem is that I'm not running the latest OS but running a really old OS (15.7.1) and there have been many upgrades since then. I personally find that hard to believe since this machine shipped with Sequoia and the battery life times Apple gives did should logically be valid by Sequoia. It also doesn't make sense to me that I would literally lose 67% battery life compared to apples quoted times just because I haven't upgraded my system.
Click to expand...
If storage isn't an issue, you don't need to "Update" to Tahoe but you COULD create a new Volume, and install a "Clean" version of macOS there (Sequoia or Tahoe, take your pick). That's an easy way to get a baseline.

sovre said:
I also learned that apple is now soldering these batteries into the machine (unbelievable!) so there's no way I can easily switch out the battery to do a comparison.
Click to expand...
"Unbelievable" is the right word for it 😉 whoever told you that, don't believe them.
 
I mean, at this point, do you have anything to lose by just updating to Tahoe at this point? really not as bad as some people try to make it out to be, I have no issues myself personally using it
 
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1BadManVan said:
I mean, at this point, do you have anything to lose by just updating to Tahoe at this point? really not as bad as some people try to make it out to be, I have no issues myself personally using it
Click to expand...
I second this. I've been using Tahoe since March 11 and I've not had any problems at all.
 
I can't speak to Tahoe on M4 MBA but... I had a M4 base MBP and Tahoe tanked my battery life. Cut it in half. I wiped the computer and it didn't matter. I'd wait if I were you.
 
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