MBP battery drain while sleeping since I updated to Mojave

[CalabiYau]

Hello

I have a late 2014 MBP. Some years with El Capitan. Then High Sierra and last month I updated to 10.14.6, service 2020-04.

In 6 years, when the MBP was in standby (closed lid or through power button), it drained nothing. Battery percentage after overnight was always the same as before sleeping it.

But after Mojave I have a regular drain. About 0.5-1% per hour.

I am not sure if this happened just after upgrading to Mojave or after I reinstall Mojave through recovery to get Safari 13 back.

I have tried all the typical suggestions: Power nap disabled from day 1, hard disk off during sleep, SMC reset, Bluetooth is off (and no wake), icloud sync just for photos and drive. Location off for all apps/services. Dynamic wallpaper off. Siri off. Night shift off. Turn off a NAS drive.

There are no apps running at the start. I even delete plists in LaunchAgents/Demons.

And finally I just rebooted, and sleep it without opening any app.

With all this I still have battery drain overnight (8h). Sometimes 3%, sometimes 8%, sometimes 5%.

It is quite frustrating because in Capitan/HS it was 0 always!

I also analyzed this:

log show --style syslog | fgrep "Wake reason"

But it seems ok. No wake overnight. For example tonight there has been a 6% drain in 7 hours:

2020-10-16 00:34:18.830778+0200 localhost kernel[0]: (AppleACPIPlatform) AppleACPIPlatformPower Wake reason: EC.PowerButton PWRB (User)
2020-10-16 00:34:18.830791+0200 localhost kernel[0]: (AppleACPIPlatform) AppleACPIPlatformPower Wake reason: EC.PowerButton PWRB (User)
2020-10-16 07:23:37.803385+0200 localhost kernel[0]: (AppleACPIPlatform) AppleACPIPlatformPower Wake reason: EC.LidOpen (User)
2020-10-16 07:23:37.803388+0200 localhost kernel[0]: (AppleACPIPlatform) AppleACPIPlatformPower Wake reason: EC.LidOpen (User)

Any idea? Any other way to analyze what can be running in the background?

Is this a Mojave problem or it is because some settings that affects different from High Sierra?

BTW, is it normal that the log duplicates all events with a tiny time difference?

Thanks!

 

[brianmowrey]

There’s tons of threads and articles. Setting sleep mode to 25 with delay seems to improve the issue at the cost of slower wakes. Others say Catalina is better about this, but that might just be because their Catalina install was an SMC reset by other means. I did both at once and it got a lot better (from 5%ph to 1%ph) so who knows.

But meanwhile the current SMC version’s behavior for safe sleep is seemingly to intentionally use a lot more power, maybe investing it in keeping the RAM extra-awake for reliably. In that sense it may be a power management behavior based on battery cycle count that Apple doesn’t want to document or explain, or sufficiently test in real life, that has the air of degrading old machines but merely reflects a pivot in Apple’s power management attitude, just like iPhone throttling. Just me guessing wildly.

If so, ideally we should be given the option to choose between the new and the vintage Safe Sleep power setting via security update, but it should have happened months ago if it was going to at all.