My M2 MBA now has got terrible battery life

[Aure1]

Hi everyone

I'm not used to using these forums so I apologize if this question is not at the right place.


I've had a base M2 Macbook Air, bought late 2022, with which I've been more than happy.

Lately though, my battery life has gone down to... 6 hours on a full charge.
Battery health reports 89%.
Activity Monitor doesn't reveal anything special.
Standby battery life still holds perfectly
My usage is very light, a few (20?) Safari tabs open, a whole lot of Youtube, and coding in iTerm2 + Neovim, a few ssh sessions.


I'm probably going to do a fresh install with MacOS26 coming very soon. Maybe I've got a rogue little pluggin pumping battery unnoticed ?


But before doing so, I wanted to ask opinions on wether this battery life after 2-3 years seemed reasonnable or not ?

It's really a bummer that I don't have all day battery life anymore, because I got used to leave the house without any cables or charger, that was neat.


Thanks for your input 😊

 

[IJustWannaTalk]

What's going on this those 20 (few? really?) tabs you have open?

 

[!!!]

Is YouTube streaming AV1 to you? If so, the M2 does not have a decoder for it, so it will use the CPU and drain more battery life. There are extensions for Firefox/Chrome which will prevent them from streaming AV1, I don't know about Safari.

Activity Monitor doesn't reveal anything special.

Are you sure? Did you check under the Energy tab?

 

[doyleo]

Your original post didn’t say, but have you done a complete shut down and restart? Don’t just put it to sleep. A shutdown, wait 30m seconds, and restart is always my first response when something changes in the way my computer is running.