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Significant drop in battery life since Sonoma?

TSE

TSE

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jun 25, 2007
4,040
3,570
St. Paul, Minnesota
I have an M2 MacBook Air.

I would get fantastic battery life on the previous version of MacOS, but as soon as I installed Sonoma, I've noticed the battery life isn't anywhere near where it was. I thought perhaps it was because I installed it over the previous version, so wiped my disk and clean installed it, but that hasn't changed a thing.

Am I the only one? Anyone else?
 
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I have no battery issues. It is currently 12:43 my time and I have been using the machine since 08:00. It has only been light use, web browsing, email, minor stuff. The screen has been on most of that time with a screen saver when not being used. I am currently at 80% battery.

Prior days after using all day I am down to 35% at the end of the day. If I start doing heavy processing, such as using Lightroom to process a couple thousand images, the battery will drop much faster.

One thing I have found that increases battery drain are attaching USB-C to ethernet or using an external SSD such as Sandisk.
 
1617292364425


on Ventura 13.5.2 on my 15" M2 Air and awaiting battery life feedback before considering upgrading
 
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I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro (not a MacBook Air I know).

You could check in Activity Monitor if a certain app is the culprit, or it could be that your system is still indexing and/or optimizing. However, the latter shouldn't take too long.
 
I'm on an M1 Air and haven't noticed anything much with regard to battery life. I use coconutBattery to keep a running indicator of how many watts are being pulled off the battery, and in my use so far under Sonoma it looks about the same (well under 5 watts during normal usage, up to maybe 10 watts with brightness up and doing a Zoom call).
 
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Sonoma on my MBA 15 works pretty nice. I have iStat menu to monitor power usage. The average power consumption is actually lower than with Ventura. It's now about 2.6W from 3.0W before. That's total power consumption (battery discharge wattage).

Overall, with only casual use, I don't feel any worsening of battery life at least.
 
vanc said:
Sonoma on my MBA 15 works pretty nice. I have iStat menu to monitor power usage. The average power consumption is actually lower than with Ventura. It's now about 2.6W from 3.0W before. That's total power consumption (battery discharge wattage).

Overall, with only casual use, I don't feel any worsening of battery life at least.
Click to expand...

how have the bugs and such been? worth upgrading in your opinion?
 
thadoggfather said:
how have the bugs and such been? worth upgrading in your opinion?
Click to expand...
It really depends on each use case. For me, I only upgraded my MBA which is only for home/casual use. For work, I still keep Ventura on a MBP 16.

If you want upgrade, make sure to backup with TM first. If run into issues, just restore it back.
 
I noticed lately that I'm losing battery charge on my M1 MBA a lot quicker lately. I am running Sonoma (V14.0) and I don't know if it's the OS or if my battery needs to be replaced. Apple is reporting my battery health at 93% while Coconut is reporting 87%. I started off with a full charge this morning and within 30 minutes, I'm down to 86% charge. Yesterday, I barely got 4 hours before my machine shut down. Same usage as always - no heavy lifting.

I'm faced with a decision:
1. Just live with it? Maybe a Sonoma update will fix this if indeed it's Sonoma that's draining my battery faster?
2. Replace the battery myself with one from OWC ($75)?
3. Have Apple replace the battery ($159)?
4. Wait for an M3 release since I don't think I gain much from upgrading to an M2 aside from considering a 15"?

I do want to go back to the "good old days" where I get at least 8 hours from full charge.
 
dborja said:
I noticed lately that I'm losing battery charge on my M1 MBA a lot quicker lately. I am running Sonoma (V14.0) and I don't know if it's the OS or if my battery needs to be replaced. Apple is reporting my battery health at 93% while Coconut is reporting 87%. I started off with a full charge this morning and within 30 minutes, I'm down to 86% charge. Yesterday, I barely got 4 hours before my machine shut down. Same usage as always - no heavy lifting.

I'm faced with a decision:
1. Just live with it? Maybe a Sonoma update will fix this if indeed it's Sonoma that's draining my battery faster?
2. Replace the battery myself with one from OWC ($75)?
3. Have Apple replace the battery ($159)?
4. Wait for an M3 release since I don't think I gain much from upgrading to an M2 aside from considering a 15"?

I do want to go back to the "good old days" where I get at least 8 hours from full charge.
Click to expand...
That is unreasonable and should not be caused by ~90% health battery. There should be something else behind it. Obviously, hardware issue is always possibility, but few things are easier to check and would be interesting... My MBP M1 Pro energy use is VERY dependent on display light setting. Like, it seems to be the biggest impact of what I do - with low light MBP uses <5W use while full light >10W. So when I use low display light settings (think like on airplane when others want to sleep) I get 20+h battery life. When I am outside in sun and display is full blast, 8-10h seems what I can get. What display light setting you use?
Some applications do have serious power impact. Activity Monitor has Energy tab and that tells you which app is using most energy currently and in the last 12h. Any misbehaves? Some time ago I had MS Teams running in background and it was using unreasnable amount of energy. Quit it and all (in my life ;) ) is better. I think Teams are fixed by now, but it can be anything, even some macOS service can be misbehaving, and Activity monitor should tell you that.
 
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Honza1 said:
That is unreasonable and should not be caused by ~90% health battery. There should be something else behind it. Obviously, hardware issue is always possibility, but few things are easier to check and would be interesting... My MBP M1 Pro energy use is VERY dependent on display light setting. Like, it seems to be the biggest impact of what I do - with low light MBP uses <5W use while full light >10W. So when I use low display light settings (think like on airplane when others want to sleep) I get 20+h battery life. When I am outside in sun and display is full blast, 8-10h seems what I can get. What display light setting you use?
Some applications do have serious power impact. Activity Monitor has Energy tab and that tells you which app is using most energy currently and in the last 12h. Any misbehaves? Some time ago I had MS Teams running in background and it was using unreasnable amount of energy. Quit it and all (in my life ;) ) is better. I think Teams are fixed by now, but it can be anything, even some macOS service can be misbehaving, and Activity monitor should tell you that.
Click to expand...
Display light setting has been at around 70% for a while now when I work in outside. Around 50% when I'm working indoors. Activity monitor is showing that Safari tends to be the biggest CPU user (about 8% and peaks at about 20%). I do have Teams running - maybe I'll quit it and see if that helps. Thanks for the suggestions - I'll look into them.
 
Phantom iCloud tabs said:
Yep, it's not just you. My m2 MacBook Air has seen a drop of at least several hours in one charge cycle. It's not like tons of new features were added, either. Very disappointing.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I'm in the same boat... It's odd... I really don't see the value of the whole widget thing.. when I just put stuff in the control center and notifications panel... Between that and center stage, Apple is trying to do the same thing 4 different ways... Annoying.
 
I've done a clean install for the sake of it when installing Sonoma and I've noticed an improvement in battery life.
But I'm still salty because Sonoma broke the Nebula app for my Xreal Air glasses. Damn it.
 
Just for the record, not doubting anyone,
my MacBook Air 2020 M1 on Sonoma is on battery, im transferring files, liking to Jazz music and typing letters here.
started this about 17 minutes ago and the MBA battery is at 100%

I can check if there is a nuclear power plant near by.....
 
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Ok, mystery solved. I had done a "clean" install after 14.0 was released, but used the recovery drive on my MacBook to do it. So it installed Ventura first, after which point I immediately upgraded to Sonoma. This time I used DFU mode and went straight to Sonoma. Even though indexing, etc., isn't even done yet, I am already getting the kind of battery usage I saw under Ventura before upgrading. So as I suspected, there's some underlying software glitch causing higher-than-normal battery usage for people who upgrade Ventura to Sonoma -- and the software developers for Apple clearly didn't test for this (carefully) before release, probably just testing a totally new install of Sonoma instead.
 
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Phantom iCloud tabs said:
Ok, mystery solved. I had done a "clean" install after 14.0 was released, but used the recovery drive on my MacBook to do it. So it installed Ventura first, after which point I immediately upgraded to Sonoma. This time I used DFU mode and went straight to Sonoma. Even though indexing, etc., isn't even done yet, I am already getting the kind of battery usage I saw under Ventura before upgrading. So as I suspected, there's some underlying software glitch causing higher-than-normal battery usage for people who upgrade Ventura to Sonoma -- and the software developers for Apple clearly didn't test for this (carefully) before release, probably just testing a totally new install of Sonoma instead.
Click to expand...
Thanks! I'll try this and report back.
 
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