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Significant drop in battery life since Sonoma?

I bought an M1 MacBook Air yesterday, have upgraded to Sonoma and used it quite heavily last night and again this morning. I am currently on 56% battery. Seems normal for me at the moment, although I have limited experience given I'm on day 2!

(p.s. very pleased with the laptop and glad I didn't spend the extra on the M2 air).
 
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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...

dborja said:
Thanks! I'll try this and report back.
Click to expand...
Last night, I erased my drive then installed Ventura from the Recovery drive and updated to Sonoma. When it was done, I ran Recovery manager and, this time, it offered to install a fresh copy (I think) of Sonoma which I did. I then brought my apps and data back from Time Machine. I'm seeing the same fast battery charge decay just using Safari. I wonder if I should have done a fresh install of my apps. Maybe I should have waited before bringing my apps back from Time Machine to see if a "bare" environment exhibited the same battery discharge rate,
 
dborja said:
Last night, I erased my drive then installed Ventura from the Recovery drive and updated to Sonoma. When it was done, I ran Recovery manager and, this time, it offered to install a fresh copy (I think) of Sonoma which I did. I then brought my apps and data back from Time Machine. I'm seeing the same fast battery charge decay just using Safari. I wonder if I should have done a fresh install of my apps. Maybe I should have waited before bringing my apps back from Time Machine to see if a "bare" environment exhibited the same battery discharge rate,
Click to expand...
just make a fresh install.
 
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dborja said:
I'll try that and withhold installing my apps for a bit
Click to expand...
Well, it might be too early to tell, but this seems to have done the trick. I did a clean install and the rate of battery discharge is what I was experiencing prior to updating from Ventura to Sonoma. After 3 hours of use, I'm still seeing about 89%. I'm re-installing my apps "manually" instead of through Time Machine just to make sure that I'm not bringing over a setting/file that's causing the issue.

I created a bootable install USB stick, erased my MBA drive then installed straight to Sonoma.
 
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