macOS Mojave Drains Battery Like Never Before

macOS Mojave Drains Battery Like Never Before(discussions.apple.com)

31 points by bhnmmhmd 7 years ago | 14 comments

tptacek 7 years ago |

You're not supposed to editorialize story titles like this. Stories are community property; the person who submits a story doesn't have a special right to add commentary to it.

An appropriate title: "macOS Mojave battery drain".

teilo 7 years ago |

I have exactly the opposite experience. Mojave is substantially easier on the battery of my 15" 2018 MBP than High Sierra was.

One reason (probably not the only reason) is that Mojave is much better at GPU switching, and manages to quickly and fully shut down the discrete GPU once it is no longer being used. In HS, this did not happen. The Radeon would still be drawing power even when, supposedly, only the integrated GPU was supposed to be active.

I'm typing this on battery, and currently drawing between 6-14W while running Firefox. In HS this would be between 20 and 30W.

fxmc 7 years ago | |

How do you measure power consumption on a Mac? I'm using a 15" 2015 MBP with ~4h battery life, even when the battery was new. I'd like to see how the upgrade affects this.

klohto 7 years ago | | |

I don't about precise power measuring tools, but I use CoconutBattery which displays what my current drain charge is. I already know what the values are when "idle", so I can compare the new values on Mojave with the ones I remember.

teilo 7 years ago | | |

All of this info is available in the system instrumentation, so with the right utility you can see it in real time. I use iStat Menus.

mauriciob 7 years ago |

After the update, macOS will start reindexing everything. It’s normal to use more power due to this.

They should check if that behavior continues after a few days, not hours after the update.

toomuchtodo 7 years ago | |

Or not perform mundane background tasks unless connected to shore power and the system is idle.

caiob 7 years ago |

Every support ticket on Apple's forum is breaking news now.[0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_lRJuQtBmc&feature=youtu.be

innocentoldguy 7 years ago |

Interesting... I did a clean install from USB and haven't had any battery issues that I've noticed.

I have had a different issue that is mildly irritating. Every time I wake my computer the brightness levels on both my laptop and external monitor are cranked up to 100%. I have the auto-adjust setting turned off, but this issue persists. Other than that, I've been pleased with Mojave, especially Night Shift.

wareotie 7 years ago |

Mojave is working like a charm. No more burned fingers while typing, and the battery is lasting even longer in my MacBook Pro 13" 2017.

I was very sad with Sierra but now I can work with multiple VM and IntelliJ without pain in my fingers.

tabs_masterrace 7 years ago |

Format C: heh. No seriously the old Windows meme of "do a reinstall" has slowly but surely been creeping into macOS. If you're running a system that's gone through 2+ major macOS updates and have problems, you should probably consider a clean install from USB. On a side note same thing applies to iOS. Welcome to software in 2018.

becauseiam 7 years ago |

For me at least, doing an SMC and PRAM reset appeared to resolve the issue of the battery draining heavily during sleep.

xmichael999 7 years ago |

Surely just a bug that will get fixed promptly.

JCSato 7 years ago | |

Surely.