In this article, we'll look at common problems and 5 fixes for these MacBook and MacBook Pro battery problems.
Why is my Mac battery draining so fast?
There can be a number of reasons. For example, different browsers consume different amounts of battery power.
- So Apple apologised and released an update - iOS 11.3 - with a new Battery Health tool as well as the ability to turn off the iPhone's throttling ('battery management') feature.
- Download Battery Health App For Mac 10.6 - real advice. CoconutBattery and 4 more programs.
- Battery Health Monitor for Mac, free and safe download. Battery Health Monitor latest version: Check how your battery is doing.
- 5 solutions for Mac battery problems 1. Check and change Battery Settings. In the top menu, where the battery appears, it’s always useful to switch usage to a statistics setting, so that you can clearly see how fast it's draining. If you click on the battery, it will show which apps are using the most amount of power.
MacOS Catalina 10.15.5 introduces battery health management in the Energy Saver settings for notebooks, an option to control automatic prominence of video tiles on Group FaceTime calls,.
In some cases, a recent upgrade to a new macOS can be the cause and therefore a temporary problem. It either stops doing this in its own time, or a new macOS patch/upgrade is sent through and once downloaded the problem goes away. It is known to happen around the time of new releases and is an issue many Mac owners anticipate.
However, in other cases, the issue is less widespread and more localized. We cover five of the most common problems and fixes for Mac users, in particular MacBook owners who have suffered from a fast draining battery.
5 solutions for Mac battery problems
1. Check and change Battery Settings
In the top menu, where the battery appears, it’s always useful to switch usage to a statistics setting, so that you can clearly see how fast it's draining.
If you click on the battery, it will show which apps are using the most amount of power.
- From here, click on Open Energy Saver Preferences
- Within this you’ve got the option to put the hard disks to sleep and dim the display when a Mac is not connected to power.
2. Switch on Energy Saver
Always useful when trying to conserve battery power on any device, and it could be a lifesaver if you happen to be out without a power cord or plug.
- From the Apple menu;
- Go to System Preferences > Energy Saver
- Now click on the Battery tab
- A slider should be on this screen: Switch Power Nap off, while sliding the scale along to ensure the screen goes dark after a reasonable amount of time when not being used, which should reduce battery drainage.
3. Find out what is using energy
When investigating a fast draining battery, it’s always useful to know what is using energy in the first place. To find out, follow these steps:
- Go to Applications;
- Click on Utilities > Activity Monitor;
- Activity Monitor will show what is taking up CPU and GPU;
- Giving you the ability to close anything that is clearly taking up too much battery power.
4. Identify background apps
Behind the scenes, most Macs can run dozens of apps without us realizing it. Some of these could be running because we forgot about them. Others open during the startup sequence. And others, without us knowing it, could be malware or ransomware, or other viruses, either designed to steal data or steal processing power to mine cryptocurrency or even run remote DDoS attacks.
Now, clearly that sort of thing isn’t ideal and you won’t want apps running that drain power, steal data, or that use your Mac for something you aren't even aware. To solve these potential battery draining problems, we recommend taking the following steps:
- Download CleanMyMac X (for free, here)
- Click on Uninstaller
- It will run a scan of every app on your system: Either click to rest or safely uninstall everything you don't need or aren't aware of.
Also, click the Optimization tab in CleanMyMac. You’ll find the tool called Launch Agents.
It displays tiny background applications otherwise non visible to a user. This very often gets exploited by advertising scripts — a sure way to drain your battery power.
As you can see, these items can be easily switched off using the Disable button.
5. Adjust screen brightness
![Health Health](/uploads/1/1/7/8/117874077/682505437.jpg)
The brightest lightbulbs consume more energy, same is true for your screen's lighting. In your Preferences, look up Displays settings and do a couple of tune-ups there. Make sure to tick 'Automatically adjust brightness' checkbox.
6. Clean up your Mac
Macs battery benefits from various forms of cleaning. Why? Because the cluttered hard drive uses more CPU resources. The more strain on CPU, the more it affects and eventually wears off your battery. There are dozens of pretty good tools to remove hidden junk from Mac but my personal favorite is CleanMyMac X. It's so enjoyable to use even for such a trivial operation as deleting junk files.
- Download CleanMyMac X — here 's a link to a free edition
- Click on the System Junk tab
As you can see, I was able to remove 18.9 GB worth of useless files: caches, broken downloads, localizations, etc.
Sit back and know that with a tidy Mac, with it free from all of the clutter of years of use — and a monitoring system in place to look after it — your battery should be operating at optimum levels again.
Apple has released macOS 10.15.5 Catalina, adding battery health management for recent Mac laptops, eliminating the bouncing tiles in Group FaceTime, providing controls for fine-tuning the color calibration of the Pro Display XDR, and fixing a variety of bugs. It’s a 2.98 GB download via Software Update; the combo update clocks in at 4.8 GB.
Battery Health Management
I always feel irrationally disappointed when batteries in my electronics start to show significantly reduced charge life. It makes scientific sense that batteries age chemically, but intuitively, it’s hard to accept that charging today doesn’t have the same effect as charging several years ago.
Apple designed macOS 10.15.5’s new battery health management capabilities to reduce the rate at which batteries chemically age. It works by monitoring your battery’s temperature history and charging patterns to adjust the maximum level to which it will charge the battery.
Unfortunately, prolonging the overall lifespan of the battery comes with a tradeoff—a reduction in the amount of time your Mac will run on battery before needing to be plugged in. Since you may—either generally or at specific times—wish to maximize runtime, you can disable battery health management in System Preferences > Energy Saver. Click the Battery Health button, deselect Battery Health Management, and click Turn Off when prompted.
Mac Battery Life
Finally, Apple notes that the limited maximum capacity may cause your battery status menu to indicate that you need to replace your battery.
The Battery Health button doesn’t appear in Energy Saver for my 2012 MacBook Air, which threw me initially but was explained by nbeadman on TidBITS Talk. He pointed out that, in a Six Colors post from 16 April 2020, Jason Snell noted that this feature was limited to Mac laptops with Thunderbolt 3 ports. That equates to all MacBook Pro models released since late 2016 and the Retina-capable MacBook Air models released since 2018. There’s no connection between Thunderbolt 3 and this feature—Apple is merely using the common denominator of Thunderbolt 3 support as a way of specifying which models are new enough to have the necessary internal hardware support.
Other New Features
The 10.15.5 update offers two additional new features:
- As with iOS 13.5 and iPadOS 13.5 (see “Apple Tailors iOS 13.5 and iPadOS 13.5 to a COVID-19 World,” 20 May 2020), Apple has added an option to Group FaceTime (in FaceTime > Preferences > Settings) to prevent video tiles from changing size when a person on the call speaks. That will make Group FaceTime easier to stomach, though the experience still leaves much to be desired (see “Videoconferencing Options in the Age of Pandemic,” 2 April 2020).
- If you have a Pro Display XDR, 10.15.5 reportedly adds controls to fine-tune the built-in calibration by adjusting the white point and luminance to your own display calibration target. For a monitor that costs $6000, you should be able to tweak individual pixels.
Bug Fixes
The list of bugs fixed in 10.15.5 includes some that have been annoying. In particular, the update:
- Fixes a bug that could prevent Reminders from sending notifications for recurring reminders
- Addresses a bug that could prevent password entry on the login screen
- Fixes a bug that caused System Preferences to show a notification badge even after installing an update (this was just discussed on TidBITS Talk)
- Resolves a bug that prevented the built-in camera from being detected when trying to use it after using a video conferencing app
- Addresses a bug with Macs with the T2 security chip that may prevent internal speakers from appearing as a sound output device in Sound preferences
- Fixes a stability problem with uploading and downloading media files from iCloud Photos while your Mac is asleep
- Resolves a stability bug when transferring large amounts of data to RAID volumes
- Fixes a bug that prevented the Reduce Motion Accessibility preference from reducing the speed of animations in a FaceTime group call
Sadly, no mention was made of the problems that some Mail users have had with data loss after upgrading to Catalina. We’ll have to wait for Michael Tsai’s users to weigh in with the results of their testing (scroll to the bottom of the comments).
And as expected, macOS 10.15.5 comes with fixes for 45 security vulnerabilities.
Should You Update? Should You Upgrade?
I wish I could change our general recommendations, but until we know more about the Mail bugs, I can’t. So, if you’re already running Catalina, either because you’ve upgraded or purchased a new Mac, let this update settle for a few days to see if it causes any troubles. It’s better to let others discover such problems and report back. Then install the update—the new features and bug fixes are all welcome.
We’re particularly intrigued to see how the battery health management feature works, but that’s going to be a long-term play. It will be difficult to assess how much it helps because no one outside Apple likely has a sufficient test suite of Macs to run for months.
Whether to upgrade from 10.14 Mojave (or earlier) is another question. We’re probably within one or two more bug fix updates for Catalina before Apple moves on to the next major version of macOS.
Assuming, that is, that Apple sticks to its usual schedule during these uncertain times and with engineers working from home. It’s conceivable that Apple could delay the next version of macOS for as much as a year. Alternatively, the company could move on to a newly named version to escape the somewhat cursed Catalina moniker but focus on cleaning up the problems in Catalina. (When it comes to new names, I’m voting for “Avalon,” which is the only city on Catalina Island and part of Arthurian legend.)
Mac Battery Health
Regardless, if you haven’t yet upgraded to Catalina, my recommendation now is that you should wait until the end of June, after Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which starts on 22 June 2020. The news that comes out of WWDC should provide some updated guidance.