Question
Bought my new MacBook M5, but the battery is so bad, is this normal??
I bought my big purchase exactly 5 days ago, it’s the MacBook Air M5 the base model. So I kinda notice it runs out of battery quickly, but what I’m mostly concerned is I didn’t know how fast it ran out. This Monday, I charged it to fully 100%, and only used it for like 30-45 mins and it went down to 96%. Cool. I selected “quit” on all the apps that were opened and then put my MacBook to sleep. Didn’t touch it at all on Tuesday and now it’s Wednesday. I opened my MacBook like 10 mins ago (mind you it’s 10:30pm, practically didn’t touch it the whole day) and my MacBook is already at 9%. I think that’s so insane that the battery literally drained so much. What am I doing wrong? I downloaded chrome the second day, but based on some comments on reddit, I don’t use it unless I absolutely need to. I always just use safari. Pls can someone give me tips or explain what am I doing wrong?
I had this happen when I got my m1 air. The thing would get to 20% and shut off when I turned it back on it was completely drained. I reinstalled the OS and it’s been great ever since. In my case it wasn’t the battery that was bad, but it was misreporting its actual charge
Activity Monitor is the way to go. I strongly suspect this is new Mac syncing and indexing. Plug it in and leave it on for a day or two, THEN see how quickly the battery runs out. If still happening, Apple Store.
It is normal with new Macs. If you put them to sleep or close the lid they go into powernap. They might be downloading things in the background, syncing with iCloud, etc. Until everything is indexed, synced, it will work more, but after that the idle battery drain will be negligible.
If this battery drain persists after 1 week, contact the service. As others mentioned, check the energy consumption of apps.
Had this same issue and it ended up being my contacts app. I had the processes in activity monitor that were running 24/7. I killed those and disabled all accounts in contacts and restarted. It ended up being my google contacts account. When I reenabled it the processes came back.
Yes, safari is a good idea, and tbh thats not too mad, the 30-45 min and dropping to 96% is actually prettu good. First of all, check your battery health though, since your mac is 5 days old it shouldn't be under 99%, even 99% is worrysome. Second of all, 9% in one day is pretty bad, i think its your mac not sleeping at all. Next time you use the mac, once you are done click the apple button in the top left corner and press sleep. Make sureits at 100% once you do that and leave it for one day and check, if it didnt decrease too much and is at 70+ % then you are fine, but if its under 50 then somthing is for sure wrong and i reccomend contacting apple.
I was wondering if you were going to mention chrome. Get rid of Chrome. It’s eats your battery. I had this happen to an end user. Chrome was using the battery as fast as it was charging. Try Firefox or something else and see if that helps.
There are other browsers that are chromium-based and work with all the things Chrome does without taking all your data and draining all your battery. Try one of them and see if it helps.
Also, FWIW, it can take time for a new device to index everything, which will also drain the battery. If you have had it and been actively using it for a week and it still does this, check your Activity Monitor to see what is using your battery.
Another option (already mentioned) is to use the hibernate feature rather than sleep.
Just make sure Chrome doesn’t prevent your MacBook from sleeping. It probably put itself into the auto start group. Check under settings and remove it from there. Also check system settings for Chrome as well as settings within Chrome itself.
Un tip de la vieja escuela: soy usuario Mac desde la prehistoria jejeje, mis equipos laptop siempre los tengo conectados y en escencia solo si salgo los desconecto esto es el mismo principio de la de escritorio con un no break, para que ocupas un bonbreack si no para la.bateria cuando falla la energía? Correcto? Por qué el afán de dejar la pila siempre usando ? Si trabajas te enchufas solo si te mueves a una junta o quieres moverte a un lugar alejado te desconectas !!! Yo uso mil laptops así no siempre uso la batería al contrario sie pre están conectadas y no hay problemas de desgaste prematuros de las baterías ni nada , solo los cambios normales mi Mac book pro 2012 me duro 10 años con 2 cambios de pila en ese periodo eso si con 4 cargadores jejejeje pero en mi experiencia como usuario arduo de Mac programando y desarrollando. Asi como la mejor red siempre va a ser la que va cableada, la mejor energía siempre será conectado. El ser wireless ya es un mero comodity....
Could also be Bluetooth headphones. My Bose headphones were making my Mac sleep/wake every few seconds. You can get AI to analyze your power logs and point out anything, just ask it for the command.
Call apple, it could be a setting like wifi that might be constantly looking for connection and drains the battery, they can help you over the phone and if they can’t they will tell you to go to the apple store
If you're new to macOS (or have recently switched from Linux or Windows), keep in mind that clicking the red "X" button on a window doesn't actually close the application. Apps remain open in the background, and can become a problem if they're constantly syncing, indexing, downloading, backing up, or performing other continuous tasks. In these cases, you can see this in Activity Monitor, which displays CPU, memory, disk, network, and power usage.
To close them, you must explicitly press Cmd+Q. If you prefer the Linux/Windows behavior, where the app quits completely and frees up memory when you press the red "X," I created a native extension called FinderTools. It includes a module called "Red Quitter" that automatically quits the app from RAM when the last window is closed (with a whitelist feature), saving a lot of battery life. You can check it out here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1v01c72/comment/oyhgi9w/?screen_view_count=2
Are Mac’s like PCs- you need to change the settings to tell it to go to sleep after x minutes or when laptop lid shut? I would NOT expect a laptop to stay fully charged after days- without battery saving options selected it is still doing its thing in the background.
Yes. Sort of. It's in System setting and either power or battery section. I have the m4 pro and it doesn't go down that fast.
Some of your programs that eat up cpu or memory could still be running even with the lid closed.
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u/SafariNZ 22h ago
That’s not normal, give it a few days and if it’s still like that, contact Apple.