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WARNING battery drain after update to Sierra

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
G

guido.coza

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 12, 2011
154
7
South Africa
Hi All
A warning and hopefully some help.
Since I updated my MID 2014 MBP retina from Mavericks to Sierra My battery drains about 3 times faster than before. Without having some concrete numbers, since the update last week the laptop shut down twice already because of no battery, and nearly every day I get at least one "low power" warning!
In the 19 month I have the Macbook now this happened before that ones!
My worry is that Sierra will fry the battery the same than one update did a couple of years ago on my MBA. Apple admitted a software problem at the time, but never compensated for the damage!
Any advise except to revert back to mavericks??

I have no idea why this is a wiki post!
 
Last edited:
How long have you actually left it open and running since the upgrade? It needs to reindex Spotlight and also the new Photos recognition needs to run, and those both use a lot of battery and take time to complete.
 
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Weaselboy said:
How long have you actually left it open and running since the upgrade? It needs to reindex Spotlight and also the new Photos recognition needs to run, and those both use a lot of battery and take time to complete.
Click to expand...
Hi Weaselboy
I never opened Spotlight and have no pictures stored anywhere near "photos"
Is there a way to switch this feature off and what for is it used??
To answer your question I updated I think monday this week and cleared out about 15GB since than via the new "about this mac feature"
The laptop is on at least 3-4 h every day as I work with LR and internet. I however can not find that I have an increase in temperature or fan activity
 
Spotlight would have indexed by now, and if you have no photos in the Photos app, then there is nothing to index... so it is not that.

It could be that you have some app or utility that is incompatible with Sierra.

After running on battery for a while, open. Activity Monitor and look in the Energy tab and sort Avg Energy Impact like in my screenshot. What does that show?

Screen Shot 2016-10-08 at 10.37.13 AM.png
 
Everything looks fine to me
What I can say the battery charges faster ( feeled)
 

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  • ACTIVITY MONITOR .pdf
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Last edited:
Ones again the macbook pro is drained from 100 to 8% in less than 4h. All I did was importing pictures in a Adobe Lightroom catalog with the screen turned dark!!
Clearly there is something wrong with Sierra!!
OR it is yet another way of Apple to pull money out of there customers pockets. With a battery that can't be replaced and a 3 times quicker drained battery than normal, the new laptop gets necessary 9-12 month earlier!!!
All I can say, if apple continues to take there customers for a right, other manufacturers are coming close to mac and it is maybe time to do the switch
 
guido.coza said:
Ones again the macbook pro is drained from 100 to 8% in less than 4h. All I did was importing pictures in a Adobe Lightroom catalog with the screen turned dark!!
Clearly there is something wrong with Sierra!!
OR it is yet another way of Apple to pull money out of there customers pockets. With a battery that can't be replaced and a 3 times quicker drained battery than normal, the new laptop gets necessary 9-12 month earlier!!!
All I can say, if apple continues to take there customers for a right, other manufacturers are coming close to mac and it is maybe time to do the switch
Click to expand...
It took now only slightly less than ONE HOUR fo go from 100%-13% !!!! Two programs running. LIGHTROOM and FIREFOX
 
since this isn't happening to everyone, it's obviously not some devious plot by apple, or an issue in general with sierra. if you can, get to apple, or to a tech shop... something. get someone to help.
 
fisherking said:
since this isn't happening to everyone, it's obviously not some devious plot by apple, or an issue in general with sierra. if you can, get to apple, or to a tech shop... something. get someone to help.
Click to expand...
It does not need to happen to everybody if it happen to 1/1000 it would be good enough!!!
And I not even say it was planned but I don"t see them being in a hurry to fix it either!!
 
You should consider backing up your data and doing a clean install. I can almost guarantee that this will fix your issue.
 
Sounds like the common theme here is LR. I'm backing either an unwanted system process is working overtime or LR is somehow killing the battery.

Either way, seeking help from someone is what I'd be doing.
 
guido.coza said:
It does not need to happen to everybody if it happen to 1/1000 it would be good enough!!!
And I not even say it was planned but I don"t see them being in a hurry to fix it either!!
Click to expand...

I think fisherking's point is that there are a whole bunch of users out there running Sierra on the exact model Mac you have and they are not having this issue. If this were a common issue with the 2014 rMBP, there would be long threads here with reports... and there are not.


I happen to own the same Mac and have no issue.
Screen_Shot_2016-10-10_at_6_48_45_AM.png

So this kind of makes it look like this is something wrong specific to your Mac and not a general issue with Sierra. Either you have some hardware failure, or more likely, some app or utility that is incompatible with Sierra. Sierra updates are not likely to fix either one of those issues. For example, I see in your screenshot (below) you have a system monitor utility called Magican running. Things like that are often not compatible with OS updates.


Screen Shot 2016-10-10 at 6.54.28 AM.png
 
guido.coza said:
Hi All
A warning and hopefully some help.
Since I updated my MID 2014 MBP retina from Mavericks to Sierra My battery drains about 3 times faster than before. Without having some concrete numbers, since the update last week the laptop shut down twice already because of no battery, and nearly every day I get at least one "low power" warning!
In the 19 month I have the Macbook now this happened before that ones!
My worry is that Sierra will fry the battery the same than one update did a couple of years ago on my MBA. Apple admitted a software problem at the time, but never compensated for the damage!
Any advise except to revert back to mavericks??

I have no idea why this is a wiki post!
Click to expand...

I have exactly the same problem. My macbook air is mid 2013, upgraded from Mavericks to Sierra. I uninstalled office 2011 and installed office 2016. No other changes.

Previously the battery can last I guess more than 8 hours. Now around 3 hours.
 
Brammy said:
Just out of curiosity, have you tried an smc reset?
Click to expand...
Yes, PRAM, SMC, safe mode multiple times...
I have some new observations,
a. Mail seems to be related, as safari up to a point...
b. after the last safe mode boot it seems that the temperatures have gone down a bit, not like the previous OS levels but close enough.
 
filmak said:
Yes, PRAM, SMC, safe mode multiple times...
I have some new observations,
a. Mail seems to be related, as safari up to a point...
b. after the last safe mode boot it seems that the temperatures have gone down a bit, not like the previous OS levels but close enough.
Click to expand...

Hi guys,

I am having the same issue with reduced battery life post Sierra Update. Google Chrome and Safari are the only apps running, and as you can see from the Screenshot below, the battery life was reduced by 50% after just 26 minutes of web browsing.

I have a early 2014 MacBook Air which provides approx 12 hours of battery life, of course depending on the tasks, but considering I am only browsing the web, I can only assume Sierra is the culprit for reduced battery life. I didn't have this issue when I upgraded to Mavericks
View attachment 668922

Any suggestions/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.
 
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