Yosemite Beta - bad battery life

[dagdagdag234]

Well, I downloaded out of curiosity, knowing there could still be bugs. But my brand new Macbook Air 11' went from great battery life to perhaps a 30% or more dive in battery life.

It doesn't usually list any apps as using significant energy (a couple of times it listed Safari)

Any suggestions as to what might remedy the problem -- aside from going back to Mavericks or waiting for the next Yosemite update?

Anyone else having this problem? Or have an idea as to what's going on?

I know in theory Yosemiti was supposed to greatly improve battery life. Oh well.

 

[Spink10]

Well, I downloaded out of curiosity, knowing there could still be bugs. But my brand new Macbook Air 11' went from great battery life to perhaps a 30% or more dive in battery life.

It doesn't usually list any apps as using significant energy (a couple of times it listed Safari)

Any suggestions as to what might remedy the problem -- aside from going back to Mavericks or waiting for the next Yosemite update?

Anyone else having this problem? Or have an idea as to what's going on?

I know in theory Yosemiti was supposed to greatly improve battery life. Oh well.

Beta - most likely it will be fine with official release.

 

[bmac89]

Beta - most likely it will be fine with official release.

A lot of people have lower battery life according to posts on the forum. I know mine is very dramatically reduced to the point of being impractical. My battery life is down from 10 hours to 2-3 hours with no applications running.

It also seems that the common response is that it is due to it being a beta, which I am sure plays a part. However each beta update has not helped the battery life and I can not see how it is going to make that big a difference between the latest GM candidate and the final release.

P.S. I should add: not only are no applications running, but also screen brightness set to lowest setting and wifi and bluetooth off.

 

[ABC5S]

12:16 Minutes of battery life from 100% and it goes down over time, but not too fast.. Yosemite PB 6 MacBook Pro Retina

No issues for me. I'm using Safari by the way

Edit..Second picture shows time remaining a bit later time shown...Not bad

 

[ZombiePete]

I had battery issues with previous betas, but on PB6 it seems like it's gone back to normal. It took a few hours; I reloaded my MBA and had to go through the drive encryption again, but after that was done my battery life normalized and it was estimating between 14-15 hours of battery available.

I say once you install the beta let it sit for a few hours while it indexes and stuff and then see how it goes after a full charge. I have no complaints now, and it was in the past the thing that was keeping me from using it full time on all my Macs.

 

[bjet767]

I had the same issue on my 2014 11" MBA and as a developer I tried a few things (since no one else had an answer, including Apple) and found a solution.

Apparently there is some sort of bug which arises when the change is made from Maverick (10.9) to Yosemite (10.10) which causes two background programs, cloudd and bird, to run almost constantly consuming a huge amount of CPU time. These two programs manage the iCloud files and are required so one can't just eliminate them.

The solution is to do a complete restore via Command-R and put a fresh copy of Yosemite on your computer. This fixed the problem for me and made those two programs start to work as planned. Be sure to back everything up and you will be required to update Yosemite to the latest version via the App Store after the restore/fresh install because it installed Yosemite GM version 1.

I went from about 3 hours of battery to over 8 hours and will probably get as much as 10 hours now with Yosemite. I am also running four major programs, BT, WIFI, no keyboard light and full screen brightness.

 

[ncaissie]

My battery life is down from 10 hours to 2-3 hours with no applications running.

Same here. I'm also having the same problem with my iPad 2 and iOS 8.
Mines a MBP early 2011.

 

[bjet767]

ncassie

"Same here. I'm also having the same problem with my iPad 2 and iOS 8."

This is a thread about Yosemite, not iOS 8, but I think you are talking about your MBP and it's battery issue.

There are only a few reasons why a battery will drain quickly, the two top are:
1. The battery is getting old.
2. The CPU is running too much (not in idle waiting for instructions).

Your iPad 2 is on the edge of being outdated for iOS 8. My work place provides iPads for use and our current 3+ year old iPad 2s are going to be replaced shortly with the Air because iOS has become a bit bloated for the older processor and memory of the iPad 2.

I would bet you need to do two things with you iPad2; the first is to do a complete wipe and restoration of iOS and the second is to just get a new one.

Now as far as your MBP goes, read my previous post about what I found.

Using Activity Monitor check and see which background programs are using CPU time and percentage. You should see two of them at the top, cloudd and bird. These run the new iCloud storage and seem to be running non-stop and using up the battery life.

The solution I found was to do a clean install and restoration via the Command-R boot of Yosemite.

If all else fails take it to an Apple Store and have them do the work for you.

 

[xiwong]

Since installing Yosemite (I installed only after PB5 came out, so I do not have experience with any releases before that), my actual-use battery life has dropped from around 6:30 to 5 hours. CPU usage and GPU usage remain the same as with Mavericks.

I did some investigating, and I believe I know why my battery life has suffered. Intel Power Gadget shows the CPU always above 3 GHz (I have a 2012 cMBP with 3.1GHz turbo boost) even though the CPU is around 97% idle. On Mavericks, the CPU would be operating in a lower clock state. So, something in the kernel or power management system is causing SpeedStep to be more sensitive.

To get back down to the base clock speed, I need to close all programs and let it idle.