Battery Draining Fast since Tahoe upgrade

It was the same for me! the battery was draining just like you mentioned. But after a few days, it started working as it did before the update.

I left it plugged in overnight; some people said there might be things happening in the background, so I figured I’d just let it sort itself out.

Not sure if that did the trick, but the battery’s been working fine since :)

I have 26.1 and am still having the issue. 16-inch MacBook Pro M4 Max on Tahoe 26.1. Issue was bad with 26, but is pretty much the same on 26.1. I also have slack, which I'm going to try manually quitting next time I let it sleep unplugged. It goes from fully charged to zero overnight every night since Tahoe if it is not plugged in and also is getting exceptionally hot during charging sometimes. It's been on Tahoe for plenty of time to have completed all indexing.

Update: After a few days the battery is working as before. It's all good.

"I have a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, 24GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. Ever since I updated to macOS Tahoe, the battery has been draining incredibly fast.

And you know what? I've been leaving it constantly on, just putting it to sleep by closing the lid. The whole story about Spotlight indexing is nonsense. It's not indexing anything. The OS version is just raw and unpolished.

My MacBook only has 54 charge cycles, and it's already reporting 99% battery health after just one month of use. For comparison, my 2020 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro went down to 87% after five years of use. What are you even talking about? This is ridiculous.

I bought an external hard drive just to offload my terabyte of data and go back to the previous OS. This whole situation is absurd, and Apple support is no help at all. Today, I started working at 10:45 AM, and by 2:50 PM, the battery was already down to 17 percent. I was watching the percentage drop right before my eyes."

[Edited by Moderator]

Yes, you are right, they are talking nonsense indexing and stuff, the update is the culprit here, alone. Lithium ion battery is supposed to be charged and used without AC and laptops are meant to be carried around, there's nothing truthful about this charging it overnight, shut it, leave it on sleep mode etc etc etc

This is not an answer for the problem stated. A new macbook that has three days of battery life suddenly changes to 6 hours of battery life after a software update. This is a bug, not a usage issue. Somewhere there is a setting that needs to be changed.

Buy a desktop computer is an ineffective solution.

Hi

I have the same issue. I m hitting 77% battery where before Tahoe this time of day = 90%. I updated the day after release and yet the drain is still a lot more than the previous OS.

I have now closed all virtual desktops but seeing no differences so far.

Josh

Same here. It's ridiculous! Before I could go 2 days without needing to charge my Mac.. now since the Tahoe update within a few hours it has run flat. Apple really needs to get bette at ironing out these glitches before they launch their updates as every update seems to have issues. Most frustrating!

I upgrade to 26.0.1 (25A362) directly, and even after some days my battery lasts literally 1/4 of the time of what it does before. I am not joking, it is unbelievable how fast the battery drains. I'm constantly checking in Activity Monitor if there's a specific culprit, but it randomly moves the energy impact from one app to another.

Thanks for the tips. Just to be clear: I bought a laptop to use away from power. Since the Tahoe update my battery life tanked, so “just keep it plugged in” isn’t a workable answer. Can we focus on why 26.x is draining so hard and what can be fixed?

Panda5598 wrote:

Thanks for the tips. Just to be clear: I bought a laptop to use away from power. Since the Tahoe update my battery life tanked, so “just keep it plugged in” isn’t a workable answer. Can we focus on why 26.x is draining so hard and what can be fixed?

Mac OS 26.1 is currently in beta and being tested. We cannot comment on the improvements made in battery performance as it is a violation of the terms of use for being a beta tester, so you may have to wait and see.

The recommendation to plug your Mac into power when it is available is a good one and should be followed. Certainly a laptop is meant to be mobile, but it is also true that speed is going to be limited on battery power with processor intensive apps, so to take full advantage of your Mac laptop you will want to have it plugged in when power is available.

In addition, when using your laptop on battery and there is power available that you are not using, then it just means you will be replacing your battery/laptop much sooner. The charge cycles that the battery is rated for is determined by how often the battery is discharged, not how often it is charged.