I have a 14-inch M1 MacBook Pro. I put it to sleep and closed the lid and didn’t use it for 5 or 6 days. It was between 70-80% battery, but when I opened the lid today the battery had drained to less than 20%. Is this normal? What is the MacBook doing in sleep mode that it would drain this much battery over 5-6 days?
I have the exact machine, you don’t happen to have a Yubico Nano key pluggin , do you? Please refer to this post
No, I don’t have anything plugged into any ports.
I have the original 13" M1 MacBook Pro. Last night I was using it on battery and it was at 92% when I closed the lid. This morning I opened it, about 12 hours later, and it was down to 88%. Most of the 12 hours it was in range of wifi it knew how to use, so I expect Power Nap to have been doing its thing. Extrapolation suggests 6 days would see it decline 48%, so had it been at 75% it would have dropped to 27%. That’s not far off what you observed, though of course the battery profile of mine versus yours will be different.
I would suggest (and I bet Apple do, too) that leaving it for more than a couple of days is reason enough to shut it down, or at least leave it plugged in periodically.
Edit: I’m not sure, but being within range of Bluetooth peripherals may be a drain on either them or the laptop.
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50% over 5-6 days doesn’t sound unreasonable.
If you need to preserve battery charge, shutting down would be the way to go.
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I just went thru this with my M2 MB Air… it was draining 10-15% overnight. After reading a bunch on this and experimenting, I discovered 2 issues that was causing this: 1) I typically have lots of safari tabs open (in 4-5 windows). I think if ANY of those tabs are trying to reload for any reason, that will drain battery. I closed tabs I wasn’t using (including 1 that specifically had noted it was using more energy), 2) I found that leaving Discord open (whether as a tab, or the Mac app), was also draining battery. Since it seems to “know” what are “new posts” each day, it must be polling periodically.
Anyway, closing some tabs, and Discord, has resulted in draining only 4% overnight now. Hope that may be of some help!
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The 4% daily drain is also what I get with the M1 Max. E.g. this weekend I lost about 20% between Friday and Tuesday. It did drain quickly once and I just restarted it to get it back to normal.
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My normal practice is to shut down the MacBook when I know I’m not going to use it for a few days. Just forgot this time.
BTW, I notice the same behavior with my M1 iPad. If I leave it unplugged and unused for a few days, the battery drains faster than I remember from my pre-M1 iPads.
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There is no PowerNap any more on M1 and the Laptop doesn’t really sleep, not in the way it worked on Intel anyway.
In much the same way your phone or iPad throttles back, your laptop is still active while closed, just on the efficiency cores, unless you shut it down.
So for the OP it’s been running in efficiency mode for 5 or 6 days, so that amount of battery drain is understandable.
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The M1 iPad drain should be similar, a few percent a day. I wonder if you’ve a challenging wireless environment in your home/office in some way (or kids who draw on it while you’re not around—that’s how I unexpectedly lose 20-30%!)
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