Why Your MacBook Battery Drains Fast

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Do you think your MacBook's battery is draining too fast? Let me show you how to figure out if it really is and how to make it last longer.

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Now I often see comments online from people that have MacBooks and think that the battery just drains too fast. Well, there is usually a good reason for this. You see battery drain depends on what you're doing with your MacBook. It is just like a car. It is not going to use much fuel if it is parked. But it will if you're driving it on the highway. On the Mac if you're doing more it's going to use more power. But it is not as simple as just thinking about which apps you're using. It's how you're using those apps as well. For instance, you could be using a graphic's app to edit a small icon or a huge high resolution multi-layered magazine cover. A spreadsheet could be a few hundred rows or tens of thousands of rows with lots of calculations. When editing a video you could just be combining two clips or you could be creating a multi-layered video with titles, backgrounds, special effects and so on. This is also true if all you're doing is just browsing the web. You could be just looking at a static text page that's hardly using any energy or you could be looking at a page with hundreds of different elements that are calling back to the server, animating things, playing streaming video, and so on. A webpage can be using almost no energy or a lot of it. 

Now instead of just having a feeling that your battery is draining fast, you can actually check to see exactly how fast it drains by just going into System Settings and then if you go down to Battery, make sure you select last 24 hours here. You're going to see a chart of where your battery was at during that time. So you can see here it was being charged up to here, it was at 100% for a while and then it drained down over a period of time. Remained steady overnight. It drained down a little bit more. Steady again and drained down. So you can get a really good idea of how long it is actually taking your battery to drain. 

A quick way to check to see what's using the most battery is to look at the battery icon here in the Menu Bar. If you don't see the battery icon there you could always add it by going to System Settings and then going to Control Center and then here you'll find Battery. Select Show In Menu Bar. If you click this it will show using significant energy and will show you the apps that are using a lot of energy right now. So if you notice your battery is draining a lot right now these are probably the culprits here. But there is a problem with this. This is very much in the moment. So, for instance, if you notice that your battery has drained a lot in the last few hours and you look here you may see that nothing is using a lot of energy. That's because the battery drain has taken place over the last couple of hours but not necessarily over the last five or ten minutes. So this only works to see what's happening right now.

So you can see now just a short time later, if I checked battery again, it shows me no apps are using significant energy even though I know some were using significant energy just a short time ago. So this isn't always very useful in diagnosing battery drain. 

To find out what's been happening over a longer period of time you're going to want to use an app that is on your Mac called Activity Monitor. I'm going to launch it here using Launchpad. I'm just going to search for Activity Monitor here and run it. By default Activity Monitor is going to show you all the different apps and processes running on your Mac and how much CPU they are using. But that's not what you're interested in. You want to know how much energy they are using. You can see here there is a tab at the top for Energy. So, switch to that and then you'll see all of the apps and processes running and you'll see a few columns that will help. 

One is the Energy Impact. This tells you how much energy it is using right now. If I click on that to Sort. There's Goggle Chrome, there's Safari, there's iMovie. These are using the most energy right now. But the next column here shows you the energy used over the last 12 hours. This gives you a clearer picture of what has been recently using a lot of energy even if you're not actually even running the app at the moment. This will show you results that make more sense. So, for instance, here I can see in the last 12 hours Safari, Goggle Chrome, the Photos App, and iMovie have been using a lot of power. But it is very important to remember to weigh that against your actual use. For instance, if an app is using a lot of power, but that is actually what you have been doing mostly with your MacBook, then it makes sense. So if you've been editing a lot in Final Cut Pro over the last few hours and Final Cut Pro has been using the most power, well that fits!. That's what is supposed to happen. But if you see an app there that you barely have been using, or it is just running in the background, you're not actually actively using it, and that's using a lot of power, well then that is suspect. You may want to quit that app or make sure you don't use it while you're connected to the battery if you want your battery to last longer.

But it is not always about the app itself, because apps can be doing several different things. For instance, with Safari here notice I can expand this and it will show me the parts of Safari and how much power they are using. Notice that some of these actually show websites. So this is a way to figure out which tabs in Safari are using a lot of power. You can see the one using the most power right now, for instance, is a tab with Yahoo. So these, of course, have tons of different elements, lots of things going on on them. So it makes sense. If I go down further I can see other sites here that are not using nearly as much. These have a lot of open tabs right now but they are barely using any power. Because when you're thinking about which apps are using a lot of energy, it's important to think about what the apps are doing. In the case of a browser it's actually an environment running many different apps. Each one of those being a different webpage. So here I've got 5 tabs open and just because Safari is using a lot of power doesn't mean all five of these tabs are. Only a few of them might be. 

Now Safari is nice enough to report energy use per tab, like that. But non-Apple apps may not do that. For instance, Goggle Chrome certainly had different processes running here but you can't really tell which Goggle Chrome tab is using the most energy. You can make some good guesses though. You can look at what's on a page and figure out that a page has a lot of stuff going on and that's probably using a lot of energy as opposed to a page that is mostly text. Of course it is pretty well known that Goggle Chrome, as a browser, uses a lot more energy than say Safari. But, Chrome does actually have a tool in it to let you know which tabs are using the most energy. You can get to it by clicking on the Three Dots Button here and then going to More Tools. Then go, not to Performance, but to Task Manager. In Task Manager here you'll see different tabs like this and you'll see how much CPU the tab is using. So it is not a perfect measurement of energy but it might give you a good idea. 

Of course the way to fix this is to close tabs that you are not using. I often see people that are afraid to close tabs because they think they might go back to that page later. But it's very easy to go back to a webpage after you've closed the tab. If it is just the main page of a website just open a new tab and go there. If it is a specific page there just Bookmark it and jump right back to it when you need it. Don't be afraid to close tabs or if you are afraid of closing tabs, don't complain that your battery is draining fast because this is the reason why.

Remember it is perfectly okay to keep your MacBook plugged in while you're using it. If power is available, why not. You'll need fewer battery cycles so it will increase your battery's longevity. Plus your battery will actually run faster if it has access to power rather than running off the battery. This will be a signal to use the high powered CPU cords rather than the efficiency ones. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.