How To Diagnose Battery Drain on a MacBook

Using your MacBook while not plugged in means the battery will drain. But which apps are using more energy than others? By paying attention to battery use on a per-app basis, you can optimize how you use your MacBook went battery life is important.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to figure out what is draining the battery on your MacBook.
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So often I'm asked questions by people who are wondering what is draining the battery on their MacBook. Well of course the answer to that is probably a particular app or something you're doing in an app. You can find out what is using the most energy by looking in the right place in your MacBook. So there are a few places you can look in your Mac to see what's going on with your battery. The first is to go into System Settings. From there scroll down, of course, to Battery. Here you're going to find a graph. You can switch between 24 hour and 10 days. Chances are you want to look at what's going on recently. So the 24 hour battery level graph here will show you the battery level over time. You could see this little bar here at the bottom showing when your MacBook was plugged in. So in this case I can see that the battery level was maxed out during that time. Then when it was unplugged and then used on Battery it gradually went down. Sometimes it went down a little more than at other times. But all of this is time without it being connected to power. So the battery is being used.
If you look here under that you'll see the screen use. So these blue lines represent when you're actually using your Mac. The screen is on. So you can see during this time I'm using my Mac and there's a gradual decrease in the amount of power left in the battery. Sometimes it's very small. Other times it jumps a little bit. Probably indicating that I was doing something using more energy at that given moment. Then you could see here I stopped using the MacBook and I left it not plugged in overnight. You could see here there was a little bit of drain, probably while it was doing system maintenance. That's perfectly fine. It's going to have to use that energy and do that System Maintenance while it is sleeping at night or if you're using it during the day. Better to have it doing it while you're not using your Mac. Ideally, you'd simply have your Mac plugged in overnight and then any system Maintenance wouldn't be using the battery at all and start off each new day at 100%.
Now this is very useful for telling me when the battery was draining and maybe I'll remember what I was doing at those times. What would be even better is if I could see which app specifically was using the most power. You can! To do that you're going to use the app called Activity Monitor that is on your Mac. I'm going to launch it here using Launchpad and then it will bring up a list of processes that are running and a default how much CPU power they are using. Now we're not really interested in these numbers here. We're interested in energy use. So let's switch to Energy here at the top. Now we're going to see a list of apps and now much energy they are using. The two columns that are really important are Energy Impact and 12-hour Power.
So Energy Impact shows you a number that indicates how much power that app is using right now. The numbers really don't relate to any specific unit. They are just relative to each other. So if you see something that has, say, a 10 and something else that has a 5 then the 10 is using twice as much power as the 5. Here I could see only Activity Monitor is really using any significant energy right now. But if I were to bring some of these other apps to the front, like Photos here, and maybe flip through some photos. If I were to bring up Numbers and run some calculations and maybe Safari here and have some video and move around in that video in Safari. Then I'm actually using things and if I switch to Activity Monitor you'll see those things show up with a higher number. Here is Safari with a 5.8 right now for instance and I've still got it open in the background.
Now the other number that you want to pay attention to is 12-hour Power. What that does is take this number and averages it over the last 12 hours. So this only tells you what you're using right now. If something was draining your battery over the last couple of hours and you just stopped using it and you looked here it's not going to give you any indication of what's going on. But the 12 hour average will. You can sort by these two columns. So I can sort by Energy Impact with the largest number at the top like that. Or 12-hour Power with the largest number at the top. This really gives me a better sense of what is going on. Here I can see, for instance, that Safari, News, and Chrome are the three top ones here.
You could also click here to reveal the webpages that Safari is using and see which ones are using the most power. So if you're browsing the web in Safari and have lots of tabs open and you notice the battery is draining a lot right now you can use this to see which webpage, specifically, is using that power. Each webpage is kind of like its own little app. It has code and graphics and streaming content and all of that. It's not always obvious which page is using the most power. The one with a lot of graphics and a lot going on may not actually be using more power than a quieter page that actually has more going on in the background.
Now it is also important to think about you App use. For instance, Safari seems to be using more than twice the power that Chrome is. But if I use Safari 90% of the time and Chrome 10% of the time then the Chrome number is actually more concerning than the Safari number. The same thing for a game that you may only use for five minutes here and there and you may find that number is really high compared to the amount of time you're actually using that app.
If you're not sure which apps you're using the most you can always go back into System Settings. Then go to Screen Time. Then in there you could go to App Usage. Here you're going to get a list of your apps and how much you use them. So, for instance, here you could see Safari was used for an hour and 14 minutes today. Whereas Chrome only 9 minutes today. If you select the app itself you can actually see these little meters with the blue part of these bars being how much you're actually using that app compared to how much you're using the computer. So you can switch to different apps and see those amounts there. So using the value in Screen Time with the value in Activity Monitor gives you a good idea of which apps may be using the most energy.
So I always have to weigh the energy use for the app with how much you actually use the app to really get an accurate picture of how much energy that app is using.
So practical ways you can use all this information is perhaps at the end of a day where you've used your battery a lot you can go in, figure out what app was using the most energy and keep that in mind the next time you have a day where you have to rely on your battery a lot. Perhaps, for instance, there's an app or a webpage that you use to take a break and it's not really that important but you see it is using a lot of energy. Then on days when battery power is very important to you you can try avoid doing that. So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: Mac Hardware (37 videos)
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