Last night, I noticed my 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 was draining the battery really fast. I calculated and it was losing about 10% of battery every hour. I got worried and got to search why the MacBook Pro M1 battery was draining fast, and to my surprise, I wasn’t the only one with this issue.
After a quick look through a few Reddit and Apple discussion forum threads, I found that several people have been reporting issues with M1 MacBook Air/Pro losing battery faster than usual.
I ditched my 10th-gen Intel i5 MacBook Pro for an M1 MacBook Pro primarily for the longer battery life. Even if it doesn’t get the advertised battery life, reviewers were getting over 12 hours easily.
In my own testing, I was able to get over 10 hours of battery life with 20% battery remaining. In those 10 hours, the Mac wasn’t idle for a moment. I had an hour-long Zoom call, several episodes of The Big Bang Theory, and constant typing with heavy browsing on Chrome — arguably the heaviest browser you can run on a Mac.
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To go from there to losing 10% of charge every hour sounded like a disaster. Per a few forum threads, other users have gone through reinstalling macOS only to find no resolutions. I have a ton of things installed on my Mac so I really didn’t want to go through reinstalling the OS.
Then I noticed, I was running macOS Big Sur 11.1 when the battery was draining fast. I thought — might I say, I kind of prayed — that upgrading to the latest version would solve the issue.
So I upgraded to macOS Big Sur 11.2 and charged the battery up to a 100%.
I then started using the MacBook Pro on battery power and started with an hour-long Zoom call. The battery lost only 4% of charge in the first hour, going down to 96% from a full battery. I was relieved! Apparently, upgrading to macOS Big Sur 11.2 solved the battery draining issue on my M1 MacBook Pro.
As with most things tech, it’s likely that your mileage may vary. But I noticed that most of the forum posts are from December or January and the latest version of Big Sur, 11.2, was released in February. So if you are still having problem with high battery usage on your M1 MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, try upgrading to macOS Big Sur 11.2 and see if that solves the issue.
At a glance
M1 MacBook Pro battery losing power fast?
Several people, including myself, have noticed the M1 MacBook Pro losing battery power at a faster than average rate. It was losing battery power at about 10% an hour.
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How to fix the M1 MacBook Pro battery draining?
For me, upgrading the macOS version on an M1 MacBook Pro to Big Sur 11.2 fixed the battery draining issue for me. After I upgraded, the problem with the battery losing its power fast went away almost instantly. I’ve been on a Zoom meeting for an hour, and it’s lost only 4% battery power.
I should mention I was running Zoom’s M1 version which might be helping save the battery life even further.
Why is MacBook Pro M1 battery draining the Mac is turned off?
I noticed this too. I turned off the MacBook Pro M1 and it lost a significant amount of battery power over the weekend. I really don’t know what caused it or why it was losing battery so fast even when it wasn’t in use.
But I’m excited to report that this problem too went away after I upgraded to macOS Big Sur 11.2.
So for now, I suggest upgrading to macOS 11.2 and hopefully, that will solve the issue for you. If not, I’m not really sure what else you can do other than wait for Apple to release a fix.
Is the M1 MacBook Pro battery draining a hardware problem?
It’s logical to think that something is wrong with your battery when it suddenly starts losing power so fast. However, I don’t really think it’s a hardware issue. If it were a hardware issue, it wouldn’t have been solved for me after I upgraded to macOS 11.2.
If you are still facing an issue with your Mac losing battery faster than usual, I’d say keep an eye on the forum threads and keep checking them every few days for any official or unofficial fixes.
I am still draining my M1 MB Pro at 10% every hour even though I have been using bigsur 11.2. Can you help?
Hmm, I haven’t had that issue yet, although I should mention that now that I have a few more applications on my M1 Mac, it loses more than 4% battery charge per hour (which I assume is normal). It’s not 10% per hour yet, though.
Perhaps you can review what apps are running in the background? Check Activity Monitor → go to Energy tab → look at ’12 hr power’ column to understand what might be draining the most battery power. For me, it’s Chrome. But I’m not unhappy at the rate the battery discharges now, so you would want to start there to find out if there’s an app that’s using more battery power than it should.
My M1 Pro already has 98% of battery health after only 29 cycles of charging. So i bet they fix some issues with software but the most batteries on M1 are not working properly and Apple doesn’t want to admit the issue
mine is one month old and the batt life is atrocious compared to my tried and true MBA from 2014. It makes me want to return the new one …