MacBook Air Battery Drain While Sleeping
I bought a MacBook Air in June this year, refurbished. I didn’t really use it a lot for day to day work, and when I didn’t use it I was charging it. It was very convenient - it weighs practically nothing and has almost no impact on me while traveling. When I cut back on using it, I noticed a few things.
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When I’d leave it unplugged for a few days, the battery would be dead. After a bit of testing I noticed I was losing roughly 25% of my battery life overnight if it wasn’t unplugged.
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It started creaking when I’d open it. I was genuinely concerned it would just fall apart when I was trying to open it.
Obviously both of these things suck, so after a bit I brought it to the Apple store. They pretty much replaced everything in it - battery, logic board, screen bezel, hinges, and gave it back to me. So problem #2 was solved, but for some reason I kept seeing the battery issue.
I brought it back Monday of this week. The guy there (Ryan) explained to me that since I wasn’t up to date w/ my software, the tech guys would basically just give it back and refuse to work on it. He suggested resetting the PRAM and calibrating the battery. He also didn’t seem to think that losing 25% battery overnight was weird, even though I’ve owned 2 MacBook Pros and 2 iBooks that never had this issue - I could leave my MacBook Pro unplugged for days and it would only lose a few %.
I did these things, but it didn’t make a difference. It was only after a ton of looking around that someone suggested turning off bluetooth.
After turning off bluetooth, I let the laptop sit overnight in sleep. I checked it the next morning, and it was only down 4% from the night before. Huge improvement. I think I could have accomplished the same thing if I turned off the “Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer” setting, but since I’m not using it, I’d rather just disable it.
Anyway, if anyone knows anything else about this issue, I’m interested to find out more. I like the Air as a “sit on the couch and browse the web” laptop, hate it for doing any sort of IDE development. Also not great for playing Scrabble on Facebook - it can’t hold the entire board on the screen. Lame.
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