Earlier this year, I bought a barely used (literally, almost never used) 2019 Intel-based Apple Macbook Pro for a steal. Fully loaded, dual GPUs, large SSD, lots of RAM.
The only snag I had is that power management doesn’t really work. I could put the computer into sleep mode – and come back the next morning and 12% of the battery had been drained overnight.
I reset a lot of options, but nothing fixed it.
Then, I discovered a simple trick – if I turn off Wi-Fi (and Bluetooth), and then put it to sleep mode – the battery no longer drains. Finally, sleep mode works correctly. (Update: Almost correctly. In power off mode, the battery no longer drains much, but in sleep mode last night, it drained 7% of the battery.)
I also had a onetime occurrence where I’d shut the case – but the computer, supposedly in sleep mode, saw the battery go to zero overnight. It seems in some situations, it doesn’t actually enter sleep mode and ended up staying awake the whole night until the battery was down to 1%.
A simple way to prevent that is to press the Caps Lock key, which turns on a tiny green LED. Now put the computer to sleep – wait for the LED to turn off and then shut the lid.
In all seriousness, Apple messed up power management – none of this should be necessary, but at least there are possible work arounds once discovered.
A search online found many, many, many posts from users of the Apple Macbook Pro with the same battery power draining problem. From the company described as where everything just works, this power management issue is sort of embarrassing.
I like Apple hardware but they are not as good as they think they are. Over the years, I have had many Mac products and there is a long history of oddities among the collection.
