macOS Tahoe Battery Life Worse?
A fair number of Mac users have found that macOS Tahoe has notably reduced the battery life and battery performance of their MacBook hardware. Looking around online, you’ll find a variety of complaints from MacBook Pro and MacBook Air users about quickly draining battery and significant reductions in battery life in general, since installing the macOS Tahoe update.
While it’s fairly common for MacOS to be slow with less-than-great performance after installing a new system software update as MacOS runs indexing and background tasks, that process is usually self-limiting and resolves itself in a day or few. The battery issues that some macOS Tahoe users are complaining about do not resolve after that initial indexing process has finished, however.
Potential battery and performance issues like this are why some users delay updating to macOS Tahoe as they’ll likely be worked out in future bug fix updates, whether that arrives as MacOS 26.1, MacOS 26.2, macOS 26.3, or later, is yet to be determined.
Here we will review some tips to help battery life and to identify what is draining battery quickly with macOS Tahoe, to improve things where they can be.
1: Just Updated a Mac to Tahoe and Battery is Bad? Let Indexing Complete
As usual, if you just recently updated to macOS Tahoe, MacOS kicks off a bunch of indexing and background tasks to get things situated for search, files, object and people recognition in Photos, cache pruning, and much more. All of this behavior is normal and expected after installing a major system update like macOS Tahoe.
Most users find that if they connect their MacBook Pro or MacBook Air to a power source for a day or few overnight, this process will complete and battery life will improve.
A good number of users who initially report battery draining problems with macOS Tahoe are finding their battery issues are directly related to this reindexing period, so simply let these tasks finish, and it’s likely that your battery life will improve again too.
2: Use Reduce Transparency to Limit Liquid Glass Excesses
The new Liquid Glass design has been polarizing, but whether you like the look of Liquid Glass or not might be secondary to any potential performance problems associated with all of the usage of transparency and translucency throughout the operating system. Drawing fancy eye candy on screen uses more system resources, and using more system resources requires more energy usage, which leads to reduced battery life. Therefore, if you turn off the transparent effects of Liquid Glass on macOS Tahoe, you can potentially improve your MacBook battery life a bit.
Go to System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce Transparency to the ON position
You might find that using Reduce Transparency offers a bit of an improvement to battery life and macOS Tahoe performance in general
3: Aggressively Close Browser Tabs/Windows & Mindful of Safari Memory Leaks
Safari in macOS Tahoe appears to have some issues with memory leaking in long-open browser tabs or windows. This can cause significant swapping, disk read/write, and CPU usage as well, all of which will contribute to quicker battery drain and higher energy consumption.
In the screenshot shown here, we can see two Safari tabs left overnight have ballooned to enormous sizes of memory, more than the Mac has with physical RAM. Upon waking the Mac from sleep, the computer was nearly unusably slow, and killing these two errant Safari processes fixed the issue (though leaving tabs open seems for long seems to recreate the problem quickly).
For the time being, be aggressive about closing Safari browser tabs and browser windows, and do not let them sit idle in the background for an extended duration.
Another solution is to use a different web browser in macOS Tahoe, like Chrome or Brave, though those browsers may have their own different performance issues in Tahoe as well.
Also be mindful that if you use extensions, plugins, and Content Blockers in Safari, you will want to keep them updated as well, as sometimes compatibility issues with older plugins and extensions on newer Safari versions can lead to performance problems.
4: Find Battery Draining Apps with Activity Monitor
You can use Activity Monitor to track down apps and processes that are consuming a lot of energy, thereby reducing your battery life.
Open Activity Monitor (through Spotlight or via /Applications/Utilities/) and go to the “Energy” tab, then sort by “Energy Impact” to find the apps and processes using the most energy.
You will also see at the bottom of the Energy window your time on battery, and estimated battery life remaining. As you can see in the various screenshots on this article, the battery life on this M3 MacBook Air with macOS Tahoe is not impressive.
5: Minimize Usage of Slack, Discord, & Electron Apps Due to Known Bug, Update Those Apps When Possible
A known GPU bug exists with Electron apps on macOS Tahoe, and this includes popular apps like Slack, Discord, VS Code, and more.
Keep an eye on updates for those apps, and install them right away if you see updates available to them, as the known bug can lead to performance problems, and thus battery drain.
If the Electron apps you use do not yet have updates available for them and they’re causing battery drain or other performance issues, consider minimizing the usage of those apps when you are trying to extend battery life.
This is a known problem and it appears related to a drop shadow bug causing significant performance issues for some Electron apps, Chrome, and other Chromium based web browsers
Some users have found what appears to be an AutoFill bug that causes scrolling to be choppy and errant GPU usage, which can lead to reduced performance and battery draining faster than expected. While that thread offers a defaults write command to workaround the issue, it disables autofill across MacOS, which is not desirable for most users, so we aren’t covering that specifically.
6: Use Low Power Mode to Extend Battery Life
You can usually squeeze another hour or so out of your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air battery by toggling on “Low Power Mode”, a feature that reduces energy usage (and performance) of the Mac while enabled, to extend battery life.
You can toggle this on from the Battery menu > Low Power Mode, or through System Settings > Battery > Low Power Mode > Only on battery
7: Reduce Screen Brightness As Much As Possible
Reducing your Mac screen brightness to 50% or less can also offer a significant improvement to battery life. This isn’t always possible, depending on the lighting conditions you are working with, but if you can reduce the brightness of your display as much as tolerable, it will certainly improve battery life as the display is using less energy.
How good or bad is your battery life in macOS Tahoe?
Various complaints regarding battery life and macOS Tahoe can be found throughout the web, and I personally have also noticed significant battery life reductions on my MacBook Air since updating to macOS Tahoe.
After installing macOS Tahoe onto my MacBook Air, total battery life plunged to about 2:30 hours (yes two and a half hours) when starting from 100% charge.
After making the tweaks mentioned above, including enabling Low Power Mode, I can squeeze out just over four hours on a 100% charge now with macOS Tahoe. This is really not great, especially on a MacBook Air that used to easily last 8+ hours and is well known for having great battery life.
If you’re experiencing issues with bad battery life in macOS Tahoe, you’re certainly not alone. You can find plenty of complaints on Apple support forums and elsewhere, though nobody really has a clear answer or solution, it’s just that; complaints.
Hopefully the tips we have mentioned here will help you a bit if you’re experiencing battery problems with macOS Tahoe. Remember to keep your Mac up to date, install any available system software updates to macOS Tahoe, along with updates to apps you use regularly.
To be clear, battery issues with new operating systems are not new, and a fair number of users have also discovered that iPhone battery life is worse after updating to iOS 26 as well, though not always to such a dramatic extent that some Mac users are experiencing. It’s important to remember these are early releases of major new operating systems, and over time Apple will release updates that will undoubtedly improve performance of battery, and in general. Keep your devices up to date, whether they’re a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, and in time things will likely improve.
