14 DAY TRIAL // A thread that has been visited more than 90,000 times on Apple Support Communities is actively discussing a battery drain issue involving OS X Mavericks on Mid-2013 MacBook Air computers. The discussion has been there since October 2013 and Apple is only now addressing the situation.
Thread starter scintoon wrote in October, “I recently installed Mavericks onto my Macbook Air 2013, Haswell, 128GB i5 model I find that the battery drains very quickly; in general it only shows an estimate of less than 6 hours with just Chrome open. Before it used to be 10-12 hours+. I used to not notice when the battery percentage would go down; now every few minutes I notice it slowly decreasing.”
User cKersley chimed in to say, “Same problem on my macbook Air 11, 2013 Haswell,. My battery has a 4h life since Mavericks upgrade and was 8h before. I've made a real test, without taking in account the time remaining shown in the tool bar. I was just using Google Chrome for the 4 hours.”
Soon thereafter, near-identical reports started pouring in and they kept coming until this very day. Now, eight months after the troubles were initially reported, Apple claims to have a fix.
MacBook Air SMC Update v2.0 is now available for download on MacBook Air (Mid 2013) models. According to the accompanying release notes, “This update addresses an issue which may cause the battery to drain faster than expected when the lid is closed.”
The Cupertino tech giant doesn’t include any specifics, and it even outlines that the update is not only for Mavericks users, but also for Mountain Lion customers.
According to separate, smaller threads that are actively discussing the same battery drain issue, Google Chrome may be somewhat responsible as well.
Weighing in at just 804 KB, MacBook Air SMC Update v2.0 goes onto OS X Mavericks 10.9.2 & later and OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5 & later. The installer package supports various different languages, including French, English, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, and others.
MacBook Air Mid 2013 users can download MacBook Air SMC Update v2.0 either from Softpedia, Apple Support Downloads, or via Software Update (through the Mac App Store) on their very Mac.
Battery drainage is a common occurrence on all portable devices, including smartphones and tablets. While there are instances where the firmware is faulty and is causing excessive CPU/GPU workload, it is actually the third-party apps installed on the system that are generally the culprit.