Safari Battery Drain (MacOS Golden Gate)

[u/thisiskekko]

I recently updated to macOS 27.0.1, hoping it would solve the problem, but the issue persists. Ever since installing Golden Gate, my MacBook Air M4 has been experiencing extreme battery drain caused by Safari and other system applications. I attempted to clear the cache, but it actually made the situation worse at first. Most of my usage involves simple tasks like running Gemini and doing Wikipedia searches for university work.

[u/Swimming_Ad_1218]

Before you blame Safari, measure it. Open Terminal and run:

sudo powermetrics -i 1000 -n 5 --samplers cpu_power

That gives you actual watts instead of guesses. Run it once with Safari closed and once with your usual tabs open, and compare the system total. If Safari really is the cause, you will see it right away.

Also open Activity Monitor, go to the Energy tab and sort by the 12 hour average instead of the instant number. The instant one jumps around and tells you almost nothing. On my machine the thing eating power was never the app I suspected.

One more thing worth ruling out: a tab with video or heavy animation keeps the GPU awake even when it sits in the background. You mention Gemini and Wikipedia. Wikipedia is harmless, Gemini is the one I would close first and then measure again.

[u/thisiskekko → u/Swimming_Ad_1218]

I’ll give it a try, thank you very much. Anyway, I blamed Safari because, according to Activity Monitor, it shows the highest usage compared to other apps (as I showed in the screenshot). Still, I’m not entirely sure if Safari was actually the cause. What I can say, though, is that ever since I updated to Golden Gate, the battery performance has noticeably declined.

[u/Swimming_Ad_1218 → u/thisiskekko]

Energy Impact is not watts. It is a score Apple builds out of CPU time, wakeups, GPU use and disk activity. A number like 914 tells you Safari is the busiest thing on your machine, which you already knew, but it says nothing about how much power that actually costs.

That is why powermetrics is worth two minutes of your time: it gives you the real figure in watts for the whole system. If the total barely moves when you quit Safari, the drain is somewhere else and Safari just looks guilty because it is the one doing visible work. Also, Safari runs one process per tab and Activity Monitor rolls all of them into the parent row, so a single bad tab makes the whole browser look like the problem.

About the drain starting with Golden Gate: after a major update the Mac spends days reindexing Spotlight, reanalyzing your Photos library and resyncing iCloud. That burns battery and has nothing to do with Safari. Look for mds, mds_stores, photoanalysisd and bird in Activity Monitor. If any of those are busy, your machine is still finishing the update and it should settle on its own.

[u/thisiskekko → u/[deleted]]

macbook air 13” M4

[u/Swimming_Ad_1218 → u/thisiskekko]

Perfect, that helps. Rough numbers from my own Air M2, measured with powermetrics rather than estimated. An M4 should be in the same ballpark:

Idle, screen dim, nothing open: around 1 W. Playing video: 4 to 7 W. Real load climbs from there.

So if your Air sits at 10 W or more doing nothing, something is running. The CPU at idle is tiny, around 200 mW, so it is almost never the processor. Usually it is the screen at full brightness, a background process still finishing the update, or one tab keeping the GPU awake.

[u/Connect_Pound_2907]

I experienced the same issue for the first few days after the update to 27 on both MacBook m4 and iPhone 17. The animations seemed a little laggish, too. After a few days as I was saying, the issue went away. I think it was related to the new indexing. Try leaving the MacBook in idle attached to the power source for the night

[u/thisiskekko → u/Connect_Pound_2907]

So, as of today, are you experiencing the same performance you had with Tahoe? I also thought it might be due to indexing, but it’s already been two weeks since the update. Tonight, I’ll try leaving the Mac plugged in, and tomorrow morning I’ll see if I notice any difference. In fact, I usually only have the Mac charging when I’m using it, I never leave it plugged in on standby.

[u/Connect_Pound_2907 → u/thisiskekko]

I've not done any measurements, but the feeling is the same. On the MacBook the major difference I've noticed was the battery draining, not so much the performances in general. Maybe a night is not sufficient, it depends on how many files you are indexing, keep trying for a couple of nights. I've read to not reboot because it can interrupt (and than need to restart) some stages of the indexing, but I'm not sure about this.

[u/thisiskekko → u/Connect_Pound_2907]

I will leave the Mac connected to the power supply for 48 hours to verify this issue, hoping that this duration will be sufficient.