10.5 binary and poor battery life

erik_bille
New Contributor

Hi there,

I've noticed a significantly shorter battery life on my MBP 13" after enrolling it in a 10.5 Jamf Pro lab/testing/hobby server for inventory and some light testing.

My initial thought was that the battery is starting to wear out after three years of faithful service, but after some testing at work (the company I work for is an AASP amongst other things) where the battery health indicator ended up right in the middle of the green area, and in combination with feeling like there had been a quite rapid decrease in battery life, this lead me to start thinking back to what changes I'd made to the machine. I later realised that enrolling it in my testing JSS was the most significant change of lately.

The JSS contains almost no policies or config profile so far, and none of the ones in there is scoped to my machine, except for the inventory update one. This eliminates the possibility of sub-optimal scoping, scripting or logic in policy design from my side draining the battery.

That was about to be it really, me thinking that this is my very light way of learning the hard way not to use your primary machine for testing, and later that evening removing the binary from the computer. However, the next day I started prepping a brand new MacBook Adorable (MacBook 12". Courtesy of the Accidental Tech Podcast) to be delivered on the day after. I enrolled it in a production 10.5 JSS and had it run through all the policies and what not. Leaving it overnight, lid closed and power unplugged, and found it having discharged from 100% to almost 30%.

The draining of the battery seems to be regardless of whether the computer is left lid open or closed, allowed to go to sleep or not.

To round off the excessively long post I'd like to ask whether anyone else has noticed a decrease in battery life on machines enrolled in 10.5 JSSes?

Cheers!

3 REPLIES 3

scafide
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hey Erik!

Activity Monitor.app is pretty good at pointing out culprits - anything chewing through CPU or Memory Cycles? Intensive disk usage? Activity Monitor has an Energy tab which monitors the current and average energy usage impact over the last 12 hours as well. Might provide some useful info.

Thanks!

Look
Valued Contributor III

Sounds like something is preventing it from sleeping, or alternatively running a pretty long task every time it wakes to check for changes, something like an inventory update set to ongoing might do this.
Make sure enable power nap is disabled as well.

sdagley
Esteemed Contributor II

@erik.bille Any chance you had an Apple Remote Desktop session going with that MBP when that happened? I've seen ARD sessions prevent full sleep activation with the lid closed.