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I've been having some issues with battery life on my MacBook Pro (15", Mid 2010). I thought I had tracked it down when I found out that the battery was near the end of its life (only holding 60% of its maximum charge) and replaced it with a new one and reset the SMC.

However, the battery still drains at an incredibly fast rate, draining in 90 minutes or less with no applications running. The new battery is at 98% of design capacity (6760mAh) and has 7 loadcycles on it, so it doesn't seem to be the culprit.

The one thing that is a possibility is I've noticed some weird behavior from Notification Center—it seems to jump up to 100%+ CPU usage for spurts of time, which I could definitely see as a battery drain (which is a question in itself: why the heck would it be doing that?)

Does anyone have any other suggestions as to what could be causing battery drain?

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  • Where did you purchase the battery from? Through Apple or is it an aftermarket unit from a 3rd party?
    – user10355
    Feb 4, 2014 at 6:25
  • I bought (what was claimed to be) an OEM battery from eBay. I had that worry myself and checked it out, but all the serial numbers, models, label positioning, fonts, warning type, etc. seem to be the same. It could just be a very high quality knockoff, but I doubt it.
    – redct
    Feb 5, 2014 at 6:13

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If something is using that much CPU it will definitely eat your battery. I'm not completely sure what is causing it but you might wan to download the latest update to your OS (10.9.1 or something of the sort) and re-install it. If it keeps happening you might need to reinstall OS X. I hate re-installing an operating system if at all necessary but I'm not sure what is causing the CPU spike.

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  • It does indeed seem to be Notification Center as the culprit. Using the top -o method below, I've found out that the binary seems to have run up over 27 hours(!) of CPU time and seems to be holding constant at 120% CPU usage. I'll definitely try an update reinstall.
    – redct
    Feb 5, 2014 at 6:17
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    Have you tried killing the process, finding the plist file for notification centre, backing up the old one then deleting it and letting the system recreate one. The issue may be a corrupt plist file for notification centre.
    – Deesbek
    Feb 5, 2014 at 13:44
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Before a reinstall I would do some troubleshooting with:

top -o cpu

once you find the culprit using your cpu, I would see what is going on using

opensnoop

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