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Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

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Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#121

Post by AlphaSite »

geoelectric wrote: post #28
ben_w wrote: post #23

Huh. That explains why my MacBook Air is doing so much worse than I expected from the number of cycles it’s reporting. It’s a mid-2013, so I’m not expecting much, but a few times I’ve seen “100%” when waking it unplugged, only for this to be immediately followed by an emergency shutdown, and when the reboot completes it claims “42%”. It’s plugged in almost continuously these days.

If you check the power tab under System Information, you can find some battery health info that might be illuminating. For example, my newish MBP16: Charge Information: Charge Remaining (mAh): 8362 Fully Charged: Yes Charging: No Full Charge Capacity (mAh): 8647 Health Information: Cycle Count: 18 Condition: Normal Looking it up, specced full capacity is 8818 mAh, so I'm at 98% health right now--probably lost a point…

I suspect the original capacity must have some variance.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#122

Post by noisem4ker »

duskwuff wrote: post #107
Lammy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of how they changed Finder in Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) to report disk capacity in base-10 bytes instead of base-2 bytes.

Eh. That was more for consistency with how storage devices are sold -- if a 10^30 byte hard disk is described by storage vendors as "1 TB", it's incredibly confusing to users to have it show up as "931 GB".

There's nothing wrong with letting users learn how hard disk marketers are ripping them off, instead of playing their game. But, as usual, Apple prefers to choose blissful ignorance for their sheep customers.

Besides that, we have proper units for binary multiples: KiB, MiB, and so on. I've only seen KDE use them properly so far, and it's a shame.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#123

Post by giancarlostoro »

Sephr wrote: post #119

It would be nice if I could keep my MacBook battery at a healthy level without having to drain it. With the MacBook Pro 16 you can easily draw enough energy to drain your battery while using a 100W power adapter. Dell addressed to this issue in their USB-C laptops by making and allowing 130W power adapters. Apple requires you to tap into your non-user-replaceable battery to supplant the power usage.

I had the issue that my charger was overheating so much it would stop charging entirely. Had to ask the IT guy for a 2nd charger so I can swap between the two to make sure my laptop wouldnt lose its charge. My former employer had us all with Macbook Pros even though due to the nature of our work we couldnt do jack while outside of the office. Still unsure why they didnt just buy us iMacs.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#124

Post by noisem4ker »

rb808 wrote: post #105

Its amazing how dumb most charging is for smart devices. I plug my phone in every night and it does a quick charge then sits there and does nothing the rest of the night. It even knows my alarm clock time, surely it should be smart enough to slowly charge all night.

On my old Galaxy Nexus running CyanogenMod, quick charging had to be explicitly activated. I still think that off-by-default is the most sane configuration, as I've rarely needed it.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#125

Post by bertil »

jb775 wrote: post #30

>Charging a modern laptop battery to 100% and leaving it there for extended periods of time—especially at warm temperatures—can dramatically reduce the battery’s usable life. This has been known for years, and this feature is relatively simple to build. I don't think it's an act of benevolence from Apple, I think the estimated cost of another class-action lawsuit has surpassed the estimated gain from decreasing the p…

I’d be surprised if the risk wasn’t seriously mitigated by hiding that option in an obscure enough menu, or a command-line tool.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#126

Post by lilyball »

jb775 wrote: post #93
lilyball wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just get rid of built-in batteries entirely Built-in batteries allow for custom battery shapes that increase battery life or allow for thinner computers at the same battery life. They increase laptop durability by not requiring a removable battery cover. They allow for putting other components on top of the battery as well to better take advantage of the space inside the enclosure. > it facilitates a privac…

> How does it do that? If I remove my laptop battery, I know no one can tap into my hardware covertly. E.g. turn on the microphone, enable bluetooth hardware to see who I'm near, enable 3G/4G hardware to track which cell towers I'm near, etc. I'd gladly deal with a battery cover on my MacBook in exchange for definite privacy. Better yet, remove the battery from inside the laptop entirely and can plug one in via USB-C…

For such a niche use case, just stick the thing in a faraday cage bag. It doesn't matter that it has power if it can't exchange any signals with the outside world.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#127

Post by sambe »

dartdartdart wrote: post #5

For people who use their laptops primarily as plugged in machines, there should be a 50% max charge mode.

Why is it not possible to completely save the battery when on AC? i.e. charge the battery to 100% (or something close) but power the laptop directly via the charger.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#128

Post by Marsymars »

cmckn wrote: post #80

Why doesn't the UI report 80% as 100%? It seems like exposing this to the user is more confusing than anything, when the cells could be over provisioned and treated politely by a system controller, without the user being part of the decision. Aren't SSD's over provisioned in this manner? You sell a drive with a terabyte of storage, but actually ship more than a terabyte of chips in the case to accommodate degradation…

> Why doesn't the UI report 80% as 100%?

The Verge piece on this says that this is what will happen.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/16/21223607/macbook-battery-...

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#129

Post by chipotle_coyote »

cmckn wrote: post #80

Why doesn't the UI report 80% as 100%? It seems like exposing this to the user is more confusing than anything, when the cells could be over provisioned and treated politely by a system controller, without the user being part of the decision. Aren't SSD's over provisioned in this manner? You sell a drive with a terabyte of storage, but actually ship more than a terabyte of chips in the case to accommodate degradation…

> Why doesn't the UI report 80% as 100%?

Because the last time they tried "silently manage the battery without the user being part of the decision" it didn't go over real well?

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