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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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, thats purely to prevent repair. Its perfectly possible to have a removable battery and to just not boot when one is not inserted. Thats how phones used to work ~2013

A removable battery requires its own protective shell, which costs weight and thickness. When it's not user serviceable, it can just be a bag of acid resting on the main board, piggybacking on the device's own case for the required protection.

Non-removable just means it's soldered down. Open a phone and you will see that the batteries certainly have just the kind of plastic shell that they always had.

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

#272
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all... I remember my 540c running without a battery.

My 180c would run without its battery, as well as my 3400c. I believe the 190 too.

Interesting. My 180 would not run without the battery.

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

#273
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most irritating thing about the iPhone. Phone shuts down in the middle of an important call? Sorry, you'll have to wait 15 minutes before you can call again. This doesn't happen in my Pixel phones. Plug it it, turn it on. I would be irritated to no end if this happened to my laptop.

Well here's the challenging thing -- your phone may be way overdue for a battery replacement, or you've run your phone like this well over the average user -- so it's been doing this to save you from having no phone at all. But you don't credit Apple with the 2nd part, and blame it for the 1st part. It's tough to make something for customers, huh? Not making a personal jab at you -- just illustrating the difficultly…

I'm not an iPhone user, so maybe I am wrong about this. But I would expect my phone to give me a warning when it is about 3 minutes before shutdown. This way I still have a reasonable amount of time to bring whatever I am doing at the moment into a graceful stop.

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

#274
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…

I believe macOS already does this. Not down to 80%, but sometimes when it shows 100% and you check the battery info, it shows that it is actually still charging.

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

#275
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it makes you feel any better I branched off to a XPS 13 2in1 4 months ago in between jobs (where I use the latest mbp) and used the thing for 2-3 months with no MBP as backup. I absolutely hate it. It throttles constantly even after undervolting it. I had to do a bunch of black magic to get it to sleep properly (which is evidently happening to every Dell) and eventually gave up on that and just set it to hibernate…

Might be worth trying Linux on that. At least you'd have more control over the sleep issues. I have a Dell Precision 7540 that I was having issues getting sleep to work. It would panic on resuming I think because of WiFi but I couldn't fix it. So I enabled "hybrid-sleep" which is like hibernate and sleep together. Before it sleeps, it flushes the RAM to disk. When it wakes up, it tries to boot from RAM and, if succes…

I have arch linux on that same machine and there are indeed a million knobs to tune these things. I haven't yet managed to make it work as good as a macbook, after putting in around ~100h by now into the problem.

I went back to macbooks ~1 month ago. The Dell is still brand new (4 months old, ~4000$ fully spec'ed), but my employer does not want it back, so it is now sitting in a drawer in my office.

I ended up billing my employer for the ~120h I spent on "configuring" the laptop over the 4 months. With that included, the laptop costed my employer about 14.000$.

Now I'm using my personal 2013 macbook air instead, and am finally able to get something done, yet I'm not happy with having to use my own laptop for work.

Had they buy me a macbook for 1.500$ instead, like I requested, that would have saved them ~13.000$ + my lost respect + my continued lost respect for requiring me to use my own 7 year old personal laptop for work.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well here's the challenging thing -- your phone may be way overdue for a battery replacement, or you've run your phone like this well over the average user -- so it's been doing this to save you from having no phone at all. But you don't credit Apple with the 2nd part, and blame it for the 1st part. It's tough to make something for customers, huh? Not making a personal jab at you -- just illustrating the difficultly…

I'm not an iPhone user, so maybe I am wrong about this. But I would expect my phone to give me a warning when it is about 3 minutes before shutdown. This way I still have a reasonable amount of time to bring whatever I am doing at the moment into a graceful stop.

iOs warns if the battery is at 20% and at 10% with a button to enable low power mode.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ha, well I've noticed my battery discharges if I play Civ 6, even when plugged in. so that confirms it too.

Are you using the smaller Macbook-vanilla charger or something? I game on my Macbook Pro + two monitors without discharge unless I accidentally use my girlfriend's OG Macbook charger instead of the Pro's charger that's twice the brick. And it can definitely handle Civ 6 (2017 and 2019 MBP).

I believe some of the MacBook Pros ship with chargers that cannot power them when running at full tilt. (Interestingly, I believe the original iPad Pro did as well.)

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

#278

So many people on here seem to be intent on micromanaging their device's battery. IMO the whole point is to let macOS handle it so you can focus on actual work. I know Apple has screwed up in the past with throttling iPhone CPU's (bad). At this point they know not to go to those lengths again.

I don't understand why the iPhone CPU thing was such a big deal. It's a perfectly sane power management feature. Apple had to choose between two options: A. Devices lose battery life per charge over time, eventually powering off randomly because not enough power can be supplied to run the hardware. B. Devices throttle their CPU over time to keep battery life per charge relatively stable, and avoid powering off. Apple…

It was such a big deal because Apple has a monopoly on „acceptable“ replacement batteries (the system shows a warning when you insert a 3rd party battery), and they charge 3x their actual worth.

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

#279

I got a top spec 15 MBP a year ago and I have to say the experience is appalling - 4000$ device that goes full airplane takeoff levels of noise at any serious workload, no ability to control performance (I would gladly throttle the CPU sooner to avoid everyone in the office turning my way when I start an emulator or keep the fans at lower RPM but constantly instead of letting the CPU idle at 60-70 degrees with no fan…

Laptops isn't designed for serious workloads. It's a small portable devices to hash some errands at starbucks. You can't change physics laws unfortunately to make all the heat disappear somewhere. Keep in mind Intel marketing as well which advertises CPU with way less heat than they expose in real life. The way you have this machines is because apple is commercial company and they should follow market demands. "10 co…

My MacBook Pro can (loudly) build LLVM just fine. The rest of the time it doesn’t make a peep and I make sure it stays that way.

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

#280

So many people on here seem to be intent on micromanaging their device's battery. IMO the whole point is to let macOS handle it so you can focus on actual work. I know Apple has screwed up in the past with throttling iPhone CPU's (bad). At this point they know not to go to those lengths again.

I don't understand why the iPhone CPU thing was such a big deal. It's a perfectly sane power management feature. Apple had to choose between two options: A. Devices lose battery life per charge over time, eventually powering off randomly because not enough power can be supplied to run the hardware. B. Devices throttle their CPU over time to keep battery life per charge relatively stable, and avoid powering off. Apple…

The major legitimate complaint was that Apple was extremely poor at communicating this to their users.
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