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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

#291

Post by shantara »

geoelectric wrote: post #146
shantara wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8246 mAh after 34 cycles on my 16" 2019 MBP. That's a lot worse than I expected. What's the best way to slow battery degradation if I use it for 8-10 hours daily for work? Run MBP from an outlet and do full discharges once a week? Run MBP from the battery and recharge the battery when it depletes? Run MBP from the battery, but charge it only to 80%?

At this point, I think anything you do is going to not be better than what the system could automatically do for itself. Their change will basically give you that 80% bit. There's something to be said for occasionally running the battery down to zero and charging it all the way back up, of course, but I wouldn't think of it as an effective regimen with current battery tech. I'm also not sure how quickly it's expected…

Thanks for the advice

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

#292

Post by kalleboo »

teejmya wrote: post #84
geoelectric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FruitJuice is a good app for this. https://imgur.com/dY0n6Uw

CoconutBattery is also good https://i.imgur.com/bv85ygJ.png

It even supports plugged-in iOS devices https://i.imgur.com/nSIJrar.png

https://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/

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

#293

Post by imtringued »

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…

That SSD analogy is wrong. Doubling the capacity doubles the lifespan of the device. The reason why there is extra space is because performance of a full SSD can degrade to unacceptable levels. Basically you can write and erase but you can't overwrite flash. If the drive is full the writes are queued in the over provisioned part of the SSD and once the garbage collector has run and freed up space the pending writes are transferred back onto the regular storage.

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

#294

Post by vbezhenar »

saagarjha wrote: post #277
hombre_fatal wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

That was the case for my rMBP 2012. Though it was only when running a game and battery discharged very slowly, so was not really an issue, at least for me.

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

#295

Post by wyclif »

mr_toad wrote: post #153
treyfitty wrote: post #139

I thought keeping a MacBook plugged in was advertised as OK (Even said to be BETTER) since the power is being drawn from the AC source rather than the battery. What’s the deal, is it better to leave it plugged in, or not?

Generally speaking it’s better to keep it plugged in than to repeatedly charge and discharge it. But it’s even better to keep in plugged in at 80% charge instead of 100%.

But...how do you keep it plugged in at 80% charge without hitting 100% relatively quickly?

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

#296

Post by o_x »

sudhirj wrote: post #290
rpastuszak wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about the parent, but my friend an I had exactly the same issue, both of us are on 16inch MBP 2020 (Civ 6 on Steam). Incredibly annoying once your laptop suddenly slows down and dies after 5h of gameplay. How is this even acceptable? Regardless whether it's a $400 or $3k laptop, I'd expect it to work when charging. I'm two apps (photoshop, lightroom) away from switching to Linux.

Probably more to do with FAA regulations than anything else. You can't put more than a 100W batter in a laptop, and the charger is 100W (96W, I think), but modern processors and GPUs need more than that at full speed with all cores, leave along fans and SSDs and screens. My similarly specced desktop runs at 400W, not including the monitor. So yeah, we seem to have hit a limit with traditional chipsets. Probably why A…

I believe the frustration is more due to the fact that even though the laptop is plugged in, the battery gets drained and after a while, it will simply shut down. I have had that issue with 2012 15 inch, 2016 15 inch, 2017 15 inch and heard similar stories from 16inch users.

Reminds me of the early brick-sized mobile phones. Sure you could be wireless, but if you wanted to use it more than few minutes, you had to find yourself a power socket.

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

#297

Post by bootloop »

rpastuszak wrote: post #284
hombre_fatal wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Not sure about the parent, but my friend an I had exactly the same issue, both of us are on 16inch MBP 2020 (Civ 6 on Steam). Incredibly annoying once your laptop suddenly slows down and dies after 5h of gameplay. How is this even acceptable? Regardless whether it's a $400 or $3k laptop, I'd expect it to work when charging. I'm two apps (photoshop, lightroom) away from switching to Linux.

I solved my few Windows dependencies with https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM... and a secondary GPU. (Might not fit your current setup but it was a game changer for me and my productivity so I can highly suggest it.)

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

#298

Post by opencl »

sudhirj wrote: post #290
rpastuszak wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about the parent, but my friend an I had exactly the same issue, both of us are on 16inch MBP 2020 (Civ 6 on Steam). Incredibly annoying once your laptop suddenly slows down and dies after 5h of gameplay. How is this even acceptable? Regardless whether it's a $400 or $3k laptop, I'd expect it to work when charging. I'm two apps (photoshop, lightroom) away from switching to Linux.

Probably more to do with FAA regulations than anything else. You can't put more than a 100W batter in a laptop, and the charger is 100W (96W, I think), but modern processors and GPUs need more than that at full speed with all cores, leave along fans and SSDs and screens. My similarly specced desktop runs at 400W, not including the monitor. So yeah, we seem to have hit a limit with traditional chipsets. Probably why A…

The FAA has no restrictions on chargers, the restriction is on battery capacity which is irrelevant to this problem. They use 100W chargers because that's the highest allowed by the USB-PD spec, but Apple providing power supplies incapable of handling peak load on their laptops is much older than their use of USB-PD. They just seem to not care very much about the heavy sustained load use case.

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

#299

Post by TorKlingberg »

wingworks wrote: post #232
kosievdmerwe wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sending your power via a USB C adapter too? If you use one of these[1] then your laptop will charge more slowly than if you just plugged in the power directly. [1] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MUF82AM/A/usb-c-digital-a...

I've only ever seen my laptop's battery discharge while plugged in via one of those USB-C hubs which allow PD "pass-through". But have yet to find one that passes all the power through.

The adapter claims some of the power for itself and downstream USB devices. I think it has to reserve power statically, so it's always claiming 5W or so.

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

#300

Post by fulafel »

hunter2_ wrote: post #194
gok wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that essentially all modern battery systems essentially do this under the hood. The "100%" shown to the user isn't the most you could charge the cells, just as high as you want to charge it to meet lifetime degradation targets. Tesla just goes a bit crazier here and exposes more headroom because they can rely on drivers being more involved in charging strategies.

What separates drivers from phone/laptop users? Certainly not techies vs normals. It would seem to me that both cohorts are capable of, and potentially interested in, deciding between "shorter days but more years" and "longer days but fewer years." I think the real difference is that car manufacturers' business health depends on less maintenance over many years, and phone manufacturers' business health depends on pla…

Some laptops support this too (eg business Thinkpads). Apple is a luxury brand and batteries are cheap to replace so it doesn't want to burden users to spend their precious cognitive capacity on battery management.
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