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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

#331

Post by mjayhn »

cb22 wrote: post #317
mjayhn wrote: 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…

> 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 any time the lids closed (it's 32gb so that adds about 30 seconds to the start up time). I've spent more time tweaking this thing, reading forums and reddit about how to make i…

It seems like we're just waiting on bios updates for Ice Lake to have a proper thermal profile. I'm not sure. What happens is the laptops thermal profile is way under the Intel recommended profile. I believe it starts to throttle around 80* instead of the 100* or so Intel says Ice Lake should be able to run at.

It's been awhile since I played with this but I don't believe I was able to bump my voltage to 25w on Ice Lake. Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe I'll do a fresh install and give it a try again. I've heard a few comments where peoples 7390 2in1s were running great but on /r/dell I've seen a lot more with complaints like mine.

I did get some improvement by dropping the thermal/power plan from High Performance down to Quiet. That seems to keep the thermals down so it triggers throttling less.

My problem is it throttles constantly and has other issues where if you move it (lift it up) while it's under load it will immediately throttle and I trigger it sitting on my lap a lot.

I bought it hoping I could run a bunch of VMs (thus the 32gb) and do light development work on it but I can barely even draw in Figma without having a rough experience so I completely gave up on developing on it.

This is a really good article https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.playerz...

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

#333

Post by mjayhn »

cb22 wrote: post #321
ben-schaaf wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that most of the Xps lineup has cooling issues. On the other hand I've got an Aero 15 (2018 I think), fan noise is decent and after a small undervolt it can indefinitely sustain max single core turbo speeds (4.1GHz) with respectable all core turbo (3.7GHz), while sitting at 70C. There are laptops out there with adequate cooling solutions out there.

To give some numbers to the comment I made previously in this thread, with an XPS 7390 2-in-1: Single core turbo 3.9GHz, maintains indefinitely, temperature hovers around ~75 degrees, fans around 5000RPM All core turbo: Keeps 3.4GHz and ~45W TDP for around 10 seconds, before dropping to 2.7GHz and ~25W TDP indefinitely. Temps still around ~75, with the fans around 8000 RPM. That's without any undervolting, but with t…

This is Ice Lake?

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

#334

Post by danielscrubs »

nizmow wrote: post #329
krageon wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Keeping the behaviour as it is makes you buy more, which is the objective of a company that shamelessly marks up hardware by arbitrary amounts.

Strangely enough, they did exactly as suggested when batteries started wearing out on iPhones (unable to reliably provide the voltage at full drain for peak performance) and you're the exact kind of person who jumped on them for planned obsolescence.

Bingo

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

#335

Post by rahkiin »

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…

I am at 89% and with some programs I work the whole MacBook heats up due to high GPU and CPU usage. Do you think this will degrade it much faster?

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

#336

Post by michaelcampbell »

praseodym wrote: post #111
duskwuff wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhones will selectively delay charging past 80% if you're at home and if your usage history indicates that the phone will be left on the charger for a while longer. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210512

Apparently a notification will show up when optimised charging is enabled. I’ve never seen it, because the functionality also requires Significant Locations and other location services (listed near the bottom of the page) to be enabled. That seems to me to be quite unfriendly to privacy. And given that I always charge my phone overnight and use my phone’s alarm function, it could simply use that as the target time to…

Having the machine know your location has nothing to do with privacy issues.

Having the machine upload or make available that information to someone else does. I don't know what the Mac does here.

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

#337

Post by kartickv »

dalemyers wrote: post #285
saagarjha wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Yup. I've got last years Macbook Pro, fully specced, and when I run lots of compilations in Xcode the battery steadily drains. I ran an intense script overnight a month or two ago and when I got back in the morning my battery was down to just a few percent. Thankfully the script finished just after that so I got incredibly lucky that it didn't run out all the way and lose all the progress.

Funnily, the base model is unlikely to have this problem, which makes it a better laptop (at least in this case) for cheaper. Your script won't stop and lose progress.

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

#338

Post by overcast »

Slartie wrote: post #31
overcast wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then 500M people complaining on Reddit that their phones only charge to 80% for some reason.

Easy: make the charge percentage display relative to the maximum configured charge. Just like it already is with battery deterioration over time: if my battery only holds 80% of its design capacity, the phone will still tell me to be 100% charged as soon as the battery hits that 80%-of-design-capacity-brick-wall. I just want the option to manually move that brick wall down a bit (they're already telling me exactly wh…

Then they'll be complaining their phone only lasts 8 hours before a charge instead of 10.

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

#339

Post by alliao »

hunter2_ wrote: post #199
alliao wrote: post #184

my favourite laptop has to be Panasonic's Let's Note I had one wayyy back model W2D and they eventually had this physical button that let you charge up to 80% for longevity reasons. That being said, I still own a macbook pro from 2011 and it's battery is still 100% healthy so I'm quite surprised to see how much's changed...

I doubt you're really at 100%... if you go to "Apple menu > About This Mac > System Report > Power > Battery Information" you can look at "Health Information > Cycle Count" and see how many cycles you've been through... see "Cycle Count Limits" at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201585 for expected lifetime. You could also look at "Charge information > Full Charge Capacity (mAh)" and compare that to whatever the or…

says 115 cycle... as it's plugged in most of it's life and full charge capacity is 6435mAh which sounds about 100% still.. oh and it's actually late 2012 rather than 2011 felt like I got an upgrade lol

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

#340

Post by gullyfur »

incognito_limey wrote: post #301
ratww wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been explained that this is because those computers might need more power than the AC Charger is able to provide, so the battery is also used as a "backup" for burst loads. This [1] seems to confirm it. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20081225111200/http://support.ap...

Thanks for the info. I recently discovered this by running folding at home on my 16inch pro overnight, and waking up to my battery being at 5%. I suspect running the CPU full bore over night was too much for the charger to keep up with.

This makes sense. My USB C portable charger also cannot keep up with charging my laptop while I have the screen on full brightness + normal activities.
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