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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

#351

Post by leetcrew »

KCUOJJQJ wrote: post #161
leetcrew wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

check out this teardown of the new 16" macbook pro: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+16-Inch+2019+Tea... everything inside the chassis that isnt pcb, heatpipe, or fan is part of the battery pack. it takes up almost all the otherwise unused space inside the device. how would you design a battery door for this chassis that doesn't decrease the size of the battery or make the whole thing much bigger?

What if the laptop was hollow where the battery cells are. And what if something that looks similar to the Nokia 5165 battery would be put into this place. The battery would contain the same bag shaped cells.

you can't just expose a package like that to the user. user-removable batteries need to have a much sturdier (ie, thicker and heavier) package to prevent damage to the cells (major fire hazard). probably the chassis itself needs an additional layer of plastic to protect the components that would be exposed when the battery is removed. on top of all that, you need a robust latching mechanism that can withstand clumsy users removing and reinserting the battery over and over again. the end result is a much thicker and heavier device.

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

#352

Post by rpastuszak »

bootloop wrote: post #297
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.

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.)

mhm, tempting

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

#353

Post by Qub3d »

surround wrote: post #350

If I know I’m going to leave a laptop plugged in indefinitely, I would like to be able to set it to 50% battery manually instead of trying to “train” the software to get it right. Most (all?) operating systems lack this ability.

On Dell's laptops (at least, on my XPS), I can set a maximum charge in the BIOS, as well as select one from a few different charging strategies.

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

#354

Post by rpastuszak »

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…

ARM seems like the way to go. I recommend comparing the energy usage of Macintosh II and Macbook Air. It's quite impressive (minutes vs hours).

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

#355

Post by newscracker »

rubber_duck wrote: post #53

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…

This seems like a hardware issue. If you haven’t tried App Tamer [1], check it out (I’m not affiliated with it in any way).

[1]: https://stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/index.html

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

#356

Post by dangus »

joncrane wrote: post #341
incognito_limey wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't this bad design? Surely if plugged in, you should be able to use everything on your laptop at 100% utilization (screen, CPU, disks, fans, etc) without having to worry about it. Otherwise, what's the point of having those things?

Is your car designed to be used with the pedal to the floor at all times?

I don't understand why this would be a design assumption, especially for a portable device.

This isn't even an assumption for running applications on servers, especially the kind that serve up things like web requests. If you have pegged the CPU, your application will already be unstable.

Sure, the server can handle being pegged 24/7 from a power and cooling perspective, but in practical use no sysadmin will allow that to happen for very long.

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

#357

Post by sambe »

gruez wrote: post #151
sambe wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>i.e. charge the battery to 100% (or something close) but power the laptop directly via the charger. That's already what's happening. However that's not enough. Leaving the battery full is harmful in and of itself.

Are you sure? I had read elsewhere that it always goes through the battery, and a sibling comment says there is insufficient power from the charger alone (not really sure how that's possible either though).

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

#358

Post by gok »

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…

Cars have way more capacity than they typically need, and very predictable usage patterns. If your car has 400 km of range and your daily commute is 80 km total, you can pretty safely charge to only 200 km and not get range anxiety. In the rare cases where you need as much capacity as possible (road trips), you know your approximate departure time, so the battery only needs to be at maximal charge for a short time.

Laptops don't get used like that. People plug them in, then unplug and walk around with them until they either they run out of power or their meetings are over. It's really asking too much to have people plan their usage out. Plus the draw rates aren't predictable. If I can get away with just checking email, my laptop lasts all day. If I have to do a big C++ compile that's 30 watt-hours right there.

I might also add that really only Tesla is doing the charging guidance UI. Other car manufacturers spend a lot of resources to perpetuate the illusion of a battery working like a fuel tank.

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

#359

Post by Slartie »

overcast wrote: post #338
Slartie wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they do that after deliberately reducing their maximum charge (a setting which would probably come with a warning that reduced runtime of the phone is the result of doing it), they'll probably also complain that their internet speed has gone down after disabling the LTE/4G option (actually that does seem to be even less transparent, because not everyone knows that LTE is faster than 3G). Didn't stop Apple from offering a switch to disable LTE/4G.

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

#360

Post by neurostimulant »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #314
neurostimulant wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you use arch instead of other distro that known to work on many laptops, such as Ubuntu?

This is pure FUD in my opinion. Arch has always run better on every computer I’ve owned, especially newer ones. The people for whom Ubuntu works usually have fewer requirements or are not as particular about things working _just right_. That’s not to say I haven’t had issues with Arch, but there were fewer and they were easier to figure out. Now if you want a distro where you can update packages without manual interv…

I mean if he's having problems and spent hundred of hours trying to fix it, instead of giving up why not just try one of the mainstream distro and see if it works? There is a chance (however slim it is) that it'll work due to higher number of users exposing hardware support issues to the maintainers.
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