Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by mthoms » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

askafriend wrote: post #246

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't the right thing. People thew out their phones because they were slow not knowing they could have been fixed cheaply with a new battery.

Apple has offered battery replacements for years before they rolled out that patch. Replacing the battery would have fixed the issue at any time. It's not like they were holding it back.

They were holding it back. That's what the several hundred million dollar lawsuit they settled was about. And their public apology. And the hundreds of articles in the tech press.

Apple's own front-line staff (ie genius's) were not informed of the throttling. So if you complained of a slow phone you were told you were imagining it, or it was an inevitable part of the newer more complex OS upgrades.

At any rate, you were told there was nothing you could do.

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

#362

Post by supernova87a » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

JamesMcMinn wrote: post #346

supernova87a wrote: post #223

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 certain that's a valid argument - if anything it's rather "apologist". They are annoyed because the phone is unusable for a period even when connected to a charger. Every Android phone I have ever used will work immediately after being plugged into a charger (even without a battery). This has nothing to do with "saving" them from having no phone (in fact, it effectively leaves them with no phone at all for a…

I don't know that that is true. Perhaps iPhone allows users to draw down the battery even more than competitors to preserve someone's "on"-time (like extend as much as possible, because you might be on an important call), because it knows that once plugged in, it can go into a dark state for some time to recover. If the choice is to have a stable power mode when on / under potential loss of AC charger power, is it unreasonable that Apple chose to do that? Are you certain that's not why they do it?

Maybe other phone manufacturers are cutting off your "on"-time sooner than iPhone is, and you just don't ever see their phones getting to this state. You don't even get to make your 911 call, because Samsung chooses to turn your phone off sooner?

So again, in that case Apple would be giving you more usable time, but you're not happy with them for it.

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

#363

Post by askafriend » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

mthoms wrote: post #361

askafriend wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has offered battery replacements for years before they rolled out that patch. Replacing the battery would have fixed the issue at any time. It's not like they were holding it back.

They were holding it back. That's what the several hundred million dollar lawsuit they settled was about. And their public apology. And the hundreds of articles in the tech press. Apple's own front-line staff (ie genius's) were not informed of the throttling. So if you complained of a slow phone you were told you were imagining it, or it was an inevitable part of the newer more complex OS upgrades. At any rate, you w…

I think people apply a double standard when talking about Apple since they are the de-facto industry leader. The battery degradation issue is something that affects nearly all Li-Ion battery powered devices.

This includes all Android phones, PC laptops, etc.

People have such low expectations of the other products by default that no standards are applied and no quality is expected.

This is the issue. We apply (rightfully so) a far higher standard when assessing the industry leader (Apple) but we apply no standard at all to the competition which frequently gets away with the same kinds of issues (and also issues that are much much worse).

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

#364

Post by wrs » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

Hamuko wrote: post #310

philwelch wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This probably goes hand in hand with the unremovable batteries. Back when they had removable batteries you could run it on AC with no battery installed and it would work fine.

Do new MacBooks not power on with just AC if you take out the battery?

Well, I don't really want to destroy my MacBook to find out.

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

#365

Post by mjayhn » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

cb22 wrote: post #342

mjayhn wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Ice Lake?

Ice Lake, yeah. It's the i7 1065G7 [1] [1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196597/...

Can you tell me what you did to set it to 25watt? I swear I've tried this a few times going through Throttlestop tutorials with different usb-c chargers (from the stock 67w up to 97w) and either that option was greyed out or I never got it to actually do 25w.

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

#366

Post by q92z8oeif » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

Shish2k wrote: post #349

joncrane wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Isn't this bad design? It’s a trade-off - they COULD build a laptop which can run everything at 100% 24/7 indefinitely, but it’d be heavier and more expensive, with zero benefits to their target audience of "people who only run at 100% for a few hours per day"

Everything that does not expose to the user what is happening, and ideally give the user control over what can happen and when, is as bad design as clippy was on Microsoft Word.

Only too-clever-for-their-own-good-designers like automagic things. No user does.

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

#367

Post by fluffything » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

neurostimulant wrote: post #307

fluffything wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 billin…

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

I tried Ubuntu and the soundcard was not detected at all because the kernel used is too old (requires 5.5 apparently). I tried upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 and the kernel there was too old as well...

Arch was the best distro I could find that used the latest kernel by default. Audio worked there.

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

#368

Post by 411111111111111 » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

Shish2k wrote: post #349

joncrane wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Isn't this bad design? It’s a trade-off - they COULD build a laptop which can run everything at 100% 24/7 indefinitely, but it’d be heavier and more expensive, with zero benefits to their target audience of "people who only run at 100% for a few hours per day"

No, He is talking about the laptop not getting enough power while plugged in.

If there was any added weight it would be with the charger, not the laptop so... Incredibly unlikely.

It's way more likely that Apple just didn't design the connector to be able to deliver that amount of power. So they'd have to add a second one or switch connectors/design a new one.

Both would be suboptimal as well.

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

#369

Post by knodi123 » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

serf wrote: post #323

knodi123 wrote: post #73

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.

this kind of behavior would warrant a return from me. do you consider that to be a faulty behavior, or just par-for-the-course of heavy workloads on mobile platforms? i'd hate for that to be the new norm, I use the hell out of my mobile computers, I don't need them draining before I even unplug.

oh, actually it was my fault. I have an air charger and a pro charger, and it turns out they're not interchangeable. The pro charger is, like, 30% bigger, and the laptop battery will not discharge while I'm using that one.

My laptop is one of the older magsafe ones, so the people talking about USB-C might be a YMMV kind of thing.

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

#370

Post by knodi123 » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #209

knodi123 wrote: post #73

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).

> Are you using the smaller Macbook-vanilla charger or something?

Yes, that's exactly what the situation was. I was just trying to confirm the phenomenon of "battery can discharge if the AC adapter is temporarily insufficient"- but the core problem was my fault for sure.