Flashing orange to green?

It started behaving correctly a few days ago (no more flashing and fully charging the battery). But it started up again today. This doesn't seem to be something that occurs all the time. I just hope this isn't destroying my battery.

I have the same fear: I hope it's not destroying my battery! Or hurting something else. Has anyone gone into the an Apple Store or called Applecare? I am just getting into finals, so I will postpone my visit until mid December... If by then no one else has paid a visit to Applecare, I will post my experience.

-TM

I would honestly get it checked right away. I contacted Applecare yesterday, and we're not sure how, but my six month old battery dropped from 5200 mAh to about 1500 since I installed Leopard. Go into your System Profiler and see if this is happening to you too! The folks at Apple were kind enough to send me a new battery, and I'll post here if the problem recurs with the new one.

I went into the Apple Store and the tech guy thought the issue could be 2 things:

1) The battery, which is what we all suspected.
2) The logicboard, something I had not considered.

Unfortunately, they did not have ANY spare batteries to test in my MBP, so they are ordering one now and we will see if that resolves the issue... If not, then the logicboard might be at fault; which would not be a good thing!

I will post an update when I go into the store again.
-TM

I had the same issue 4 months ago with a MB, the MAh was slowly dropping off and the battery only had 53 cycles on it. The charger would flash green, amber and would never fully charge the battery.
There is a little know recall on MB batteries, I'll find the link again and post it. Anyway took the MP to Apple with a print out of the recall, I got a new battery.

Here is the link:
http://www.apple.com/support/macbook_macbookpro/batteryupdate/

and another one

https://support.apple.com/macbookpro15/batteryexchange/

Thanks for the postings White Dog. I had done the battery upgrade and my battery was not one of the model numbers recalled.

I have updates on my replacement process. First, I have a new symptom to add: when discharging the malfunctioning battery, when mine got around 10% it would just shut off without properly going to sleep mode. SO I think that was a sign of calibration issues.

Anyways, I took in my malfunctioning Sony battery and received a new SMP Brand battery that upon initial calibration seems to be working great. The original power rating was 5455 mAh, which seemed pretty good to me. I will post if there are any issues, but it appears a replaced battery is the solution...

-TM

The battery in my MBP seems to be doing well, but will keep an eye on it too.

Same thing happening here... I'm on my second battery (the first one stopped working altogether) and my battery health has dropped from around 80% to 33% in only a few cycles. Oh, and there are only 52 cycles on this battery. Now I notice the charge light switching between green and amber. Simply wonderful.

I tried calibrating the battery, to no avail... the computer won't sleep properly when the battery gets low, it just shuts off abruptly. I also tried resetting the SMC, no difference.

Any updates on this? I plan on going to an apple service store when I get back to the city in a couple weeks, so I'll be sure to post my experiences as well. Honestly, if they could solve this one curse of a problem I would have absolutely nothing negative to say about the MBP. What a pain.

Add me to the list of those having similar problems. I also had to get my first battery replaced after about six months, and now the second one seems to be dying as well. I have several hundred cycles on mine (although I can't tell whether CoconutBattery knows to differentiate between the first and second batteries when it counts cycles); I use my laptop on the go frequently, yes, but I didn't think that this would mean I had to buy a new battery once or twice a year.

I have recalibrated several times, and this has not helped at all. If anything it has made things worse. If CoconutBattery is to be believed, I have vacillated between 70% and down to 15% of original battery capacity within the last couple of weeks. Sometimes it seems very confused -- I have seen it say 15% and 55% on the same day!

The abrupt shutoffs when the battery is low are also getting more frequent for me as well. As is the light switching from green to amber and back.

I agree: I otherwise love my MBP, but it is hard for me to believe that Apple can't seem to get its act together with the battery, and it is indeed an enormous headache.

You should be able to get a replacement battery, read this:
http://www.apple.com/support/macbook_macbookpro/batteryupdate/