Q: MacBook Pro Battery 'Service Battery' after Snow Upgrade

count me as another unhappy owner of a ticking time bomb
(NVIDIA GPU) and now Battery (after SL 4+ --> 1h ), defective case design easily dents, warps - it is just not suitable for regular use at outside.
Yes i kindly asked Apple --> none of them will get fixed
by Apple

This is the my first and worst expensive gadget ever!
Thank you Apple

NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT:

Chipset Model: GeForce 8600M GT
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 512 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0407
Revision ID: 0x00a1
ROM Revision: 3212
Displays:
Color LCD:
Resolution: 1440 x 900
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Built-In: Yes
Display Connector:
Status: No Display Connected

Battery Information:

Model Information:
Manufacturer: SMP
Device name: ASMB012
Pack Lot Code: 0002
PCB Lot Code: 0000
Firmware Version: 0110
Hardware Revision: 0500
Cell Revision: 0200
Charge Information:
Charge remaining (mAh): 3310
Fully charged: No
Charging: No
Full charge capacity (mAh): 4904
Health Information:
Cycle count: 167
Condition: Normal
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): -1858
Voltage (mV): 11495

same problem, after upgrade SL it apears the message "service battery" in my Macbook pro 15´ I tried everything.

So Rod, let me get this straight. It's not a software issue but my battery.

OK. When I was using Leopard before the switch to Snow Leopard a couple weeks ago, I was getting about 2 hours out of my battery. But this isn't my main concern.

Over & over in your posts you tell many people it's the battery, not a software issue. Then why doesn't the software give any of us a warning that the battery is about to quit? Now, even after 30 minutes of use before the battery quits and does a hard shutdown, there is absolutely NO warning. That's something the software is supposed to do, yes/no?

I have an old Pismo running Tiger that I still get an hour out of the batteries and it gives me a warning just fine. I have to believe that there is an issue with the software not recognizing something from the battery. I have oredered a secondary battery for the MBP but am skeptical about using it until Apple releases a fix or I switch back to Leopard.

Hi, I replaced my battery after the SL install I had the same issues that most of you have had, I'm still running SL after replacing the battery about 2 months ago and below is my power reading:


Battery Information:

Model Information:
Serial Number:
Manufacturer: GSA-A1175
Device name: ASMB012
Pack Lot Code: 012d
PCB Lot Code: 050d
Firmware Version: 646e
Hardware Revision: 2800
Cell Revision: 0000
Charge Information:
Charge remaining (mAh): 5720
Fully charged: Yes
Charging: No
Full charge capacity (mAh): 5743
Health Information:
Cycle count: 13
Condition: Normal
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): 0
Voltage (mV): 12552

I think some brand has lost their interest in Operating Systems and computer hardware. I only see iPad all around, updates for iTunes and iPhone, and so on. I think I given up on this, Apple left me with the most advanced OS in the world, which by coincidence, destroys your battery if your model is "tool old".

I can not believe that Apple is still silent looking at this thread and how many people has reported here. And I wonder how many people who doesnt visiti this forum is sufferinf this battery mayhem in silence.

Veeeery nice Apple, veeery nice...

There is an article in CNET about Microsoft investigating Windows 7 battery issue....(news.cnet.com/8301-138603-10445767-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-13-0-20)

my istat showed that my battery's health 80-90%. after i calibrated now it shows 18%. can you believe that.

Model Information:
Manufacturer: Sony
Device name: ASMB012
Pack Lot Code: 0001
PCB Lot Code: 0000
Firmware Version: 0110
Hardware Revision: 0500
Cell Revision: 0303
Charge Information:
Charge remaining (mAh): 1018
Fully charged: Yes
Charging: No
Full charge capacity (mAh): 1018
Health Information:
Cycle count: 5
Condition: Check Battery
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): 133
Voltage (mV): 12603

My OS is wrong in my post on 2/2/10. I'm using 10.6.2. Sorry about that. Gil

Hi parisontour,

For the OS to be able to predict an impending shut down it has to be able to rely on the battery being within certain parameters in terms of both voltage and the ability to meet transient power demands. When a battery gets older it becomes less predictable in this regard, especially with the ability to meet transient power demands. I don't think I've ever said that "software" doesn't play a part in the process, and in fact I've pointed on occasion to software that may exacerbate the problem, but saying the "software" may be involved at least for some, doesn't equate to saying that there is a "bug" in SL, for the reasons outlined below.

If you look back over the years here you will see many, many, posts from people running every version of OS where sudden, unpredicted, shutdowns occur with old batteries. I've seen hundreds of these posts involving pre-SL Apple notebooks, and there must be many thousand if you tally them all up. I've experienced such shutdowns myself on my own MBP 2.2 15" SantaRosa running Leopard when my battery fell into the low 70% of original capacity range. I experienced it on my PB12, when the battery got below 50% of original capacity running under Tiger (though it was generally fairly well behaved even at this point under light to moderate loads). In both cases replacing the battery fixed the problem. (There are certainly situations where people's batteries appear to age "more gracefully - my daughter managed over 900 cycles on an iBook G4 battery and was still getting shutdown warnings - but perhaps she didn't ever place it under as much stress as I placed my own computers)

(The prime reason why Apple have introduced the "Service Battery" warnings with SL , in fact, appears to be to provide an additional "warning" that a battery is approaching the sort of state where the battery may no longer be predictable in this regard).

People have usually first experienced these problems in the past (regardless of the OS in use) when they have done something that uses a bit more processor power than usual, or plugged in a bus powered device, or run the optical drive, or preformed an HD intensive task, or started up an iSight camera or the like - something that puts a sudden demand on the battery. One minute they are sitting there with seemingly an hours battery time left or somesuch. The next the computer shuts down as if the power cord had been yanked from a desktop instead of giving the gentle warning of a low battery.

The process with "sudden shutdowns" under SL is just the same. It happens when the battery has deteriorated to a point where it is no longer possible for the OS to predict its behaviour in situations where there is a transient demand for power. No OS can predict and warn you of such things in a timely enough fashion to prevent them when they occur. They are instantaneous events. What it can do is try to provide a more general warning of deterioration to the point where there is the potential for such things occurring (hence the "Service Battery" warnings).

Now, people like you quite rightly say, "but my computer is shutting down suddenly after half an hour (or ten minutes, or two hours) under Snow Leopard and it didn't under Leopard". Well, the ultimate reason is the same as with earlier OS's: inadequate power to meet a peak in demand.

The question then becomes why are such people intermittently running into a greater power demand under SL than they did under earlier OS's. The immediate (understandable) response of most who suffer it is "there is a bug in the new OS".

Well, I've seen these sorts of situations after the introduction of a new OS or a system update before and I think the answer is rarely this simple. Sometimes it is simply because peoples batteries have been right "on the cusp" anyway, and the additional load imposed by having to deal with a fuller, more fragmented drive or the like after an update helps to push them over the edge. Given that many MBP batteries are reaching about the age when they die anyway, pure chance will explain a fair number, too, this time around.

More often, though, it is because of third party software incompatibilities with the new update (We saw this a couple of years back when a version of the then very popular Virex utility became a very nasty processor "hog" after an OS update. This caused problems which included dramatic loss of battery life, sudden shutdowns on computers with weak batteries, overheating issues in iMac G5's , exacerbating a pre-existing hardware problem with capacitors in power supplies, a host of general complaints about poor performance after the up date etc. Similar things happened with various Canon and HP printer drivers after another update). In these situations the third parties involved came up with new versions of their software which overcame the problems.

It is known that some similar problems have arisen since the introduction of Snow Leopard. Some old or corrupted fonts, for example, can cause a new SL process called "fontworker" to run riot, chewing up 100% of CPU cycles at times. Some versions of the popular "Skype" software have been found to do the same (see http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=205011) and it has now been updated. And so on. Any CPU hogging process like this is likely to lead to unexpected shutdowns when used on a computer with a bad battery like yours, in just the same way that similar issues arose in the past.

You might find it useful to try running Activity Monitor to check CPU usage on your own computer with the old battery in place. See what, if anything, is pushing up CPU usage at the time when the unexpected shutdown occurs.

In this case, it has become increasingly evident that one very commonly used piece of software, while perhaps not a full blown "processor hog" (it doesn't chew up a 100% of CPU time) , is placing greater demands on power for the CPU than it did in the past. It was never particularly "power friendly", but it is a lot worse now. It is the Flash Player Plug-in.

Open up activity monitor and look at CPU usage. Now start up Safari, and head to the CNN website and watch a video. Keep an eye on the CPU % claimed by Flash Player. Sure, Safari's own use will climb , too. I've looked at this booted from both Leopard and Snow Leopard, and under Snow Leopard Adobe's Flash Player often more than doubles in CPU usage compared to the pre SL versions. The combined CPU load (and therefore load on the battery) of Safari and Flash under SL is usually at least 20% higher than under Leopard, and often more, because of the increased contribution from Flash.


So here we have at least one "smoking gun" - a commonly used piece of software that places greater loads on the CPU, and therefore the battery, under SL than it does under Leopard. Whether it is Adobe's or Apple's responsibility to resolve the issue (if it is seen as needing "fixing") is a moot point. I guess either or both may argue that they design their software for "healthy" computers that are operating within "normal" specifications, and that performance advantages in using more CPU power outweigh any reduction in battery charge duration, etc etc.

Now people with normal batteries won't start crashing unexpectedly as a result of this increased CPU usage by Flash, but people with batteries that are "on the edge" may well, and those with batteries in a condition like yours are very likely to indeed. The same computers, of course, would crash without warning under any other OS if exposed to the same processor load ( when rendering video under battery power for example), but if their primary computer usage is web browsing they may never run into such situations (though under SL they should at least receive a "Service Battery" warning beforehand if they check it).

Some people may find, as I've indicated earlier in this thread and elsewhere, that simply changing to 32 bit Safari (using Get Info) will reduce the load sufficiently to extend their battery life and avoid sudden crashes for a while (though if a battery has reached this point it is going to have progressively greater difficulty in meeting demand as time goes on.) Unfortunately alternative browsers like Chrome and Firefox are themselves pretty heavy CPU users when accessing web related video sites and the like too - generally worse than Safari (I don't use Camino, so I can't comment on it as another possibility) so they aren't likely to provide any relief.

No doubt there are other bits of software that will use more power under SL, too, (though there are likely to be others that use less - people seem fairly divided out there about whether their batteries run for a longer or shorter period under SL than it did under leopard, suggesting that different usage patterns and applications produce different experiences. I haven't seen any noticeable overall change one way or the other on my own computers - but I don't spend much time looking at "Flash" based video and the like).

Some people here suggest that I tell people all the time to simply get a new battery. Actually what I usually say is that they should get their battery tested. In your case I said the same, though your figures are very much at the 'bad" end of things. Once you start suffering shutdowns like this, whether it be from visiting Flash websites or the like under SL, or from rendering video or opening a few programs simultaneously under an earlier OS, it is time to get a new battery if you care about the integrity of your data.

THose who say that 'reverting to Leopard" fixes the problem may well squeeze a few more weeks out of their old battery if they don't do anything intensive with their computers and are lucky. It won't be long before they suffer the same unpredicted shutdowns that you have experienced, though. The same would apply to you, if you decided to simply revert to Leopard and to continue using your old battery.

As I've pointed out I have no problems with my own new battery under snow leopard (it was updated under Leopard, after I experienced just the same problems with unexpected shutdowns as you are, a few weeks before SLs release) . Quite a few others who have gone down the same route here say the same. New battery, no more problems.

Cheers

Rod

fakfaah wrote:
my istat showed that my battery's health 80-90%. after i calibrated now it shows 18%. can you believe that.

If this is an original or old battery, only completed five cycles, and rarely if ever been calibrated before , fakfaah, then yes I can. Your stats show a battery with very , very few cycles and a very low capacity. An older battery that has had such very little use will simply die from inactivity.

If it is a new battery, then you should try repeating the calibrating processes, making sure you follow the required sequence correctly, with the necessary wait states included, and see if it corrects the problem. If not, as it has only completed five cycles, take it in for testing and if it is defective then it will probably be replaced under warranty.

But, if it is a new battery, make sure the calibration was done properly first. One unusual thing about your figures is that although the total capacity is low, the voltage is quite high. This might indicate a problem with the calibration you have just completed. see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490 and make sure you follow the steps for the MBP, not the earlier computers.

Cheers

Rod

lol, tl:dnr

How long did it take you to write that dissertation?

Sorry I don't buy this Rod. There are too many people complaining of battery death after upgrading to Snow Leopard

See these threads for a 2 minute trawl of the web:

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-21565_102-0.html?threadID=357366

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/989002041041


Andy

This is so funny now Rod...

Again and again, booooring... I haven't read a single user saying that you became helpful with this issue.

I think people on this thread doesnt even read your posts from long ago...

And you spam the thread with those useless long readings...

C'mon boy read here, ready...?

Snow Leopard IS THE PROBLEM

Rod Hagen wrote:
Hi parisontour,

For the OS to be able to predict an impending shut down it has to be able to rely on the battery being within certain parameters in terms of both voltage and the ability to meet transient power demands. When a battery gets older it becomes less predictable in this regard, especially with the ability to meet transient power demands. I don't think I've ever said that "software" doesn't play a part in the process, and in fact I've pointed on occasion to software that may exacerbate the problem, but saying the "software" may be involved at least for some, doesn't equate to saying that there is a "bug" in SL, for the reasons outlined below.

If you look back over the years here you will see many, many, posts from people running every version of OS where sudden, unpredicted, shutdowns occur with old batteries. I've seen hundreds of these posts involving pre-SL Apple notebooks, and there must be many thousand if you tally them all up. I've experienced such shutdowns myself on my own MBP 2.2 15" SantaRosa running Leopard when my battery fell into the low 70% of original capacity range. I experienced it on my PB12, when the battery got below 50% of original capacity running under Tiger (though it was generally fairly well behaved even at this point under light to moderate loads). In both cases replacing the battery fixed the problem. (There are certainly situations where people's batteries appear to age "more gracefully - my daughter managed over 900 cycles on an iBook G4 battery and was still getting shutdown warnings - but perhaps she didn't ever place it under as much stress as I placed my own computers)

(The prime reason why Apple have introduced the "Service Battery" warnings with SL , in fact, appears to be to provide an additional "warning" that a battery is approaching the sort of state where the battery may no longer be predictable in this regard).

People have usually first experienced these problems in the past (regardless of the OS in use) when they have done something that uses a bit more processor power than usual, or plugged in a bus powered device, or run the optical drive, or preformed an HD intensive task, or started up an iSight camera or the like - something that puts a sudden demand on the battery. One minute they are sitting there with seemingly an hours battery time left or somesuch. The next the computer shuts down as if the power cord had been yanked from a desktop instead of giving the gentle warning of a low battery.

The process with "sudden shutdowns" under SL is just the same. It happens when the battery has deteriorated to a point where it is no longer possible for the OS to predict its behaviour in situations where there is a transient demand for power. No OS can predict and warn you of such things in a timely enough fashion to prevent them when they occur. They are instantaneous events. What it can do is try to provide a more general warning of deterioration to the point where there is the potential for such things occurring (hence the "Service Battery" warnings).

Now, people like you quite rightly say, "but my computer is shutting down suddenly after half an hour (or ten minutes, or two hours) under Snow Leopard and it didn't under Leopard". Well, the ultimate reason is the same as with earlier OS's: inadequate power to meet a peak in demand.

The question then becomes why are such people intermittently running into a greater power demand under SL than they did under earlier OS's. The immediate (understandable) response of most who suffer it is "there is a bug in the new OS".

Well, I've seen these sorts of situations after the introduction of a new OS or a system update before and I think the answer is rarely this simple. Sometimes it is simply because peoples batteries have been right "on the cusp" anyway, and the additional load imposed by having to deal with a fuller, more fragmented drive or the like after an update helps to push them over the edge. Given that many MBP batteries are reaching about the age when they die anyway, pure chance will explain a fair number, too, this time around.

More often, though, it is because of third party software incompatibilities with the new update (We saw this a couple of years back when a version of the then very popular Virex utility became a very nasty processor "hog" after an OS update. This caused problems which included dramatic loss of battery life, sudden shutdowns on computers with weak batteries, overheating issues in iMac G5's , exacerbating a pre-existing hardware problem with capacitors in power supplies, a host of general complaints about poor performance after the up date etc. Similar things happened with various Canon and HP printer drivers after another update). In these situations the third parties involved came up with new versions of their software which overcame the problems.

It is known that some similar problems have arisen since the introduction of Snow Leopard. Some old or corrupted fonts, for example, can cause a new SL process called "fontworker" to run riot, chewing up 100% of CPU cycles at times. Some versions of the popular "Skype" software have been found to do the same (see http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=205011) and it has now been updated. And so on. Any CPU hogging process like this is likely to lead to unexpected shutdowns when used on a computer with a bad battery like yours, in just the same way that similar issues arose in the past.

You might find it useful to try running Activity Monitor to check CPU usage on your own computer with the old battery in place. See what, if anything, is pushing up CPU usage at the time when the unexpected shutdown occurs.

In this case, it has become increasingly evident that one very commonly used piece of software, while perhaps not a full blown "processor hog" (it doesn't chew up a 100% of CPU time) , is placing greater demands on power for the CPU than it did in the past. It was never particularly "power friendly", but it is a lot worse now. It is the Flash Player Plug-in.

Open up activity monitor and look at CPU usage. Now start up Safari, and head to the CNN website and watch a video. Keep an eye on the CPU % claimed by Flash Player. Sure, Safari's own use will climb , too. I've looked at this booted from both Leopard and Snow Leopard, and under Snow Leopard Adobe's Flash Player often more than doubles in CPU usage compared to the pre SL versions. The combined CPU load (and therefore load on the battery) of Safari and Flash under SL is usually at least 20% higher than under Leopard, and often more, because of the increased contribution from Flash.


So here we have at least one "smoking gun" - a commonly used piece of software that places greater loads on the CPU, and therefore the battery, under SL than it does under Leopard. Whether it is Adobe's or Apple's responsibility to resolve the issue (if it is seen as needing "fixing") is a moot point. I guess either or both may argue that they design their software for "healthy" computers that are operating within "normal" specifications, and that performance advantages in using more CPU power outweigh any reduction in battery charge duration, etc etc.

Now people with normal batteries won't start crashing unexpectedly as a result of this increased CPU usage by Flash, but people with batteries that are "on the edge" may well, and those with batteries in a condition like yours are very likely to indeed. The same computers, of course, would crash without warning under any other OS if exposed to the same processor load ( when rendering video under battery power for example), but if their primary computer usage is web browsing they may never run into such situations (though under SL they should at least receive a "Service Battery" warning beforehand if they check it).

Some people may find, as I've indicated earlier in this thread and elsewhere, that simply changing to 32 bit Safari (using Get Info) will reduce the load sufficiently to extend their battery life and avoid sudden crashes for a while (though if a battery has reached this point it is going to have progressively greater difficulty in meeting demand as time goes on.) Unfortunately alternative browsers like Chrome and Firefox are themselves pretty heavy CPU users when accessing web related video sites and the like too - generally worse than Safari (I don't use Camino, so I can't comment on it as another possibility) so they aren't likely to provide any relief.

No doubt there are other bits of software that will use more power under SL, too, (though there are likely to be others that use less - people seem fairly divided out there about whether their batteries run for a longer or shorter period under SL than it did under leopard, suggesting that different usage patterns and applications produce different experiences. I haven't seen any noticeable overall change one way or the other on my own computers - but I don't spend much time looking at "Flash" based video and the like).

Some people here suggest that I tell people all the time to simply get a new battery. Actually what I usually say is that they should get their battery tested. In your case I said the same, though your figures are very much at the 'bad" end of things. Once you start suffering shutdowns like this, whether it be from visiting Flash websites or the like under SL, or from rendering video or opening a few programs simultaneously under an earlier OS, it is time to get a new battery if you care about the integrity of your data.

THose who say that 'reverting to Leopard" fixes the problem may well squeeze a few more weeks out of their old battery if they don't do anything intensive with their computers and are lucky. It won't be long before they suffer the same unpredicted shutdowns that you have experienced, though. The same would apply to you, if you decided to simply revert to Leopard and to continue using your old battery.

As I've pointed out I have no problems with my own new battery under snow leopard (it was updated under Leopard, after I experienced just the same problems with unexpected shutdowns as you are, a few weeks before SLs release) . Quite a few others who have gone down the same route here say the same. New battery, no more problems.

Cheers

Rod

Rod,

Was it really necessary to type 1797 words (10,302 characters, 44 paragraphs) to say "I have no problems with my own new battery under snow leopard"?

Don

Hi everyone,

Now I've had my Macbook Pro 29 months, and for the last month I've been experiencing the failing battery defect since upgrading to Snow Leopard that other people have mentioned. My battery has done 163 cycles, System Profiler says check battery. The battery fails somewhere between 10 and 40% and this is different every time with no obvious trend Sometime in the last couple of days the computer has gotten very hot, and the battery has expanded right down the middle indicating a serious fault.
I'm worried that this excessive heat has also affected the trackpad and mouse button as it feels like there is a raised distortion in those as well.
I think the writing was on the wall for my battery anyway because rolling back to Leopard still produced random battery failures; but I can;t help thinking that Snow Leopard somehow triggered my battery's bad behaviour and now serious fault.