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

My "Bad" battery is acting a bit different since I updated to 10.6.3, anyway, I need more time to test my "healthy" battery and to check if Snow Leopard stopped killing cells, which I dont really believe right now...

Cheers.

Alex, i plan to upgrade to 10.6.3 as soon as i have a free weekend. can you keep us updated on what you find with your healthy battery?

I upgraded to 10.6.3 and so far service battery disappeared. It's going to be a couple of hours since then. Anyway, I don't have too much expectations.

I'll keep you posted.

@FightTheFuture

Of course I will try my best to share my findings with all the folks here.
In the meanwhile, if your "Leopard" installation works nice and your battery acts "normal" I would stay safe there. Anyway, I have some free "Easter" days and I will do some test / observation from Thursday and so on.

Cheers,

PD: Am I the only one with a "pre-unibody" MBP having the killing battery
issue and having recently updated to 10.6.3? I thought I would see more comments from others here...

Didn't have much expectations indeed. After an almost 5 hour batter cycle, battery dropped dead and mac went to sleep. I plugged it again and there it was: service battery. Anyway, it's behaving different.

Hi everybody. Before seeing this post I actually thought that my battery was going over but now I believe it's not the case any more. After more than 2 years of use my battery has less than 180 cycles and I remember was working perfectly before updating to SL.

I was also puzzled by the fact that the Italian translation of "Service Battery" was not even mentioned in the Apple guide to battery usage.

Anyway, after having updated to X.6.3 the problem is unfortunately still there. Haven't tried to use battery for more than 1h, the remaining charge is supposed to be 0.55h according to the OS.
Hope Apple will listen in this case, not like for the 3G voice recording limit capacity.... who hasn't been fixed yet!

So seems the "problem" is still there. One thing is so clear for me now, Apple doesn't give a sh!7 about this issue anymore, they are silently saying "throw your pre-unibody 1700$ machine away and get a new one if you want something that can hold some charge on battery, and don't annoy us, we are trying to figure out how to sell this iPad cr4p so we can keep the money income and you can still believe we care about products and customers..."
I will be using this laptop for now because if have no other choice now, on one side, I dont have the money for a new laptop, and on the other, they are selling Core2Duo at 1700$, c'mon...

And now, you can delete this from the forum Apple, I am going to post it around...

If you have a Time Machine and were backing up during the 10.5 days then I slap you in the face and say "Downgrade, fool!" like how MR. T. does it on those advertisements for Snickers chocolate bars. You need to go back to 10.5 to get your battery back. I did and after a week or two worth of using my computer unplugged my battery slowly settled down and went back to normal.

Do this and I hope you have success.

Add me to the list...

Model Information:
Manufacturer: Sony
Device name: ASMB012
Pack Lot Code: 0003
PCB Lot Code: 0000
Firmware Version: 102a
Hardware Revision: 0400
Cell Revision: 0303
Charge Information:
Charge remaining (mAh): 1548
Fully charged: Yes
Charging: No
Full charge capacity (mAh): 1548
Health Information:
Cycle count: 268
Condition: Check Battery
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): 105
Voltage (mV): 12559


I am experiencing the same issues as everyone else after my SL upgrade.

I am going to go to 10.6.3 and will report back.

Wish me luck!

Cheers
Chris

Chris, like many others in this thread, your battery is simply way past its prime. You are lucky it is still running at all, in fact. 268 cycles is far more than many of the batteries in these computers manage regardless of what OS they are running.

Many are lucky to get more than 150 before they start to have problems with them. My own became erratic after 150 or so cycles and 18 months running solely on Leopard. You will find many people posting in other threads here whose batteries have not managed 200 who have never upgraded to SL.

Your capacity is down to 27% of the original. Lithium batteries can become unpredictable when they get below about 80% of original capacity.

You simply need a new battery. No OS update is going to change that, I'm afraid.

Rod

I have run into the same problem. A few days after I installed snow leopard I noticed that my battery would drop from 100% charge to about 60% charge in approximately 5 min, and then I noticed the "service battery" indication. I have a external drive that I tried booting from that has OS X 10.5 Leopard on it, and my battery acted as it used to, with a normal charge depletion rate - the battery would last about 2.5-3 hours under normal usage (iTunes, email, internet, and MS Word or Excel.) This is clearly a Snow Leopard problem as my battery does not need to be serviced under Leopard (and I get about 2.5-3hrs charge) but it does under Snow Leopard (only about 30-35min charge). This is a huge inconvenience as a laptop is supposed to mobile, but with a battery that lasts only 30min it has become a desktop without all the desktop advantages. Please fix this Apple...

I had my battery replaced under the Apple's better replacement program last August 2009, so as you can see below, this battery is fairly new - only 59 cycles.

Battery Information:

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): 1716
Fully charged: Yes
Charging: No
Full charge capacity (mAh): 1758
Health Information:
Cycle count: 59
Condition: Check Battery
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): 0
Voltage (mV): 12443

Running Leopard from an external drive is very different from running it from the internal, Nick.

Essentially you have an external powered HD replacing the one otherwise being run by your battery. In other words you are removing one of the two heaviest loads on the battery from the equation. Remember that when booted from the external not only does it handle the majority of application related work, but it also provides all of the kernel related activity, all of the swap files, etc etc. even if you still save your docs onto the internal.

Your battery does not throw up a "Service Battery" message under Leopard simply because there is no such message under Leopard!

Your battery may have been provided to you less than a year ago but it is simply shot. You need a new one.


People who are convinced that their battery problems are all down to Snow Leopard would do well to read the thread at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1227431&tstart=0 , where many of the same things were said as are being claimed here. The major difference is that the thread was begun in early 2008, and related to claims of the impact of Leopard on battery life and predictability after updating from Tiger. You will find all the same "culprits" there - with erratic behaviour, reduced charge life, etc etc etc. Interesting, don't you think! You were saying much the same in one of your own very first posts here , Nick What was it you were saying then, back in 2008, running Leopard?:

In my opinion, this is a software issue because my computer never had any issues with the battery until recently (within the last few months). If there is any way to get this message directly to Apple instead of just discussing it on this forum we all need to let them know how unsatisfied we are with their product, and that they MUST do something about it!

I gather that after you received your replacement battery you changed your mind about this, and, as you say here, it worked fine for quite a while thereafter? Just about as long as your first one, in fact!

It is the batteries that are bad.

Cheers

Rod

Screw Snow Leopard. Screw everyones opinions. Milk it for what its worth and keep getting new batteries. Soon you will have ten batteries all with 20 cycles and service battery messages. Load 10.5 on for good and enjoy your new batteries.

Rod. Please tell me what it is that I can do to prove that Snow Leopard really is altering the total capacity of the battery? I will make a video demonstrating whatever it is that needs to be demonstrated so you can be convinced that Snow Leopard is not nice to batteries.