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

So if you have all the answers lapwolf, explain to me why purchasing a new battery has corrected this problem for myself and others? Why is it that out of hundreds of thousands of apple laptops out there we're only seeing a couple hundred posts here? We're talking about a fraction of a percent complaining about this, could it be we're only seeing statistical noise because HARDWARE failure rates are higher than a fraction of a percent?

You seem to know everything. Oh, one last question. How are the ad hominem attacks furthering the discussion on this forum? For the record, denial is not force nor was that a particularly insightful statement.

Well splat, maybe YOU should explain how it hasn't helped others. Try using some common sense. People are reporting erratic battery behavior and battery life cut in half after the upgrade. Those that have the option to boot Leopard have their battery life restored.

As I have said before, I don't believe in coincidences, but I do believe in facts. These are the facts. You choose to ignore the facts, I choose to respect them.

YOU have yet to add anything relevant to the discussion, so maybe it's YOUR insight that is lacking...

In actuality a fact can be a perception, so maybe what your perceiving is true is actually false. Why not go buy a battery and see what occurs...? Do some hands on testing.

You guys are ridiculous. I'm unsubscribing from this thread.

The fact that at present a small percentage of laptop owners are reporting this issue doesn't necessarily negate it to being perceptional. The data loss issue that 10.6.2 will be addressing affected a relatively small number of owners with a specific use case, and Apple is moving forward with a patch. The same could be true here as well. The latest batteries currently available were likely used in the QA process for SL. Those purchasing replacements have no issues. However, batteries still in use by those who purchased their laptops 1 or 2 years ago may have issues with SL. Since it's not feasible for Apple to test against every hardware permutation, a defect for a subset of owners could have slipped through.

It looks like quite a few people are having the same problem to me. There's no way it's a coincidence. When I first saw the warning and noticed the reduced battery life I figured it must be a bug since I was running a new OS. I only use my computer for music, so it gets used a lot less than a regular user. I have a desktop PC and a junk laptop for web surfing. Thus, there's no way my Macbook Pro should be having any battery issues with such little use. This is why instead of buying a new battery I googled "snow leopard, service battery", sure enough, I find a post with 20+ pages of users having the EXACT same problem as me, some even worse. Resetting the PRAM temporarily fixed the problem. I'm hoping that when I reset the SMC later tonight that will fix the whole thing. Best case scenario, it gets fixed in the 10.6.2 update.

A few reasons we haven't seen 100,000 people report the problem:

Some users don't ever unplug their laptops, my main junk laptop stays plugged in, it's been running that way for 4 years.

Some users just buy a new battery and assume the software was telling the truth.

Some users don't bother to post in forums, they just wait for the bug to be fixed.

Many users haven't upgraded, my room mate is scared to after all this mess.

And some users have probably gone directly to apple, not everybody uses web forums, especially older people like my dad. He'd probably just buy a new computer.

All this statistics nonsense and the overall argument that we're wrong or delusional is out of place. I'm here to make the problem public, look for solutions, and share my results as I try fixes (like resetting PRAM & SMC).

We've all noted that some of you think our batteries all just magically went bad at the same time, and somehow are only bad when running SL (and run fine under Leopard), so please stop restating that. It's not helping.

Has anyone had luck with an SMC reset? As in, the reduced battery life and warning haven't come back?

People here suggesting to go and buy a new battery, yeah, that may solve the problem eventually, but why spend $130 on a battery that was working fine before upgrading? I reckon we can do better things with that money!

I would say, unless strictly needed, wait until we get to the bottom of the problem, besides what other people here is saying. We have provided more than facts to prove there is a problem, but I will try something else, I did have my battery replaced by free cos it had less than 100 cycles even if I was out of warranty, but I did downgrade to Leopard, you see, don't want to risk again, as I use the laptop to work. I did also had other issues with SL, discussions are full of them, i.e. my virtual hosting apache file was overwrote! same happened with my php settings file, I couldn't print/scan for two weeks, and the list go on... there is a possibility most of these issues won't happen if we do a clean install, but again, that still proves there are issues with the upgrade (to do a clean install, get latest updates, and install/configure again all programs I use to work takes me nearly a whole day)

So I wouldn't say is dumb to downgrade if SL was stopping me to my job.

What I will try to do is replicate the problem again, but with my new battery, will create image of my 10.5.8 Leopard to an external drive, make it bootable, then upgrade that drive to SL, and run for a while, and see what happens, can't promise to do it soon as I have not too much time, but if I can replicate the problem, I think that would be more than enough to prove it, don't you think?

The number one rule of thumb is NEVER do an upgrade, especially when its a bump in full release. Your things will get over written and that is with any OS. Typically Apple has a far superior way of doing it but best practice is no. I wouldn't say that it was an SL bug. On that note Apple has to fix the deletion bug, that is nothing small by any means. People's data is and can be very expensive. Either way always have a backup. As always do a fresh install, run disk repair, then do updates then disk repair again. Again do the combo updates as it has all the information needed. Any firmware updates should be done before any updates unless otherwise noted. After that reset PRAM and SMU and your set.

Side Note: I have seen 10.x.x issues on fresh installs as a copy of a file was corrupt or something happened that made an OS not run correctly. There is what I call a trial period to make sure all is well.

well...i'm still having troubles, "service battery" showing up and then disappearing...battery health oscillating between 86% (same as with L) and 45%, same for the battery performance.

sometimes i get one hour and half, sometimes it lasts for more than 3 hours, and i randomly get the "service battery" warning and random shutdown without warning, not always...

of course, never experienced soemthing like that before upgrading...but listenin to someone here..it's just coincidences...

I noticed last night that my MacBook Pro 4,1 also has one of the magic coincidentally failing batteries.

I was just getting ready to schedule an appointment with the Genius Bar when I found this discussion. The battery failing was absolutely no coincidence. I've had no problems with the battery before Snow Leopard. It is directly related.

Hopefully Apple is hearing about this problem and will have a update available soon.

David Hinz wrote:
I noticed last night... no problems with the battery before Snow Leopard... It is directly related.

David, how long ago did you install Snow Leopard?

I have access to 4 batteries. I have upgraded my mbp 15 to snow leopard 10.6.1. The others are simular to mine, but coworkers batteries.

I tried all 4 perfectly functioning in 10.5.8 battteries on my computer (which now has the service battery indicator). They all say service battery. From one with 60 cycles to mine with 180.

This is a bug, or a ploy to sell batteries. Fix it. Period.

(i dealt with my parrallels breaking (terminal), my vpn breaking (solved), overall slowdown (semi solved) and a few random freezes. But for this, I would have stayed where i came from...

I may ignore it (im not good at this) or go back to 10.5.8. The computers I am responsible for at work are staying at 10.5.8, period. (not for this, but overall issues, they are stable now, who needs more problems?).

I upgraded my laptop the night that Snow Leopard was released. So I guess it has been about a month or so. Could my battery have gone bad in a month, sure. Did everybody else's go bad at the same time they upgraded, could have. But very unlikely. I didn't notice this problem immediately after I upgraded, but I rarely click on the battery menu item where the "Service Battery" message is displayed. I usually just look at the display percentage in the menu bar. Maybe the problem started with 10.6.1, I don't know. But it is still a problem with Snow Leopard (period).

That's very interesting. Now what you (or someone else) needs to do is show this demo to an apple 'genius'. You won't convince anyone at apple by posting on the forum but showing a genius this may be more helpful.

I'm skeptical about this being a snow leopard problem but I still have my old battery just in case. As I've said before though, in my case a new battery solved the problem.

My wife and I upgraded to snow leopard a few weeks ago. Within a couple days we are both getting a service battery warning and less than 40 mins of battery life, where we both had nearly three hours under leopard. My battery is less than a year old. What are statistical chances that hers and my battery would both die at the same time considering they are both fairly new batteries? The only non-constant and equally present variable in this scenario is the OS upgrade. There is something wrong with snow leopard's battery functions. This is almost undeniable, statistically speaking.