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

Hi don,

I personally doubt that it has anything at all really to do with snow leopard. Sony have had huge problems in their battery division in recent years, with some 10 million computer batteries (including those fitted to their own computers as well as other manufacturers) recalled a couple of years back.

Many of the batteries in the early model MBP suffered as a result and were replaced early under warranty or under the extended replacement program. While the later core2duo (but still non-unibody) models still had their fair share of battery issues they weren't anything like as frequent as with the earlier ones, and many are still running on their original batteries. Unfortunately the replacements used in many cases with the original models during the early period of failures don't seem to have been much, if any , better than the ones they first came with.

Its a matter of age and product cycles causing the apparent difference, rather than anything to do with snow leopard, I suspect. The release of snow leopard simply co-incided with the time framework when many of these replacement batteries were beginning to die. There were plenty of reports here of the replacements failing even before Snow Leopard arrived on the scene , though.

Its a battery issue, I reckon, not an OS one.

Cheers

Rod

Rod Hagen wrote:
Hi don,

I personally doubt that it has anything at all really to do with snow leopard.

Hi Rod,
I hate to disagree, but we have many early MacBook Pro users who have upgraded to Snow Leopard who are experiencing this issue.

Early MacBook Pro > Leopard > Snow Leopard = battery issues
Don

yes.. that's my case exactly...

battery down from 3:30 hours to 40 minutes...

that's a fact..

don montalvo wrote:

Hi Rod,
I hate to disagree, but we have many early MacBook Pro users who have upgraded to Snow Leopard who are experiencing this issue.

.....

Don

Yes, I'm sure you do, Don, but as I'm sure you also know correlation isn't the same thing as causation. In this case you could also equally say "These computers are all of a certain age, and use the same type of battery , which has a known history of problems". Looked at from this perspective the fact that they started dying about the same time that SL was released can equally plausibly be seen as pure co-incidence.

Cheers

Rod

Rod Hagen wrote:

don montalvo wrote:

Hi Rod,
I hate to disagree, but we have many early MacBook Pro users who have upgraded to Snow Leopard who are experiencing this issue.

.....

Don

Yes, I'm sure you do, Don, but as I'm sure you also know correlation isn't the same thing as causation. In this case you could also equally say "These computers are all of a certain age, and use the same type of battery , which has a known history of problems". Looked at from this perspective the fact that they started dying about the same time that SL was released can equally plausibly be seen as pure co-incidence.

Cheers

Rod

Hi Rod,

The many early MacBook Pro users who we have not updated to Snow Leopard are getting 2-3 hours of battery time.

A while back, when we saw this happening, we took two early MacBook Pro users (who we know won't be working on battery power) and upgraded them to Snow Leopard.

Within a few days, their batteries showed the same behavior...20-30 minutes per battery, if they're lucky. Meanwhile, the others who were not updated are humming along with 2-3 hours battery life. I'm quite convinced that the upgrade of these early MacBook Pros to Snow Leopard has something to do with this issue.

I hope Apple is burning the midnight oil on this one.

Don

The only constant is Snow Leopard. Battery Age, cycle count, battery type, and battery usage all fluctuate.

rod, if you do a quick flip back a few pages in this thread, you can see that i have had the same issues with a third party battery. Snow Leopard is the only constant in this situation.

Message was edited by: FightTheFuture

I just want to make one thing clear, my battery doesn't die, my computer just shuts off. I don't go from 100% to 0% in 10 minutes, I go from 100% to 80% to off in 10 minutes. When I restart the battery is still at 80% not 0.

I've had bad batteries, and they've all gone from 100%-0% never 100%-80% too off.

This is why I believe it's software related and not the battery.

I would like to ask if this is the same performance others are getting?

I should also point out that the battery drains faster, after SL, if it's asleep and unplugged. That's the only time the battery will drop to 0, if I unplug it while sleeping.

Same here, the machine just shuts off, no warnings, nothing, just a click and it's dead. The battery still reads about 20% and if I press the button on it one green led lights.

FightTheFuture wrote:
rod, if you do a quick flip back a few pages in this thread, you can see that i have had the same issues with a third party battery. Snow Leopard is the only constant in this situation.

Except that it isn't, FTF. I, like vast numbers of others, am running Snow Leopard on pretty much exactly the same computer that you own yourself with no issues at all, and many other people experiencing battery issues, of course, are NOT running Snow Leopard.

Lots of people have battery issues. Lots of people run snow leopard. Inevitably some who run snow leopard also have battery issues and notice them soon after installing. Those who are both having battery issues and running snowleopard, of course, are drawn disproportionately to a thread like this one, with both in its title. The correlation means nothing.

Cheers

Rod

Message was edited by: Rod Hagen

I did some experimenting, I have two batteries, the original (A), that died in less than a year and Apple refused to replace, and the battery I bought to replace it (B) which is over a year.

I started up my machine, with battery B, and under Energy Saver I see the following:

Service battery. Estimated time remaining: 3:27 (96%)

After 15 minutes the machine shut down. I restarted and see:

Service battery. Estimated time remaining: 0:55 (78%)

I also see 3.5 lights on the battery.

I then tried with Battery A:

Service battery. Estimated time remaining: 0:37 (98%)

After about 10-15 minutes the machine shut down, after I start back up:

Service battery. Estimated time remaining: 0:24 (74%)

I also see 3.5 lights on the battery.

I did find it interesting that both batteries shut down within 4% of each other. If this were a battery related issue, shouldn't they behave differently?

Battery A Information:

Model Information:
Manufacturer: Sony
Device name: ASMB012
Pack Lot Code: 0003
PCB Lot Code: 0000
Firmware Version: 102a
Hardware Revision: 0500
Cell Revision: 0303
Charge Information:
Charge remaining (mAh): 724
Fully charged: No
Charging: No
Full charge capacity (mAh): 846
Health Information:
Cycle count: 61
Condition: Check Battery
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): -1991
Voltage (mV): 11657

Battery B Information:

Model Information:
Manufacturer: Sony
Device name: ASMB012
Pack Lot Code: 0003
PCB Lot Code: 0000
Firmware Version: 102a
Hardware Revision: 0500
Cell Revision: 0303
Charge Information:
Charge remaining (mAh): 1441
Fully charged: No
Charging: Yes
Full charge capacity (mAh): 1936
Health Information:
Cycle count: 77
Condition: Check Battery
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): 375
Voltage (mV): 12448

From Apple: A properly maintained Apple notebook battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 300 full charge and discharge cycles.

If you have actually bought replacement batteries and they have failed in the manner you say , simply take them back and get them replaced, Don. A new battery purchased from Apple is covered by a 12 month warranty. The same principles apply to it as to batteries purchased in computers. If , as you say, you have bought new batteries which have dwindled to 20 minutes run time a few weeks , with 50 cycles on the clock, they are covered by the warranty, which is based on the same 80%/300 cycle formula within the 12 month warranty period.

Talk about buying battery after battery because they fail within a few weeks of purchase with 50 cycles on the clock is simply silly.

Rod

I went into the Apple Store today and all they said was that SL is very particular about battery charge. For me I was getting the "replace soon" message even though the battery had 60% of its original charge capacity.

What I found out later in the evening is that these messages appear to be activity dependent. I had the VMWare Fusion setting, "Show the applications menu in menu bar" set to Always and noticed that it took quite a bit of memory in the Activity Monitor. Once I set this to "only when fusion is running" I noticed that the "replace soon" message on my old battery was gone.

Just my two cents.

The information you provide about both of those batteries indicates that they are both at the worse end of the "defective" spectrum, Johnny.

The original full charge capacity of the Sony ASMB012 was around 5600 mAh.

One of your batteries now has a full charge capacity of 846mAh .

In other words its maximum capacity when fully charged is about 15% of its original capacity.

The other battery has a full charge capacity of 1936mAh (around 35% of its original capacity).

Batteries often get pretty flaky when the total capacity gets below about 75 to 80% capacity and are far from predictable when their maximum capacity gets below about 50%. Usually at least one of their three internal cells will be serious out of kilter by this point. Yours have gone far beyond this point.

In short, both batteries are clearly actually defective - far, far below specification. You can't expect seriously defective batteries to behave predictably. It doesn't surprise me at all that both shut down prematurely after perhaps 15 minutes or so. You were probably actually lucky to get 10 to 15 minutes out of battery A ! With two batteries this bad the ability to maintain the required voltage level consistently during use is slim. Simply spinning up the HD or doing something that requires a momentary bit of CPU work may well push them over the edge and shut down your Mac.

Your batteries are simply shot. Kaput. Past it! (As Monty Python might have said "These are ex batteries. If you hadn't nailed them to the perch they'd be pushing up the daisies!" )

Your problem has nothing to do with the OS you are using. Your batteries are simply completely and utterly stuffed!

Cheers

Rod

You'l find, FtF, that it always takes quite a few cycles for the "full charge capacity" of a new battery to stabilise. The battery in my MBP 13, for example, went up and down by similar margins, or more, during the first month that I owned. I After the first month it stabilised at pretty much the claimed "100%" level of 5450 mAh (it had been both higher and lower than this prior to this) . From then on, over the three months and some 65 cycles (using Snow Leopard) it has declined very slowly to the point where it now sits at 99% of the nominal capacity.

I also bought a new battery for my SantaRosa MBP in late July 2009. Again, the same sort of pattern of variation occurred. Ups and downs in the first few days followed by stabilisation and then very gradual slow decline. All while running under OSX 10.5. I updated this Mac to Snow Leopard the day it came on the market. It made absolutely no difference to battery behaviour, which by then had become very stable.

Your experience is simply typical of that experienced by anyone with a new battery who pays close attention to its "behaviour" when they first use it. It says nothing about the impact of one OS or another. Your battery was just doing what new batteries always do. If you had stuck with Snow Leopard you would have found that the same stabilisation occurred.

From what I can see "Fast mac" batteries are pretty good stuff (despite the awful problems they had with their early iPod batteries), and worth considering as an alternative to the Apple ones, but they still go through the same initial ups and downs of reported maximum capacity that any new Lithium Ion battery experiences.


Cheers

Rod