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

Your full charge is only(mAh): 4392 vs what 5200+ on a new battery. You dropped 1,000mAH on your battery which is around 80% remaining. As Apple states:

"Each time you complete a charge cycle, it diminishes battery capacity slightly, but you can put notebook, iPod, and iPhone batteries through many charge cycles before they will only hold 80% of original battery capacity. As with other rechargeable batteries, you may eventually need to replace your battery."

Replace your battery

+1 for this problem:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10864263#10864263

Here's mine:

Battery is 10 months old.

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): 2090
Fully charged: Yes
Charging: No
Full charge capacity (mAh): 2090
Health Information:
Cycle count: 55
Condition: Check Battery
Battery Installed: Yes
Amperage (mA): 0
Voltage (mV): 12446

Current build of 10.6.3 does not solve this issue.

Tim

Your battery is also done in for with a status of Full charge capacity (mAh): 2090 is over 3000mAH loss. Your not going to have much power for anything

Oh I'm well aware of that and so are the other people contributing to this thread, it lasts 30 minutes before the machine shuts down with no warning.

This is the 2nd battery that has done this and it's only 10 months old with 55 cycles. Apple regards a battery that exhibits this behaviour with less than 300 cycles as defective. I have a genius appointment on Monday to get it looked at. If it is not replaced free of charge I will be a very unhappy customer...

Somehow Snow Leopard either causes the problem or exposes a design flaw in these particular batteries.

Tim,

Thats my point exactly especially in this case. For this instance regardless of age your battery has a lot of use or its defective as it only has 55 cycles. This is a clear sign of a defective battery from Sony. An OS DOES NOT CONTROL THE BATTERY. If you want to point to Apple and there OS you can't as its a 64 bit OS. If 64bit can not be run on a CD then Intel would have to release that, unless someone wants to test power use of a CD running 32 and then on 64 and check power consumption / strain. I think this proves the point of defective batteries even further.

TimMyers wrote:
This is the 2nd battery that has done this and it's only 10 months old with 55 cycles. Apple regards a battery that exhibits this behaviour with less than 300 cycles as defective. I have a genius appointment on Monday to get it looked at. If it is not replaced free of charge I will be a very unhappy customer.

I'm in the same boat as you, and from what a Customer Relations person said to me over the phone is that they WILL NOT replace the battery for free. I would have to pay for it out of my pocket, and THAT makes me a very unhappy customer.

Since Apple refuses to acknowledge the problem, it is not surprising that 10.6.3 doesn't address it.

I'll reiterate what I posted earlier:

_For now I would discourage anyone I like from "upgrading" a MacBook or MacBookPro to SL, the downside is too severe, versus the upside, and not worth the risk. Basic math..._

Tim, if you look back at the posts in this forum from BEFORE the introduction of Snow Leopard you fill find that substantial numbers of the very same batteries were failing then, too.

see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1979926 for example

or http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2035304

or http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2045291

or.... (the list is a long, long one)

Inevitably as these batteries age further the number of failures also increases.

Is there some evidence that these Sony ASMB012 batteries have a higher than desirable failure rate? Yes.

Can it really be linked to OS changes. No.

All of this needs to be put in the context of the total number of units sold. Well over a million Apple notebooks each quarter for the period when these batteries were being used. Say perhaps 2 million MBPs a year for the two years that this particular battery configuration was in use. Roughly 4 million batteries of this kind in circulation as a result (these are just thumbnail figures, but they are around the right general magnitude). Lithium Ion batteries have a high failure rate regardless of brand, even when treated well , and many, of course, are not. At least a quarter seem to fail "prematurely". Even when looked after well, and assuming no defects, the realistic life expectancy of these batteries is in the realm of 2 to 4 years. That means that a heck of a lot of MacBook Pro (or any other brand) batteries are going to die every day, some young, some old, most somewhere in between.

If we assume that all of the 4 million original MBP batteries will be dead within 1500 days then , on average roughly 26000 of them will die around the world each day. Of course the figure is not this simple - it is heavily skewed towards older age, and away from youth, but we are now at a point where they are just about all getting older (they haven't been installed in Macs as original equipment for over twelve months). We can safely say that many, many thousands of MacBook Pro batteries can be expected to die each day. Over the last few months Snow Leopard has been selling like hotcakes to the millions of MBP owners. Putting the two things together, simply on the basis of probability alone many thousands of people are going to be installing Snow Leopard on the MBPs roughly around the time that their batteries bite the dust.

Of course, when two events like these happen to roughly co-incide (as they inevitably must because of the attrition rate of batteries and the high take up of Snow leopard), being human, if it happens to us personally we put two and two together and assume that the two events must somehow be related. The reality, though, is that the probability of the two sets of events occurring in rough proximity at the present time means that such coincidences will inevitably be quite common, even if they are completely unrelated to each other in any causative sense.

Cheers

Rod

Any time you build a straw horse, it's easy to knock it down. Unfortunately, the actual facts don't support your assertions, especially since you fail to mention the facts, or gloss over them at warp speed.

What a strange "coincidence" that immediately upon upgrading to Snow Leopard, the majority of posters in this thread experienced significant battery life reduction and anomalous behavior (spontaneous shutdowns, etc). Must be latent battery issues. Must be extra power needed to run SL.

We're not buying what you're selling. This is a Snow Leopard upgrade issue, pure and simple. Any other "explanation" is smoke and mirrors.

Stop while you're behind.

If it was a "Snow Leopard issue pure and simple", lapwolf, then all users , including I, and the many other regulars on this forum using SL, would be suffering from it as well. We are not.

If you look back over this thread you will see that a number of posters have already indicated that it simply turned out that their battery was faulty and that after replacing it everything is fine.

Yes, SL may have more draconian warnings than in the past. Instead of "Fair", you get a 'Service Battery" warning and so forth.

The figures posted by many others indicate that their batteries were clearly already highly suspect before they upgraded.

It is simply human nature to believe when two things happen in close proximity to each other that they are somehow linked, whether they are or not.

Yes, there are some others that look like unusual anomalies, and some probably are, but I get the feeling that at least a few of these may come from wolves dressed in sheep's clothing!

Cheers

Rod

i'm running Snow Leopard 10.6 (not 10.6.1 or 10.6.2). The version bundled in the original DVD.

it's 11 days from the clean installation and no more "service battery" troubles.

Maybe it's only a coincidence and the battery was joking. But it's very strange.

bye

i post a screenshot of the "time remaining" of the same battery that was lasting no more of 1,5 hours 11 days ago. now 5,5 hours.

How can u say that is not a software problem ????

Link: http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/2965/batterya.jpg

Message was edited by: Francesco131177

You sound more and more like a "wolf on a mission", my friend. The vast majority of users have no problem at all with their batteries after updating their MBs and MBPs to Snow Leopard. Literally millions of Mac Intel Notebook users have already done so (some five million Snow Leopard upgrades so far, which will only run on Intel processors, and 75 percent of all Apple Intel Mac sales are either MBPs or MBs).

Could someone reasonably suspect that you might just be someone with a very different agenda to push with that underlining, dramatic comment and provision of very little real information yourself, my dear wolf?


Cheers

Rod

I see from your other post, where you literally call for "blood in the streets" amongst other hyperbole, that you are apparently using what must have been a very, very early prototype year 2007 MBP13, sferrari!

Cheers

Rod