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

I agree - too many folks are having problems with Snow Leopard and MacBook pro batteries for it to be a coincidence. My friend and I both upgraded our early-model MBP's late last year to SL. About two months later we both experienced the same situation - the dreaded "(Not Charging)" message. I have bought a new battery, installed it, and am still getting the Not Charging message. I have reset everything that it's possible to reset and still no improvement. Are Apple avoiding acknowledging a rampant problem here?

I agree - too many folks are having problems with Snow Leopard and MacBook pro batteries for it to be a coincidence. My friend and I both upgraded our early-model MBP's late last year to SL. About two months later we both experienced the same situation - the dreaded "(Not Charging)" message. I have bought a new battery, installed it, and am still getting the Not Charging message. I have reset everything that it's possible to reset and still no improvement. Are Apple avoiding acknowledging a rampant problem here?

Hello SuperDrongo,

If you do a Google for Mac Battery "Not Charging" you will find that your particular problem, in various guises, has been around for a long time...since long before Snow Leopard was released in fact. It is usually hardware related.

Sometimes it can be overcome simply by resetting your SMC. Sometimes it can be fixed by cleaning the contacts on your MacSafe plug and the socket on the computer itself. In other cases it may require a replacement battery or even a hardware repair (even a logicboard replacement) for the computer itself.

Rod

Derek, your computer is still under warranty. Your description also sounds like a straightforward battery failure. As you still have warranty coverage you should get in touch with Apple or an AASP and have the battery replaced.

Rod

Fedux wrote:
Same problem here.... Very annoying!

Apple please listen to us, it's impossible that suddenly ALL of this batteries became bad only after installing SL!

Of course it possible, Fedux. It would actually be surprising if it was otherwise. There are millions of Apple notebook batteries out there just as there are millions of people who have installed Snow Leopard. Battery failure is a common problem with computers regardless of the OS in use. Thousands can be expected to fail each day on MacBooks and MacBook pros simply because of the number in circulation. Many of those will be on computers on which Snow leopard has been installed within the last few days, weeks or months.

Rod

TYDYsails wrote:

There is definitely something not right here. As has been pointed out before, how are all these batteries appearing to fail at the same time? Yes, Mr. Hagen, you are undoubtedly correct in one respect but the common behaviour was not common before SL. The odd case might be put forward to counteract this but the overall scenario is showing a SW fault originating from SL.

TYDYsails, if you look back at the posts in this very forum to the days before Snow Leopard you will find that new posts about battery failure and the like occurred with just about the same frequency then as they do today (one can expect a gradual increase because the batteries for this model are getting older, but even this seems slight) see here for example for the posts for the same time last year (Jan 2009) . Head back another year to here (Jan 2008) and you'll find much the same (including even posts claiming the Leopard or even a Tiger update, had "destroyed" peoples batteries. )

This is only to be expected. Batteries are one of the less reliable components of notebook computers. As I've said elsewhere here, lots (thousands) of batteries fail every day and millions of people have recently installed Snow Leopard on their MBPs. It is hardly surprising that when battery failure occurs in close proximity to a new OS installation that people get suspicious, but it would really be far more remarkable if a substantial number of people did not have such an experience, given the numbers we are talking about here. The laws of probability simply demand it.

I believe I shall keep my "duff" battery for a while and see what happens with 10.6.3. There is the off-chance that it will "un-duff" itself.....

I'll say again, that looking at your own particular figures no OS update is going to "fix" your battery. It simply needs replacing.

Shigglyboo's problems, with his very dramatic shifts in capacity, are actually unusual when compared to most others in this thread, and I find myself wondering whether he may even have an underlying hardware problem of some other kind, though defective batteries can behave very erratically. The fact that he is suffering other types of "crashes" also suggest that he may have issues (either hardware or software based) that go beyond simply battery matters.

Cheers

Rod

Message was edited by: Rod Hagen

TYDYsails,

After you've finished Rod's rather verbose response, the first thing you should know, is no, he doesn't work for Apple, even though it seems like it =) jk

Seriously though, there is a bug in Snow Leopard concerning batteries. Snow Leopard isn't necessarily killing batteries, but instead is more strict about battery integrity. Where Leopard would slide on a battery who's power fluctuates, Snow Leopard shuts down. I did some tests by downgrading to Leopard and saw improved battery performance, but my battery is still screwed up.

Some people have reported that sometimes a new battery fixes the problem, others have reported that their new battery starts seeing problems after a few weeks.

There is a possibility that you will need a new battery, the SONY batteries that ship with the MBP have a poor user rating (2 stars on the apple store), so if you are planning on replacing the battery consider buying a third party battery, like FastMac, as they tend to be cheaper and have better performance. One company mentioned on this board is said to have the cheapest battery, I forget which one it was, this thread has gotten too big to reference.

So, with any luck, Apple will fix the bug, and let us with less then perfect batteries to squeeze some extra life out of them, or replace them with the cheapest battery possible, in case you have to replace it in the future.

Cheers.

Johnny Storm wrote:

Seriously though, there is a bug in Snow Leopard concerning batteries. Snow Leopard isn't necessarily killing batteries, but instead is more strict about battery integrity. Where Leopard would slide on a battery who's power fluctuates, Snow Leopard shuts down. I did some tests by downgrading to Leopard and saw improved battery performance, but my battery is still screwed up.

Johnny,

as I and others have mentioned elsewhere, there is evidence that some applications draw more CPU time, and therefore require more power when run under Snow Leopard than under Leopard. The best documented example is the Flash Plug-in for Safari. If you run Safari in 32 bit mode under Snow Leopard you will find, for example, it places less load on your processors when it encounters a flash site than it does when Safari is running in 64 bit mode. The Flash Plugin is a processor hog (and therefore battery muncher) at the best of times but when run under 64 bit (ie in SL Safari's normal default setting) it gets even nastier, just about doubling its demands, and increasing the chances that an already failing battery will simply shut down without warning.

The reality is , though, that if you placed your processor under the same level of stress under Leopard (doing something else that is equally or more processor intensive as Flash is under Safari running in 64 bit , such as video rendering or the like) you would find yourself needing the same amount of power and your computer would shut down just the same.

There are, no doubt, other examples out there.

Now, you can call that a "bug" if you like (though whether you would blame Adobe for creating a plug-in that uses so much power, or Apple for letting them run it in Safari/SL under 64 bit, is a moot point), but running 64 bit apps is what Snow Leopard is all about. It is not something that Apple are going to change!

Sure, Adobe may come out with a less "hungry" version of their Flash plug-in at some stage, but they aren't usually very quick to optimise their software for Macs and I suspect that the reason they let it chomp up the CPU cycles is because they are available to be chomped and doing so maximises performance without having to substantially re-engineer their product. The same is likely to be the case with others designing software specifically for 64 bit use.

As long as a user's battery is up to spec, and available to provide the required current on demand, this doesn't matter much. Sure, it reduces the amount of time it takes to run a "cycle" - gives you a shorter charge life etc, but it doesn't result in a shutdown with a "normal" battery. It is when a battery is already in decline and really needs replacing that problems of unexpected shutdowns and the like occur.

Changing from Snow Leopard back to Leopard (or, more simply, just running your apps in 32 bit mode rather than 64) may reduce power demands in some situations, but it won't 'fix" a dying battery, and it won't stop your computer unexpectedly quitting if you use a "heavy duty" app that requires heavy CPU usage (or a number of apps demanding CPU time simultaneously) even in 32 bit Leopard. The only thing that can do that in these situations is a new battery capable of handling a normal full load.

Cheers

Rod

Rod Hagen wrote:
Changing from Snow Leopard back to Leopard (or, more simply, just running your apps in 32 bit mode rather than 64) may reduce power demands in some situations, but it won't 'fix" a dying battery, and it won't stop your computer unexpectedly quitting if you use a "heavy duty" app that requires heavy CPU usage (or a number of apps demanding CPU time simultaneously) even in 32 bit Leopard. The only thing that can do that in these situations is a new battery capable of handling a normal full load.

Rod,

I appreciate your loyalty to Apple and your defense of Snow Leopard is... well, its something. But I have to respectfully disagree with you. There is a bug in Snow Leopard, I have no doubt about that, I appreciate your ad nauseum defense of the OS, but it doesn't change the situation.

I have no doubt that in the short term a new battery will improve my experience, but until the bug at the heart of the matter isn't fixed, its only a temporary solution.

I did do a series of stress tests in Leopard, browsing the web, watching video in Flash, and Leopard did significantly better against Snow Leopard doing nothing. In other words if I simply left Snow Leopard on, with no Applications running, the machine would shut down in increasing shorter amounts of time, 94% last time I checked. But under leopard I was able to use the computer for over an hour, draining the battery to 20%. I'm not denying that my battery should be replaced, on the contrary, I think I've pretty much said as much.

But if what you said is correct, and that the power requirements of Snow Leopard's 64bit optimization is at the root of the increased amount of battery failures that are being reported, then this was poor planing on the part of Apple, who should have warned individuals prior to upgrading that the new OS had higher energy consumption demands. Had I known this, I probably wouldn't have bothered upgrading to Snow Leopard, as all of the benefits of the OS do not outweigh the cost of replacing the battery.

As I've said in the past, this isn't the first time an Apple OS update has caused issues in the hardware, this feels like just such a situation.

Cheers.

. There is a bug in Snow Leopard, I have no doubt about that, I appreciate your ad nauseum defense of the OS, but it doesn't change the situation.

Well, Johnny, I'm sorry, but you'll have to admit that if you were running two MBPs from two different "generations", both under Snow Leopard, neither of which exhibit any sign of the problems concerned, you'd probably find it difficult to call the matter an OS "bug", too!

The nearest I can get to "emulating" the problem is when I bung my old "bad" battery (which is still a bit healthier than yours, but was replaced six months ago, before SL, for any "real" use) back in my SantaRosa MBP. Yep, it shuts down prematurely under heavy CPU load in Snow Leopard. Trouble is , it also shuts down equally prematurely under the same heavy CPU load in Leopard, and even Tiger!

If you, like me, had been dealing with other people's queries about extremely similar types of battery problems for years here, in everything from PB1400s running under OS 7.5 through to current MBPs , and just about everything in between, and seen every OS Upgrade or Update ever introduced during that period blamed for battery problems when they have occurred soon after an update along the way, I suspect you'd be a bit more circumspect about the notion that this was a specific "Snow Leopard" bug, too!

Your idea of warning about installation for people with defective batteries because if they visit a flash site running Safari in 64 bit mode they may suffer from an unexpected shutdown is interesting, but where would this stop? Should Apple also be telling people with bad batteries not to use iMovie or iDVD under battery, *even under Leopard or Tiger*, because doing so is also likely to cause an unexpected shutdown because video rendering is processor intensive? Or Motion or Final Cut Pro or Logic? What about third party apps like WoW, or DVD ripping software, or even a particular version of Virex that hogs the processor, or even some old Canon printer drivers ? The same applies with them and the consequences are the same regardless of which OS is installed if the person concerned has a bad battery.

I guess a warning that said "Do not install this software on a defective computer" might deter a few, but not many? (I've often wished that OS updates carried a warning that said "Do not install this update if you already have problems unless they are specifically identified as being addressed in the documentation accompanying this update." Installing ANY update onto a computer that already has directory or system corruption problems, or free space issues, for example, in the hope that it will magically "fix things" is a recipe for suicide. Doing so almost invariably makes things much, much, worse - but I digress.)

Or, rather than posting warnings about anything and everything, is it reasonable for them to assume that people have equipment that is pretty much "up to spec" and working within normal operating parameters? A "good" battery (which, for a Lithium battery means 80% of original capacity or better) is very much a part of any normal notebook computer. Should Apple (and third party manufacturers too, perhaps) really be specifically providing warnings with respect to installation of all of their software for those who don't happen to have one, or even "designing down" their software to make sure it meet the needs of such people?


Cheers

Rod

New battery. Battery is fully charged. Still have "X" in menu bar. Read this at MacFixit.
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10426564-263.html?tag=mncol;txt

Waiting for 10.6.3 to see what happens. Rob

Thanks for your very detailed answer but you missed the most important thing....
"Why battery itself says that it is charged and SL shuts down my computer?"
"Why after it shuts down if I push the power button I can work and use it again for at least 30 minutes?"
This couldn't be a battery problem....

P.S. (I can see battery still has power inside by pushing the button on it. Lithium batteries have an internal chip that determine the charge status so they should be independent from the computer and the computer itself should be smart enough to read "inside" the battery chip...)

Fedux wrote:
Thanks for your very detailed answer but you missed the most important thing....
"Why battery itself says that it is charged and SL shuts down my computer?"
"Why after it shuts down if I push the power button I can work and use it again for at least 30 minutes?"

Because when the computer shuts down suddenly in this fashion it is not actually SL "choosing" to shut down the computer. It is a transient demand for power which the "bad" battery cannot supply that causes the computer to shut down. Exactly the same thing occurs under any other version of the OS when the same situation occurs.

Think of it like a car engine with a bad fuel pump. The fuel pump can provide enough petrol while you are driving along on the flat but you put down your foot on the accelerator to overtake a truck on a hill and the engine just dies and stops because not enough fuel is getting pumped through to meet the needs of acceleration. It is the same with an unexpected shutdown in a notebook computer with a bad battery.

Snow Leopard's "Service Battery" messages are intended in part to provide you with a warning that you have got a "bad fuel pump", that might give out in this fashion if placed under too heavy a stress. But it is not Snow Leopard itself which is actually shutting down the computer when a sudden shut down occurs. It is simply that the power supply is temporarily not able to meet a "spike" in the power demand.

As with the car in the analogy I mentioned, once the "engine" has stopped in the "high demand" situation, you may well be able to restart it, and even continue to "drive" with the bad battery for a while as long as it isn't exposed to the same temporary higher demand again.

Cheers

Rod

If you read the comments of the author underneath the CNET article you link to (which has already been mentioned above) , Rob, you will see that they are based primarily on the discussion in this thread. As I've already said, using the article to "justify" claims made / beliefs expressed here is simply a circular process.

As far as your "X" in the menubar goes, if the battery itself is charged (and will, for example, run another computer) this almost invariably occurs because of a poor connection between the battery and the computer. Remove the battery, check the contacts for dirt or damage, and carefully re-insert it. If this doesn't fix the issue then you probably have a hardware problem.

If an "X" appears when the battery is not charged, follow the process described here.

Cheers

Rod

Rod, I did not mention that I have already been to a Apple Service Center. About 2 weeks ago they tested it and gave me a new battery. Same results. They now want me to wait for the latest update before they try anything else. Best, Rob