Battery Health Management Bug?

The new charging/discharging behaviour does disappear for me if I turn battery health management off in 10.15.5.

With the health management feature on, my battery will slowly drop percentage, and the laptop would not charge unless the power is at 90% or less even with AC plugged in. As soon as I turn this feature off, the MacBook Pro starts charging again as soon as the power is less than 100%.

I have the same issue with my MBP Late 2018. First I thought it's the power adaptor, but it's not. Plus my mac is plugged in power 95% of the time.

The only solution I figured was to hard reset the mac by shutting it down then holding down the power button for about 8 seconds till the Apple appears then disappears. Then start the computer and the battery is charging again.

I also noticed that this problem occurs when working with heavy graphical tasks in Adobe and other editing software. However, this did happen before installing Catalina. Now I disable the Battery Health Management option in the Sys Preferences, and will see how it goes.

Cheers,

would be interesting to see if the 10.15.6 update just release we still have this problem....

I have identical symptom on my 2019 13 inch MacBook Pro.

I sent it in to Apple for repair/examine last week, only to have it returned to me one day after with a note attached “can not reproduce charging issue”, and it passed all their diagnosis checks....

This odd charging behaviour would go away for one day or so after SMC reset, but it always returns eventually. Further more, this bug/behaviour remains when i restored the OS back to 10.15.4.

Also, my wife’s 2018 15” MacBook Pro and my friend’s 2016 15” MacBook Pro do not exhibit the same behaviour in 10.15.5. I am puzzled by the inconsistency of this.

Very interesting! Thanks for the insights, Rusty! I think we can really point towards the Battery Health Management system, regarding this experience.

Considering the typical behavior of a battery, staying at 100% if plugged in, this should be clarified in more detail by Apple. How the BHM system actually acts or write a topic about our experience stating it is "normal" or rather intentional. Then I could sleep in peace and use my MBP without any worries.

I’ve got the same issue.

Brand new 16” 2019 MacBook Pro. Took a while to get charging in the beginning. Restarting

-PRAM/SMC reset

-Safe Boot. Etc.

after chargjng to 100% I thought all good.

Had it plugged in all night and in the morning the battery was down to 5%.

Very frustrating as still no answers.

Hey,

I think my issue looks exactly the same as yours. What do you think? https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251525381

I have not come across a good solution just yet. How about you? I was in touch with the Apple Support but they obviously won't do anything over the chat except suggesting resetting the SMC, which didn't help.

The user experience is horrible seeing ur MBP losing charge while plugged in. We need Apple to do sth. about this ASAP! Or at least clarify what is causing this. I am not doing any heavy tasks while this is happening, just normal 1 window browsing.

Thanks for the detailed answer.

Yes, that's exactly what I am wondering about, at some point you might leave with 90% battery while having your MBP always plugged in. Which is a weird thing, if you ask me.

I get the benefits coming with this feature, but Apple should answer some questions regarding this.

First, how the discharging actually works and how it is decided by the BHM (through an FAQ or sth.).

Secondly, the additional cycles and how they are counted.

Did disabling the Battery Health Management option help anything? Please let us know!