New MacBook Pro, Battery takes forever to charge

dritao wrote:

Yeah sorry I should’ve mentioned it before! I bought the Mac new from Best Buy, so the charger and everything is from the box.

It’s the 16 inch M3Max with 16-Core CPU, 40-Core GPU, 48GB Unified Memory and 1TB SSD Storage

Thank you. That is a top of the line Mac, it should easily be able to handle what you are using it for.

When the battery stops charging, does it look like this:

Showing the plug like that, instead of the little lightning bolt that signifies charging is underway, means the Mac is keeping the charge level below 100% intentionally to preserve battery life.

This setting in controllable in the System Settings, Battery, Battery Health. If Optimized Battery Charging is active (turned on), this is how it will behave.

If the lightning bolt is showing but the charging is slow when demanding (like your 3D perspective applications) graphics or calculating activity is underway, that is normal.

And if the Optimized Battery Charging is active the charge level may hold even or decrease at times. It should not get much below 80% when the charger is connected.

If you wish, you can turn off Optimized Battery Charging and then should see the charge rapidly progress to 100% when idle. Also if you click on the battery icon at the top of your screen, it should present an option to "charge to full now" which will then proceed to do that if you select it.

See more on this: About Optimized Battery Charging - Apple Support

If you think your Mac charging is not proceeding properly, even after reading the above, then I expect it is still under warranty and by all means have it examined at the Apple Store. You have a very expensive and high end computer and you deserve for it to be operating correctly

That computer is a battery-CAPABLE device. It is not optimized as a battery-operated device. (It is NOT an iPhone.)

Your computer performs best when connected to AC power. It can use the full output of the Power Adapter AND when doing especially challenging work will also freely "borrow" power from the battery. In some cases, even with the power adapter connected, the charged state may decline during stressful work.

When used only on battery, your computer has no extra cushion of power, and may perform more slowly. However, for ordinary non-stressful tasks this may not be objectionable (possibly not even noticeable.)

In general, you should ALWAYS connect AC power when it is possible to do so, and only run on batteries (which could be somewhat slower) when no AC sources are at hand. Your Mac will NEVER over-charge.

you do not seem to be encountering this specific issue, but I am adding a bit about it for completeness.

That particular Mac often demands more than 60 Watts power to charge and run at the same time. If you are charging via USB-C cable or external device (such as an external display that provides some power) you must be certain your external device can supply rather a LOT of charging power.

.. AND that the USB-C cables you are using are not just 'regular' USB-C cables. The default power transmission capability of a regular USB-C cable is only 60 Watts. Premium USB-C cables that can transmit up to 100 Watts power are available, and much more expensive. Super-Premium USB-C cables that can carry up to 240 Watts have recently become available as well.

dritao wrote:

So I bought this MacBook Pro not too long ago for school ...

Right now that I have it charged, the battery is actually going down WHILE I’m charging it.

... when I bought this mac, the seller did reassure me that these Macs would be able to handle software like this, but should I just avoid using it now with this Mac? Is this supposed to happen with the battery?

thanks!

Did you buy the Mac new from Apple? Who was "the seller" who told you these things? Or did you buy it used? What type of charger are you using, is it the one from Apple that comes/came originally with the Mac from the factory? What power rating does the charger have? What model Mac do you have?

Newer versions of the OS allow the battery to discharge some even while connected to a charger as keeping the battery at 100% all the time shortens its life. My MacBook Pros often decrease charge level to 80% (starting from 100%) even while connected to the charger. The 80% level is better for the battery if it is always connected to a charger.

Grant, those are good points. Sometimes people don't appreciate the importance of the cable capacity.

In this case the poster indicate they were using the out of the box new charger and cable, and that Mac comes with a 140W charger. I would hope the cable is also rated for that when new from Apple. I have a Mac like that I use at work but can't check because it is connected right now to a dock that actually only provides 86W but it seems enough to charge the laptop to full when it needs to.

dritao wrote:

So I bought this MacBook Pro not too long ago for school and I’m running programs like Maya Autodesk and I noticed after using these kinds of software, my battery takes forever to charge, it’ll take like 20 minutes for it to go up a percentage. It doesn’t say that any apps are using significant energy and it says that the battery health is normal.

Right now that I have it charged, the battery is actually going down WHILE I’m charging it.

I know these softwares are very heavy and take up a lot of energy, and when I bought this mac, the seller did reassure me that these Macs would be able to handle software like this, but should I just avoid using it now with this Mac? Is this supposed to happen with the battery?

thanks!

What exact macbook pro is this...?

What exact macOS are you currently running...?