MacBook Pro 2011 Battery Re-Charging Issue

My 13" (via the Kill a Watt) reports almost identical numbers to the spec for idle states, maximum current draw I have seen is 57w, which is well within the psu limits.

Csound1 wrote:

My 13" (via the Kill a Watt) reports almost identical numbers to the spec for idle states, maximum current draw I have seen is 57w, which is well within the psu limits.

Indeed. Which is what leads me to believe that this is a firmware or software glitch somewhere that causes the power drain to rise beyond the capacity of the PSU -or- the charging subsystem is not routing enough power correctly to motherboard from the PSU causing the battery to suppliment the motherboard to keep it running.

It's not easily reproducible - but I'm going to continue testing by running the game I played when it first happened or other GPU and CPU intensive games. For science, of course. 🙂

I'm able to reproduce this behavior in a couple of different ways.

I can do it with multiple GPU intensive Mac OS X games in Steam, Osmosis and Team Fortress 2 are just a couple I've tried. I've also been able to reproduce it in VMware Fusion and Parellels - but NOT in bootcamp running Windows 7 64bit.

When I do this, the MBP fans begin to ramp up and it generates a lot of heat - but the Killawatt only reports a 49.8 watt draw on the AC adapter and begins to drain the battery. 15-20 minutes of play yielded about 10% battery loss.

I've tried with three magsafe power adapters and been able to repeat the procedure on each one of them.

This leads me to believe it's a problem with OS X power management software because it doesn't happen when I'm running Windows 7 natively with the same software load.

Here is my 2 cents

Im a Audio Power User I use Protools for a livinga nd of course I have a MacPro fully loaded

but I bought a MBP 2.5 I7 with 8 gb 750gb 7200 rpm drive and aniiglare screen to get more res and no glare

I use this to record live shows normally +24 tracks 32 bit from 44.1 to 96 khz the normal file size I work wirth is around 20 gb, I also use it as my on the road workstation

I also use lots of plugins since I mix inside the box whemIm at home and on the road

I took this 2 screenshots of a session Im working on the battery is at 81% but when I started working with the power supply on it was close to 95% i did a 2 hour session that day note that it says that it will charge the battery in 20:15 hrs and the bat life is 98%

so yes the power supply is not powerfull enougth

thats my 2 cents Im not a gamer so I dont unserstand the game consuption and I wont work on windows cause I cant rely on a crappy os if I get a blue screen on a middle of a concert ill have 4000 + people that will like to kik my but

The problem is, it's not a PSU issue.

I'm running another test this weekend with a free CPU loading tool called SystemLoad (http://www.bresink.com/osx/0SystemLoad/screenshots.html) with my quad core i7, if I load 4 CPU cores to 100% - charging stops.

The Killawatt shows I'm only pulling about 65 watts through the power supply - 20 watts shy of its rated limit which I have hit before while playing games or flogging the GPU and CPU at the same time.

1 x 10% = Charging; 44 watts draw on AC

1 x 100% = Charging; 50-62 watts draw on AC

2 x 100% = Charging (time doubles); 64 watts draw on AC

3 x 100% = Charging (time doubles again); 64 watts draw on AC

4 x 100% = No charging; 64 watts draw on AC

5-8 x 100% = No charging; 64 watts draw on AC + battery life drops.

I'm going to switch to boot camp and try a similar CPU load test...

Almost the same results in Windows 7.

All cores loaded to 100% CPU and fans spun up high - 50-51 watts on the PSU, no battery charging.

As soon as the load drops to one core - battery begins charging again.😠

bspiral wrote:

Almost the same results in Windows 7.

All cores loaded to 100% CPU and fans spun up high - 50-51 watts on the PSU, no battery charging.

As soon as the load drops to one core - battery begins charging again.😠

Maybe its not charging the battery in that scenario because of the added heat it'd generate.

256fx wrote:

bspiral wrote:

Almost the same results in Windows 7.

All cores loaded to 100% CPU and fans spun up high - 50-51 watts on the PSU, no battery charging.

As soon as the load drops to one core - battery begins charging again.😠

Maybe its not charging the battery in that scenario because of the added heat it'd generate.

Maybe there are two scenarios :

Scenario 1 : max CPU load, battery stops charging because it can't deal with the heat of charging and the heat from the CPU

Scenario 2 : Max GPU, battery stops charging and starts draining because the power supply can't deliver enough power.

It's amazing that I was finally unbanned - Here's my 2 cents.

A lot of people are flaming in this thread: It's innappropriate. Without any flames, here's why its such an issue and here is a way to reproduce the issue we've been having on your machine.

1. Let the battery drain below 95%

2. Start up photobooth.

3. Start Recording.

4. Plug the machine back in.

You'll notice that it never charges and will continue to discharge. This only works on the following machines:

All macbook pros that were produced last year that have a 15 inch (or greater) screen and the Radeon card in it. (Note, if you do not have the radeon card, this issue will not be reproducable)

Regardless as to anyones opinions or love for their macbook, this issue still affects many of us. I have attempted to contact apple and I was met with "You're using the machine wrong." Last time I checked, I know how to use a computer as I am only a programmer. I guess I shouldn't "use" the machine.

And to those who will say "GO BUY A PC" or " GO BUY A MAC PRO", let's talk about the issue with that: A mac pro is over priced for the hardware - I can build the exact same mac pro for 1/5th of the cost, it'd just need to be hacked. Also, I can't exactly develop for apple on any other machine than an apple, so this leaves me with two options.

1. Buy a windows notebook and a Hacked MacPro so I can program for apple

or

2. Support apple by buying their macbook pro honestly.

I decided to go with the latter option so I could take it on trips (since I travel a lot) - This would work great if the machine worked.

I just wanted to express my utter disgust with apple and their complete negligence on this issue. I upgraded to 10.8.2 to see if any smc fixes that I could have missed while I was still on 10.6.8 and experiencing this problem could fix it, but it did not. The only solution I've found is to download xcode from the app store, open instruments, and use it's preference window to limit my system to only use one CPU core on my 17" 2011 i7. If i do that while it's rendering something in compressor or after effects & draining it's battery because of the excessive power useage, it'll stop and resume charging as normal. Of course this completely defeats the purpose of buying a quad core i7 notebook in the first place.

all the best wishes to you in appropriating a reliable mac and spec boost to compensate for the massive heasache that issue was to so many of us - and something that will reduce the resale value of countless defective machines that were never made good. (On the most stressful occasion for me, I was forced to leave to visit a client with 12% battery charge despite the machine having been connected to AC for 36 hours or so. Good luck.

<Edited By Host>

Sure is a lot of post editing going on here.

If Apple spent nearly this amount of effort reconciling with unhappy customers instead of doing this perhaps we wouldn't be so upset in the first place.

Hi

I've recently run some tests on my 17 mbp early 2011 i7 2.2GHz machine and the battery charged as it should, whereas previously it didn't when on the psu. I'm intregued as to how this has changed. I was running BOINC on 100% to process random data, had 2 VMs running and was converting images in Aperture.

My bro is an electronic engineer, and he suggested the only way they could have acheived this is by adjusting (increasing) the thermal cutout for the internal psu and/or throttling back the cores or gpu to draw less power - unless they got some numbers seriously wrong originally (which is doubtful else they would have fixed this issue a year ago).

Has anyone else experienced the same?

I'm running 10.8.2.

Also, are they pulling comments off this thread as well?

If so, shame on Apple.

Regards

Jadub

I haven't seen any comments pulled yet, but have seen people complain about it - so there's that.

I'm running a non-upgraded (fresh install) of 10.8.2 on a late 2011 MBP 15" with the AMD GPU. I have experienced this issue in the past, especially with full screen 3D games and heavy CPU/GPU tasks like iPhoto facial recognition tasks.

Today I decided to revisit the issue and attempt to reproduce the problem.

I loaded the CPU cores with this:

Launch terminal and run this command (yes > /dev/null 8 times, for each logical core)

yes > /dev/null & yes > /dev/null & yes > /dev/null & yes > /dev/null & yes > /dev/null & yes > /dev/null & yes > /dev/null & yes > /dev/null

Tip: To stop the cpu load, simply type this in the terminal: killall yes

Then run this app to load the GPU:

Geeks3d GPU Test ( http://www.geeks3d.com/20121129/gputest-0-2-1-for-mac-osx-opengl-benchmark-furma rk-gimark-stress-test-videocard/ )

It's a OS X friendly GUI wrapper for the opensource Furmark openGL benchmarking and stress testing utility

In about ten seconds the fans were running wide open and activity monitor showed I was maxed out on CPU. Even browsing slowed up a bit while the CPU crunched on everything.

My battery remained at 98% charge and the MagSafe connector remained green.

So I pulled the MagSafe connector and let the battery discharge to 95%(it doesn't take long with stress tests running!) According to BatteryTimeRemaining -73.2 watts of power (negative indicating a discharge of the battery).

I plugged the MagSafe back in and it remained green for about 10 seconds then changed to orange. At this point I had 6306 mAh left in the battery.

A minute later, the MagSafe was still orange, and I'm at 6342 mAh and a power reading of 14.54 watts, indicating a slow but positive charge - under full stress of GPU and CPU. It completed the charge in about 1 hour... so it was clearly using almost everything from the AC power adapter to keep the laptop running.

I'm comfortable saying that Apple has fixed the problem - probably by eliminating the symptoms through changes in power management. I'm still not pleased because I'm assuming they dialed down the power consumption on something (GPU and/or CPU) which will yield lower performance to bring the entire laptop's power consumption numbers in line with the available power from the magsafe AC adapter.

Message was edited by: bspiral Added tip for killing the Yes test and thoughts at the end.

Wow, so the post was deleated where apple gave a guy a refund on his macbook pro with charging issues.

I dont want a refund, i just want a macbook pro that actually stays charged