Mavericks MacBook Air 2013 Battery Draining

the capacity is mAh. Evidently. Under 1500 you need to service battery, all right, but one should have a proper gauge to be informed. Let me also add, the laptop operates in humid and hot south east asian islands. Right now. since there is no battery fix yet in the works, I suspect the measures changed.

ChrBart wrote:

Hey Folks

I found a solution for the battery drain that worked on my rMBP15 Late 2013 and my girlfriends MBA 13 Mid 2012. Battery-Time went from 4-5 hoursto about 9 hours on the rMBP since performing these steps:

1. Reset com.apple.finder.plist, com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and com.apple.desktop.plist
   - Open a new finder window
   - Choose Go > Go to folder. Your destination is ~/Library/Preferences
   - Locate com.apple.finder.plist and rename it to com.apple.finder_backup.plist
   - Locate com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and rename it to com.apple.sidebarlists_backup.plist
   - Do the same for com.apple.desktop.plist. Note: This file was missing in my (rMBP) folder. If so: nevermind.
   - Open Terminal and type: killall Dock
2. Reset your SMC:
   - shut down your system
   - plug in the magsafe
   - hold down shift+ctrl+alt+power for a second, then release. Your magsafe should blink
   - do this three times
3. Reset PRAM:
   - turn on your mbp and hold down alt+cmd+p+r immediately
   - hold down the keys until you hear the startup sound the second time
   - release the keys and let the MBP boot.
4. Give your system some time to adjust to the changes: after a while it should show you a much increased battery time.

I hope this works for some of you. Please keep in mind that you do this on your own risk. Some styling-settings for finder and your finder-sidebar e.g icon sizes and the like might get lost in the process. But 5 hours of extra battery should be worth that.

Best regards and hopefully I could help some of you

Bart

This did it for me as well. Thank you.

Macbook Air 13" 2013

After a reboot I was back to old battery life (8h). Today I found it is because of the thunderbolt ethernet adapter (from Apple). With wifi I get the promised battery life of 12h+. Is this normal? I thought wifi consumes more. By the way, the adapter gets pretty warm, should I worry?

Just to share my experience:

I got a first Macbook Air 11 2013 and within a couple of days noticed it wouldn't hold a battery charge for more than 5 hours. There was no other software than Apple's. I returned and they replaced it.

I have been using the replacement since August and as soon as I started using it I noticed a great improvement. I could finally get the "+9 h battery remaining" in the battery power menu. I soon realised it wasn't real...

Even after I updated to Mavericks, there was almost no improvement. If I timed my usage, it would never get anywhere near 9 h of basic use (Safari browsing, Word...). I was getting at the most 4.5 h!

I called Apple Care, went through their usual troubleshooting things (that I had already done, even reinstalling from scratch...) and I finally decided to get an appointment at the Genius Bar. I also had a side issue, where my power adapter would not charge or intermittently stopped charging (but I still managed to fully charge the battery).

Now this is what is important:

When I got to the store, they acknowledged the charging issue (luckily, the intermittent issue showed when I was there), they did a hardware test and everything was ok, even the battery!

The guy said they couldn't do anything. I said ok, let's just wait and see how the battery drops while at the helpdesk... He said ok, leave your computer here, we'll check it.

After 2 days, they called me to tell me the battery was faulty and the power IO on the board as well (charging issue).

The Apple Hardware Test is not always reliable.

Don't give up, bring up your case with your evidence and be patient!

I am now getting easily 7-8 h of continuous use and I am finally enjoying it. I think it's such a shame I had to go through all this hassle and I had to spend spend so much time getting what I paid for.

After hours spending time on this issue, I finally did a clean install. Now Mavericks runs and I have 12 h and more battery life.

This worked for me: I had 4:30 hours before doing it, and 11:24 hours immediately after. Thanks so much !

ChrBart wrote:

Hey Folks

I found a solution for the battery drain that worked on my rMBP15 Late 2013 and my girlfriends MBA 13 Mid 2012. Battery-Time went from 4-5 hoursto about 9 hours on the rMBP since performing these steps:

1. Reset com.apple.finder.plist, com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and com.apple.desktop.plist
   - Open a new finder window
   - Choose Go > Go to folder. Your destination is ~/Library/Preferences
   - Locate com.apple.finder.plist and rename it tocom.apple.finder_backup.plist
   - Locate com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and rename it tocom.apple.sidebarlists_backup.plist
   - Do the same for com.apple.desktop.plist. Note: This file was missing in my (rMBP) folder. If so: nevermind.
   - Open Terminal and type: killall Dock
2. Reset your SMC:
   - shut down your system
   - plug in the magsafe
   - hold down shift+ctrl+alt+power for a second, then release. Your magsafe should blink
   - do this three times
3. Reset PRAM:
   - turn on your mbp and hold down alt+cmd+p+r immediately
   - hold down the keys until you hear the startup sound the second time
   - release the keys and let the MBP boot.
4. Give your system some time to adjust to the changes: after a while it should show you a much increased battery time.

I hope this works for some of you. Please keep in mind that you do this on your own risk. Some styling-settings for finder and your finder-sidebar e.g icon sizes and the like might get lost in the process. But 5 hours of extra battery should be worth that.

Best regards and hopefully I could help some of you

Bart

Sadly the trick did not work for me... I got 8 hours on a fully charged battery, when I am not using any programs! Thats just bad! I bought this laptop for the long lasting battery and now apple screwed it up with mavericks...

Daniel, can you do following: start a new thread, and post an Etrecheck list there. Post the link to the new thread here.

Ok, thanks! I will do that!

been away from the discussion board for a while and I started to read some of the thread and realized the issues about this 10.9 battery with MBA.

Mine is 2013 i5 256g, 8G model. The battery was as it was advertised with ML - over 12 hours.

Since I used it for work and did not noticed the battery issues after my upgrade to 10.9

Therefore, I took my MBA out today and did some work and realized it only held for 7:56 with 100 charged.

I did the 10.9 upgrade since October 2013, I think it did it's "adjustment" over months.

So, I gave your method a try this afternoon, I worked very well, and I got 15+ hours with average use, it is holding the charge and over few hours of use, it still at 90%!

thank you for the post!

Sam

I got a 13'' Macbook air 2013 yesterday and I updated it to Marvericks. Yesterday, when I opened my mac for the first time, the battery was at 11:29 hours. Then, when I installed Marvericks, I noticed that the battery had dropped to 5 hours. Now, it keeps on going down.

What should I do? Should I go back to Apple Store and get it changed?

Thanks.

The time "remaining" estimate is (just that an estimate) is currently inaccurate in some instances in Mavericks, others report same and much testing on my own of several machines indicate the same.

This however does not affect the ACTUAL battery life.

recommend the free APP called coconut battery and checking via mAh of charge rather than a time "remaining" indicator until this is resolved

http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/

Or can contact Apple for free service and/or in shop diagnostic as you are entitled to same.

I can happily report around 20% increase in battery life (actual) on 2 different Air, and additionally much faster boot times (from 22 seconds down to 7 seconds)

Peace

😊

Thank you for your reply.

I will get it to 0% and see what it does.

Dreey wrote:

I will get it to 0% and see what it does.

No, dont ever do that on purpose, deep battery discharges are worst thing you can do to any Lithium battery.

Considerations:

In a perfect (although impractical) situation, your lithium battery is best idealized swinging back and forth between 25 and 85% SOC (state of charge) roughly.

Keep your macbook plugged in when near a socket since in the near end of long-term life, this is beneficial to the battery.

A lot of battery experts call the use of Lithium cells the "80% Rule" ...meaning use 80% of the charge or so, then recharge them for longer overall life.

The only quantified abuse seen to Lithium cells are instances when often the cells are repeatedly drained very low…. key word being "often"

In a lithium battery, very deep discharges alter the chemistry of the anode ➕ to take up lithium ions and slowly damages the batteries capacity for the cathode ➖ to transport lithium ions to the anode when charging, thereby reducing max charge levels in mAh. In short, radical swings of power to lithium cells disrupts the chemical ecosystem of the battery to hold charges correctly which likewise impedes the perfect transfer of lithium ions both in charging and discharging. In charging your lithium battery, lithium ions are “pushed uphill” (hard) to the anode, and discharged “downhill” (easy) to the cathode when on battery power. Deep discharges, damages this “upward” electrolyte chemistry for the battery to maintain a healthy charge and discharge balance relative to its age and cycles.

Optimally, in terms of a healthy lithium battery and its condition, it is most happy at 50% between extremes, which is why low-power-drain processors such as the Haswell are ideal on lithium battery health since a partially charged battery with a low-drain processor has, in general, much more usage in hours

Oh, thank you for letting me know. I wasn't aware of that.