Mavericks - power use / service battery

I noticed that my battery life jumped significantly. I now get 1-2hours MORE since upgrading to Mavericks on my MBA late 2012. I do, however, have the service battery warning. It kind of annoys me, because I use my computer every day for college and the nearest Apple store is 5 hours away from me... I can't get it serviced without sending it in. I hope that this is just a software glitch and that Apple adresses it soon.

Today my mid 2009 MacBook Pro shut down with 53% battery indicated. When I turned it back on it said 0%! I plugged the charger in and within a short space of time it was back up around 50%. I unplugged it and about 5mins later the charge had actually gone UP to 77%!!! 20mins later the screen went blank and it wouldn't respond at all. I plugged the charger back in and pressed the power button and it came back on immediately as though it was just in standby mode. Very strange, my battery was replaced about five months ago and only has 101 cycles on it. Somethings not right here!

I'm also now getting the 'Service Battery' indication.

I thought I was out of the woods when the "Service Battery" item disappeared from my menu. But then it came back. For me, it seems to be related to a capacity threshold of 77%. I was at 77% (according to CoconutBattery) and it was gone, but then it dropped to 76%, and the message came back. If I can get it back to 77%, I'll see if the message goes away again.

Doesn't 76% seem a tad bit high to issue a service warning?

The max capacity is all over the place. In one day, it was anywhere from 4173 mAh to 4217 mAh, mysteriously rising and dropping. My machine is over 4 years old, but has only 346 cycles.

Dropped 10% in 2 days and one cicle. Service battery warning appeared. Uh-huh

And I'm not even on mavericks.

I'm thinking: the first time I installed mavericks, there was an update to EFI or firmware. Installed it of course, noticed that in start up manager I now have an (useless) option to connect to wi-fi. Since then I installed and deleted the entire drive about 3 times, and the problem persists. The firmware is the only thing that continues unchanged, because I allways have that option in startup manager. So I think it's the only thing that can cause this for me.

Now, my macbook pro 7,1 doesn't have a firmware restoration utility, so I cant just rollback to the previous version and check......

Deerskin

I tried following the advise of poster “Jasperpants” and tried recalibrating the battery

Its nonsense if someone tells you that you can calibrate the LiPo cells in your modern macbook

😊

Hi,

As I mentioned before, I also started having the battery issues (low life, service message) once I installed the firmware update (MBA mid 2012), and there's apparently no way to go back. Re-installing 10.8.5 from time machine did not change anything. So maybe it really is related to the firmware update.

Side note : could MBA mid 2012 users post their amperage please ? Mine is now around 1000 mAh usually, seems a tad high to me. It's found under System profiler -> power.

Cheers.

Same thing here!

After the replaced SSD, I found the capacity of the battery decreased 19%!!

I was trying to adjust the battery(use until sleep, then charge to full), Then I found this notification.

Could it be more defect in MBA 2012 ?

Same problem for me. 2011 MBA 13 inch 1.7Ghz Core i5

145 Cycles - Service Battery - Fan constantly running. Running pretty hot too!

Same here. 2011 MBA 13 inch i7.

'Service Battery' appears suddenly, a week or two after upgrading to Maverick.

Around 340 cycles.

Apple please investigate !!

It must NOT a coincidence with so many people have so few cycles got the same issue.

My battery life seems to have recovered quite a lot recently. The thing is I am not sure why. Now this morning I had a thought that it might be because I had to switch from Apple Mail to a third party app which actually worked with gmail. Could it be Apple Mail is doing something to drain power? I had noticed memory usage often was at 7.99 out of 8 GB and that it had very high cpu usage, which I don't see anymore after stopping use of apple mail.

did you apply the latest Mail.app update ? It fixed some issues regarding Gmail and high power consumption.

Yes I did apply the latest mail update, but the gmail synch problems persist with this.

I have the same problem with my MBP 15" early 2011 on mavericks, just noticed it today and already on 61% service battery, i rememberd a few weeks back i was still on 92%, i only have 111 cycles. Battery can only last 2,5 hours with minimal usage. Hope apple comes with a fix soon.

my early 2011 mbp 13" just came up with a service battery warning. I will be bringing it to the genius bar as it is under applecare still. Will update on what happens.

After installing Mavericks, the battery on my late 2011 Macbook Pro is 100% dead. It has an 'X' through the battery icon and the system does not even acknowledge that a battery is installed. How bout some help here Apple, WTH?