Mavericks - power use / service battery

So for those of you doubting this was an issue with the Mavericks upgrade, I can almost surely tell you iit is. We have 4 MBP 3 13" and 1 15" bought between 2010 and 2013. I upgraded them all to Mavericks last month, all within 1 week have the service battery warning and crap for battery life. Time for Apple to fix!!!!

Finally, I did go to apple store, as I had another good reason to go to the bigCityThatHasAnAppleStore. On the GeniusBar appointment comments I asked about the availability of the battery, but no one came back to me. Luckily, they had the battery in stock, and they commited to being able to complete the repair within a reasonable time (a few hours). And so they did.

I brough the laptop back home, connected, charged the battery - showing 4 hours to go.

Today morning though..... 2 hour 50 mins to go when fully charged. Actually I have had it on for 2.5 hours, and it is still showing 31% of juice, almost 1 hour remaining. I was working on wifi and writing an app in Xcode, that probably drains the battery quite a bit, but I can see I can get around 4 hours of life. Probably the battery gauge needs to recalibrate itself.

It costed me $129 plus tax. The service was nice, I got an email immediately when the laptop as ready for pickup.

I was happy with the service only because they had the battery in stock. I know that if they did not, I would not have left the laptop, and would be ordering the one from iFixit - although I do not know how one can be sure that they are genuine. To me, it would be best if apple could pre-order the battery, so when one goesto the store, one knows it is there.

(Yes yes I know I may be seen as "not easy". I personally think we should all be "not easy", and demand services that really suit our needs).

Let me get this straight: Apple promised a revolutionary Operating System that would save the battery and bla bla bla?

Now, a few months after installing this "miraculous" OS, my battery, that used to last about 7 hours of normal use, poorly lasts for 3 hours.

And I noticed that everytime I use the battery or let the MBP in powersleep, the battery looses about 1% of maximum charge capacity, compared to its design capacity.

And Apple seems to be saying there is no problem at all?

I just noticed that in the last 15 days the maximum charge capacity of my battery degraded 8 points, from 61% to 53% (today).

And I called Apple's support in my city (I'm brazilian) and they told that when the service alert appears in the battery menu, it has to be replaced by the cost of R$590,00 (or a littles than USD 300,00 FOR A BATTERY!!!)

So I am considering buying a chinese battery for USD64,00 on DX that, at least if Mavericks keeps screwing with batteries, this one will be cheap.

The Apple store told me it was impossible for software like an operating system upgrade to affect battery life. I tried to point out that the whole frickin marketing campaign for Mavericks was about how the software upgrade can certainly affect battery life. They didn't get it.

Mavericks seems to run my fan MUCH more than Snow Leopard ever did. And it is slower and had many inexplicable pauses of 15-90 seconds. I'm very unimpressed. I would downgrade except I already upgraded too many documents to the new iWork and need to be able to edit those on my MacBook.

Impossible?

A person that says such things certainly doesn't know s****t about computer architecture.

HOW I SOLVED THE MAVERICKS/BATTERY ISSUE:

I had totally the same problem with Mavericks and my battery. They never got good friends... I tried reinstalling mavericks, but it didn't help.I don't have a screenshot of battery life, but you'll see it later. The problem seems to be with the kernel_task with its 70+ threads and mostly more than 600MB usage...

My next thought was: what if I just downgrade to Mountain Lion?! I did this: reinstalled Mountain Lion (find an instruction for this if you want) and restored my data from the Time Machine Backup. First, everything looked fine, but then at some point kernel_task returned back to the Mavericks level!!! I definitely saw this happening first after restoring all my data and preferences!

Hence, my next step was formating and reinstalling Mountain Lion again withoug restoring from backup! I saved needed data to an external drive in order to not need the backup in any way. After the system was ready to use I copied the files in an old fashion and installed the programs I needed manually... (yes, I wanted to be sure that no program would "activate" kernel_task)

... and voilá:

Maybe this is not very impressive, BUT: MY BATTERY BEGAN GETTING BETTER!

To achieve this, I tried fully load and unload my MBP as often as I can... so the usual process to calibrate the battery and (at least for me) this seems to work!

Afterwards I thought of the fact, that maybe if I would have clean installed Mavericks and not use the restore function, everything could also get better. but I got the idea a little bit too late, after I didn't want to start installing all the programs again and so on... Anybody wanna do this, feel free to do it and report about your results!

I am really happy somehow solving this issue for me. I was long waiting for Apple to fix this, but nothing happened. Now I am at least at about 3-4 hours of battery life again. This is actually almost what I had before (the battery is still pretty old), but Apple was talking about even more battery life before... Nevermind! 😉

Hope I can help some of you with these hints/suggestions! 🙂

Alexey

Yes.

I reverted back to trusty Snow Leopard a while ago, clean install from original dvd, and my battery level jumped from 83% to 89% (389 cycles) according to coconutBattery. On Mavericks, the capacity would never go higher than more or less 4800mAh, and now it's always above 5000mAh.

But I still think that something has changed under the "hood" because there was this firmware uptade that installed right after Mavericks. But need someone to confirm on this.

I just reverted back to Mountain Lion. My machine seems faster, the fan runs much less. My new, replacement battery dropped from max of 5500mAh 3 months ago to 5000mAh today. I'm hoping the switch back to Mountain Lion halts or reverses the battery damage.

I had this issue too, "Service battery" after installing Mavericks 10.9

But today after installing the 10.9.3 upgrade the problem is gone!!!

Good thing I did not have the battery replaced...

Did you only had "service battery" warning or did the battery also last for a couple of hours later before the update to 10.9.3?

Hope to hear more such stories... 😉

Same here (MBA 13'' Mid 2011) had the "service battery" even after the 10.9.3 beta but oday after the installation of the final 10.9.3 the warning is gone :-)

Let's hope that Apple silently fixed it.

Glad to hear it worked for some people, didn't do it for me though 😟

My joy lasted about half an hour..!! The warning is back again...!

It was a short moment of joy. It seemed to be fixed after the upgrade to 10.9.3.

But now the message is back! (service battery)

Bummer...

it seems to be logic... when you clean the kernel and system caches with onix or similar it happens too (the message dissapears) but later, it comes back.

So, I understand the upgrade/update cleaned the caches.... and the message gets out!. But it is temporal.

So sorry!

Vicente.