Q: Mavericks - power use / service battery

I am also having an issue with the battery since installing Mavericks.

Of the apple products which I own, I have a 2009 Macbook with the original battery, but have never had an issue with it.

I usually keep it plugged in and that is the way it was when I updated from 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to Mavericks. At the last moment that it was running 10.6 the battery icon showed 100% with no service warning. After I install Mavericks it listed it at 97% even though it was plugged in the entire time, so I figured it would be a good time to calibrate the battery which I hypothesized would fix the issue.

I disconnected the power adapter and began to discharge the battery. At some point I walked away and the screen went dark. This was expected based on my Energy Saver settings, but my estimate was is that it should not have yet reached the battery limit. When I went to waken it, I was able to login to see the desktop again for just a second before it suddenly turned off completely. I did not receive any low battery warning as I had in the past, and as mentioned above it did not go into sleep mode but rather immediately turned off.

I decided to investigate a bit. I reattached the power adapter and restarted the machine. I noticed that the battery still listed 10% charge despite the fact that it was just few minutes earlier that it completely conked out.

I also noted that even though I had not heard any unusual fan noise before the sudden power failure, upon restart, and a second restart shortly thereafter, the fan(s) blew at full blast. I turned off the machine completely and let it cool and then finally it worked properly with the third start-up.

This time, when the battery was fully charged it did go up to 100%, however some time later I noticed the “Service Battery” alert. There was no progression from normal status to “Replace Soon” to “Replace Now” to “Service Battery”.

The battery had always worked perfectly. Not even once did it deliver an unexpectedly short power supply or show the slightest sign of fault. It was just a straight jump to battery failure as a seemingly direct consequence of installing Mavericks.

I have not tested the actual length of the current battery life so I cannot comment on that aspect of the problem, but there does appear to be an issue with Mavericks’ battery management that needs to be addressed.

I trust (I hope not naively) that Apple will live up to their promise of maintaining the highest standards in customer experience and satisfaction and will either quickly release an acceptable fix or implement a battery replacement program so that I can continue to support the platform and make additional purchases without hesitation.

For those of you following this thread, I believe there is light at the end of the tunnel.

I've posted a few graphs of my battery capacity showing what happened after installing Mavericks.  Hint: The battery capacity cratered.

Well, after talking with Apple, removing a few energy hog apps, one of which being a remnant of Blackberry Desktop uninstalled 2 years ago it seems my battery is slowly making a comeback.

As of today I'm back to 81% of the battery's design capacity and I no longer have the service battery alert.

My 2 cents, install Coconut battery and start recording what you are getting.  See if the battery capacity starts to climb back up after a few cycles.

Mine has recovered 10% in just under 20 cycles.

Here's the pic.

Mine has gone down from 76% to 72% in the last couple of days and that's after I made some energy-saving tweaks.

Hey amgodd, yeah mine climbed a bit, then tanked again but I seem to be on the up.  It's been over about 20 days so keep watching.  I'm sure you will be along with everyone else on this thread!

I've been recalibrating my battery since Nov. 1st after updating(clean Install) and seeing the "Service Battery" warning. 20 cycles later 10% of my battery was recovered and "Service Battery" warning is GONE. I highly encourage others to try this.

I think others will have experienced this, or are about to, but if you post here, rest assured that Apple is workin' on it.  I received not one but TWO calls from a person who spent a great deal of time gathering data on what had happened, isolating and documenting the rate of battery power decline, and looked to see if there was any commonality with programs I used regularly and the ones others having the same problems use etc.  The guy, Rick, was admittedly a data-gatherer, but he was no dummy, and asked all the right questions, and very thoroughly and professionally.  I know we won't have a fix/patch in the next 24 hours, but we will some time soon.  It has truly brought back my faith in Apple care, which I have seen decline over time, the "geniuses" not as swift as they once were, many of the folks unfortunately behind the bar and unable to logically problem-solve better than you can.  You know what I mean.  How many of you either thought about going to the Genius Bar when this happened and then thought better of it and stayed home?  And how many of you actually went  in to talk to the geniuses only to have them have no CLUE that this was an issue?  I even had an apple chat session about two days after the service battery message appeared, and the chat folks, however nice, said bagel, zip, zero about the commonality of this battery drain issue after a mavericks install. Their advice, run some hardware tests on it (I did and found nothing wrong) but take it to the  geniuses anyway, they said.  No way.  I applaud apple for paying attention to these forums (a shout out to Rick,or was that Rich?)  and lest I forget again, every new piece of software is a beta until 90% of its bugs are/is? resolved.  We have ventured a little naively into the unknown, my friends.  Our new mantra in all such situations?  "Remember that it's beta.  Remember that it's beta.  Until it's not". Cheers to all!

Interesting. erickpere2, do you see the capacity go up when running on AC? I ask because I took my MBP off AC power, and over the past couple of hours, I've seen the max capacity slowly creep up, according to coconutBattery. It was originally 4123 mAh (76%) and now it's at 4190 mAh (77%).

Did you get your 10% increase by continually calibrating, or just by regular use?

What I do is use my macbook thoughtout the day and let the battery drain to 0 and shut off. I then let it charge all the way up to 100% every time I have done this my battery capacity has gone higher and now the "Service Battery" warning is Gone. I will keep updating until we get a software update from apple.  

I got a 15" macbook Pro Early 2011. Since Mavericks upgrade I noticed battety discharge in about 30min using applications like Skype. I also got the red battery indicator and "Service Battery" message. After investigation I discovered that the battery has only about 5% of initial capacity (345 mAh vs 6900 mAh). It only has 193 cycles.

got contacted as well by a apple-bugreport-engineer to send in the sysdiagnose. so they are gathering data and trying to figure it out.

on the other side 10.9.1 preview was released yesterday, unfortunately haven’t spotted anything about battery stuff within the seed notes. so let’s see if it’s already fixed with the next update

My mac is also running the fan at 2000rpm constantly wether the cpu is hot or not. Anybody else is having this?

Hi again,

a few days after my post, and my battery capacity has hit an all time low of 59% ! With an age of 15 months, and 274 cycles. I'm lost here... Don't know if it's worth changing the battery seeing how the upgrade destroyed its capacity.

But did the battery capacity realy take a hit? I mean, just by installing new software, can it in reality drop this much? Or is it only related to Mavericks (software)?

I'm on 10.6.8 now, and seems that my battery realy lost an incredible amount of capacity in just a few days, acording to the battery icon.

How is apple planning to compensate us if this is true? I'm definitly not buying a new battery, because this was not MY fault and neither should anyone.

I have the same problem after upgrading to Mavericks on both 2010 Macbook and macbook pro on service battery. I made a clean install on Mavericks and still same Service Battery. I only had a few couple of hundred  battery cycles.  Tried SMC and PRAM reset and it does not work. I open my mac and take out the battery and clean CPU fans  and spray contact cleaner on the CPU fan motor. I attach the battery back and power on the mac without the cpu fan attach and once i hear the chime I power it off again. please note mac is not attach to  power supply when powering on. plug back the cpu fan cable to motherboard and install back cover.

Power on the Mac and battery service is gone. check the status on battery condition and its back to normal and I was able to get one more hour on battery life. Tried on both Macbook and Macbookpro and still same result. This is not guarranteed to work on some but since I no longer have warranty I have nothing to loose. one observation is that Mavericks is kinda sensitive on heat which make cpu fan active and drains battery fast.

I tried following the advise of poster “Jasperpants” and tried recalibrating the battery again despite my bad experience with it. Unfortunately, this time the results were even worse than last time.

I began to discharge the battery when again at about the 10% charge point the machine turned off completely without any low battery warning.

This time I let the laptop sit for more that five hours before starting to recharging it completely. Only after the battery was fully finished recharging did I turn it on.

I took some extra notes about the process.

1) At startup the date (and time) were reset to what I assume is their default 1/1/2001 but the location setting was still correct. Shortly thereafter when iCal auto launched it caused a race which required a restart to fix even though I had corrected the time in the Preferences by then.

2) In the meantime I noticed that Spotlight started to reindex the drive.

3) Time Machine also ran a large backup of the changes registering approximately 1.6GB even though I had just run a backup shortly before and there should have been a very small incremental backup this time.

4) The battery capacity went down considerably (and continues to drop much faster than it did since the last restart).

At the time of my first post on Nov 14th the battery was listed at 3777mAh. Just before this restart on Nov 17th it was 3630mAh. Today, just one day later it is already down to 2816mAH!