Is my Apple wireless keyboard's battery life inaccurate?

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Is my Apple wireless keyboard's battery life inaccurate?

Hello.

On my Mac mini (mid-2011) at work, I use a small Apple wireless (Bluetooth) keyboard (no keypad). For several weeks, its upgraded Mac OS X 10.9.5 (all and since 10.7.5) has been showing my battery life going down until 1% (14% was the warning one that alerted me, but I didn't change the battery yet). It has been stuck at 1% for several weeks so far and the keyboard still works fine. It seems like the battery power is inaccurate? Is there a way to get an accurate reading? I'll change its battery once the keyboard starts acting weird/odd. 😉

Thank you in advance. 🙂

Mac mini, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), Mid 2011,16 GB RAM,Core i5 2.3 GHZ

Posted on Jan 17, 2015 12:49 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 28, 2015 12:01 PM in response to antdude

I don't know about the Wireless Keyboard, but Apple's Magic Trackpad (MT) is amazingly inaccurate in telling the computer how much power is left. I have a mid 2010 iMac (27", 3.6 GHz i5, 10.10.1). About a week ago, my the iMac reported that the MT had a low battery. Usually, I tend to change the battery when this happens. This time, I decided to just keep on going. Well, it's been more than a week now, and the MT is working fine. The battery charge has been gradually dropping (sort of), and now reads 8%. One day it even went to 40%, but then it dropped back to 9. I don't think this has anything to do with Yosemite, since I had been noticing that the battery life on my MT seemed awfully short, lasting less than 2 weeks on Apple's rechargeable batteries. This has been the case from 10.6 through 10.10.

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Answer 2

Jul 16, 2015 3:18 AM in response to antdude

Same thing is happening with my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) using an A1314 Apple wireless keyboard with Yosemite 10.10.4. Overnight, after replacing the batteries, the Keyboard battery level (in System Preferences > Keyboard) supposedly went down to 12%. But then I took out the batteries and put them back in, re-paired the keyboard, and then Keyboard battery level went up to 43%. I tried it again, and the level went up to 100%. These were the same batteries.

So clearly the software monitoring the levels is flaky. Also (in System Preferences > Keyboard), clicking the Set Up Bluetooth Keyboard button never finds this keyboard. This is no biggee since the Keyboard prefs themselves seem to work with this wireless keyboard, but stil...

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