Meaning of no battery icon showing?

As per this article : macOS Sierra: If an X appears on the battery icon in the menu bar

If the battery icon in the menu bar contains an X, either your Mac does not recognize the battery or the battery is not properly installed in your portable Mac.

• If a battery is fully charged, but you still see an X: Your Mac may not recognize the battery. After you plug in your Mac and let the battery charge for five minutes, the battery should be recognized.Your battery can become fully drained if you use your Mac unplugged until it puts itself to sleep or if you leave it in sleep mode for an extended period.
• If your computer has an accessible battery: If you can access the battery, remove it, then reinstall it. Refer to the manual that came with your Mac for more information about properly installing the battery.

If the battery icon in the menu bar still has an X in it, your Mac may need to be serviced. For more information, see Find out how to service or repair your Mac.

Hi,

its a bug. I updated too Sierra 10.12.6 and after turning my MacBook Pro on the next day I noticed that the battery icon had disappeared. I am not sure if it is the case but still.. It's so annoying.. Nevertheless, I found a fix myself. It's fairly easy and quick.

What you need is the Battery.menu file from the time when the icon in the menu bar was visible. Who would thought that with that simple update they can issue such a bug. I made a backup copy of the file when I heard that they had got rid of the Battery Timing information with an update to Sierra 10.something. That is why I have this file. Coming to the problem..

If you have the Battery.menu file from the system version before the problem occurred or you got it form your friend or found it on the Internet this is what you need to do:

Turn Off Rootless System Integrity Protection

Reboot the Mac and hold down Command + R keys simultaneously after you hear the startup chime, this will boot OS X into Recovery Mode

When the “OS X Utilities” screen appears, pull down the ‘Utilities’ menu at the top of the screen instead, and choose “Terminal”

Type the following command into the terminal then hit return:

csrutil disable; reboot

You’ll see a message saying that System Integrity Protection has been disabled and the Mac needs to restart for changes to take effect, and the Mac will then reboot itself automatically, just let it boot up as normal

Copy and paste

Copy the Battery.menu file to /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/ and overwrite the existing file

Re-Enable Rootless System Integrity Protection

Simply reboot the Mac again into Recovery Mode as directed above, but at the command line use the following syntax instead:

csrutil enable

Just as before, a reboot of the Mac is required for changes to take effect.

That is all. It worked in my case. If you have a problem getting the file let me know. I will send it to you.

All the best.

Might be a corrupt .plist.

Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.

Quit the application.

Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.

Restart the computer, open the application, and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.

If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.

Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.

System Preferences > Energy Saver

Select: Show battery status in menu bar