Does Gaming on macbook Pro 2017 hurt it?

Why would it be damaged?

It's no different than playing games on a PC.

Worst case scenario is the Mac simply cannot run the game. There's no damage that can come from playing games on a Mac. In fact most games have Mac versions precisely so you can play them on a Mac.

Phil0124 wrote:

Why would it be damaged?

It's no different than playing games on a PC.

Worst case scenario is the Mac simply cannot run the game. There's no damage that can come from playing games on a Mac. In fact most games have Mac versions precisely so you can play them on a Mac.

Depends. I've actually had a game damage my 2007 MacBook battery. Or at it did so indirectly. It was on battery power alone while I was trying to perform a calibration cycle. The game was cranking up the fans and I believe it went into an automatic thermal shutdown. When I started it up again the battery indicator was saying "Service Now". The really odd thing was that it was reporting negative capacity if you could believe it. It looked like the unplanned shutdown corrupted the onboard battery management data. It was out of warranty, but an Apple Store offered a "service replacement" battery for less than the cost of a retail battery.

Sounds more like a coincidental series of events that something directly involving the game. Also how do you perform a calibration cycle while playing a game? And what game was it?

While the game may have been pushing the CPU, and as such generating heat which would activate the fans, it has no relation the Battery's actual status or its charge capacity. It just does not work that way.

If the battery died like that, it was very likely already on its way out, and any amount of usage would have probably caused this.

Unless you can unequivocally prove the game had anything to with it directly it was just an unfortunate coincidence.

I have yet to see a Game actually be conclusively proven to cause any damage to a Mac in any way.

If it was, there would be a bunch of reports, and the game studio would have been in really deep doo doo.

I sometimes play games on my 2012 MacBook Pro (half life 2, Portal 2, civilisation IV) and I can say that it's not damaged anything. I've never had a thermal shutdown; I think that newer Intel CPUs are much better at handling thermal issues, they just slow down until the temperature returns to normal.

Phil0124 wrote:

Sounds more like a coincidental series of events that something directly involving the game. Also how do you perform a calibration cycle while playing a game? And what game was it?

While the game may have been pushing the CPU, and as such generating heat which would activate the fans, it has no relation the Battery's actual status or its charge capacity. It just does not work that way.

I don't attribute the game to directly modifying the onboard battery stats. However, it was pretty clear that it was getting hot, the fans were at maximum, and all of a sudden it went click and everything shut down immediately. I'm thinking almost anything that could have generated that much CPU activity had a chance of doing the same.

My best guess as to what happened would be that the shutdown happened right as the onboard battery stats were being updated with a new capacity value - like how a storage drive is corrupted. It was really odd too. It went from "Service Now" to "Normal" then back to "Service Now" over the years. But the really odd thing was that impossible negative value for the battery capacity. I didn't actually get it replaced until it started swelling. I tried once but didn't come back when an Apple Store was out of stock of service replacement batteries.

What I was trying to do was the old, monthly recommended battery calibration. I used mine mostly as a desktop replacement, and Apple used to recommend discharging it once a month to "get the electrons flowing" as well as to allow the battery management to get a better idea of what the capacity was. I've looked it up and I think this is called "Coulomb counting" where it's just counting total charge passing through a battery until auto shutdown.

Hi,

I don't think playing games on MacBook Pro hurts something.

Experience with what? Many people play games on their computer.

FWIW, I don't think it was playing a game or running any app that damaged your battery.