macbook air battery question

hypertc13 said:

My macbook air is about 14 months old. The battery has 336 cycles on it and my battery capacity is already at 77%. Aren't these suppose to hold 80% capacity after 1000 cycles?

Also every now and then I'll be doing something whether it be surfing the web or streaming music and applications pause and it says my hard drive is full and I must make room. Then I'll restart my computer and check how much space I have and it shows I have near 20 GB of space left on the ssd. Does anyone else ever experience this?

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If you have Apple Care you could perhaps check it out with them, they might give you a solution?

If I had only 20 GB remaining free space, I would be shopping for a larger SSD. Especially if you have minimal memory installed, Virtual Memory can suck up a lot of storage space in a heartbeat.

My MBPro is used every day for the past two plus years, has 69 cycles and the battery remains at 96%. I guess it is all in how you use your machines.

wolfpuppies3 said:

My MBPro is used every day for the past two plus years, has 69 cycles and the battery remains at 96%. I guess it is all in how you use your machines.

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So you never use it on battery power? I don't see how it's possible to use it every day for two years and only cycle 69 times unless it was rarely used on battery power.

How do you look up the number of cycles and percentage?

CoMoMacUser said:

How do you look up the number of cycles and percentage?

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Hold option and click your logo->System information->Power.

You see to have two issues. One with the battery and one with the hard disk space.

Regarding hard disk space I am wondering if your local Timemachine backups are eating up the disk.

First do a time machine backup of your machine.

Then open "Terminal" and type this,

sudo tmutil disablelocalbackup

If that doesnt work

sudo tmutil disablelocalbackups

Not sure about the "s" at the end.

What that will do is disable your machine from making local backups till you connect it to your time machine drive.

Then restart and see how much space you have.

Since you are only 2 months out of warranty I would bring it in and see if they can do anything about it since that is a faulty battery if it is reporting below 80% and under 1000 cycles. You might get lucky and they might replace it.

If not then you can have them replace it for about $130 or do it your self (not that hard just get the right screw drivers and open the bottom then unscrew the old battery pack and pop in the new one.)

My '11 13" Air is 15 months old with 215 cycles and its gone from 92% to 79% as of this am. I regularly use it off AC power, but lately it has been dropping 1-2% every couple of days it seems. I'm taking it in for a "genius" appt today to see what they'll do. It's definitely not performing to the specs they publish, so hopefully I can get a replacement free of charge. I'll post back what happens.

To Johnny Allen

Yes I do, two days a week. M-F it is plugged in at my desk connected to a 27" monitor.

Took my Air in today and they offered me nothing. He reset the battery manager while running their diagnostics and suggested seeing if that has any positive effect on my battery health. Their test showed my battery at 85% and I'm now seeing 81%, not much of an improvement from the 79% I saw this morning.

He said if things don't improve I could pay $130 to get a new battery installed. If I see no improvement, which I don't expect to, I'll go back and press to get it replaced for free. They shouldn't publish that batteries should last through 1000 cycles and be at 80% if that isn't the case - or that they'll replace those that fail within the first 500 cycles (mines at 215 now).