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Macbook pro 2011 "not charging"

Those "heavy duty apps" you're running are requiring enough power that it uses all or almost all the power supplied by the AC adapter, thus not leaving any to charge the battery. It's the same thing as plugging an iPad into a PC to charge it, the port doesn't allow enough power to charge the battery AND to use the iPad, only one or the other.
 
David-fr said:
Hi all,
I did used Mr.Google and did not find anything that explains this particular issue.
When my MPB is under heavy load it says not charging, here is a SS:
When i closed the heavy duty apps it went back to charging :S
Click to expand...
Read the AC POWER section of the following link. This should answer most, if not all, of your battery questions:
 
David-fr said:
Just got off the phone with Apple Care, they said it is not normal and set my a genius visit.
Click to expand...
It is quite normal, despite what one particular AC rep says. Remember "Genius" is their job title, not an indication of their knowledge, intelligence or experience.
 
GGJstudios said:
It is quite normal, despite what one particular AC rep says. Remember "Genius" is their job title, not an indication of their knowledge, intelligence or experience.
Click to expand...

I'll report here what they'll tell me.

I should be able to use my computer at it's max without it shutting down.
 
David-fr said:
I'll report here what they'll tell me.

I should be able to use my computer at it's max without it shutting down.
Click to expand...

What do you mean "shutting down". You only said that it wasn't charging. Not charging and shutting down have nothing to do with each other.
 
Icy1007 said:
What do you mean "shutting down". You only said that it wasn't charging. Not charging and shutting down have nothing to do with each other.
Click to expand...

If it does not charge and it is been use guess what happens? It will shut down cause the battery ran out.
 
Funny you have this problem, I had this same thing happen to me about an hour ago. I was rendering about 50 frames out of Cinema4D on high res, with some mograph effects, with Miro downloading a movie, photoshop, and Chrome with about 10 tabs open, and I watched as my battery slowly crept from a Full Charge down to 0, then the comp shutoff with a loud click and a violent screen flash. The machine was plugged into the AC adapter the entire time. That should not happen.
 
@Kanthony, it's happened to me too once but I haven't gotten my MBA to do it again..
 
Kanthony said:
Funny you have this problem, I had this same thing happen to me about an hour ago. I was rendering about 50 frames out of Cinema4D on high res, with some mograph effects, with Miro downloading a movie, photoshop, and Chrome with about 10 tabs open, and I watched as my battery slowly crept from a Full Charge down to 0, then the comp shutoff with a loud click and a violent screen flash. The machine was plugged into the AC adapter the entire time. That should not happen.
Click to expand...

You should call Apple care so they have records of this.
 
i have had this last few days - but only running safari which i wouldn't say is massively demanding! brand new 2011 17" i7
 
Icy1007 said:
Those "heavy duty apps" you're running are requiring enough power that it uses all or almost all the power supplied by the AC adapter, thus not leaving any to charge the battery. It's the same thing as plugging an iPad into a PC to charge it, the port doesn't allow enough power to charge the battery AND to use the iPad, only one or the other.
Click to expand...

are you kidding me??? it does that??? I run Windows 7 on VMware and playing Half Life 1 on it(yes HL 1), Google Chrome, Steam(no games though, just chat), Skype, Messenger for Mac and iTunes and i have no problems. And look what the OP is running? Parallels and 2 programs from parallels, a smiley face program(yahoo messenger i guess), firefox and activity monitor!!! It shouldnt do that!!!
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

NZed said:
Icy1007 said:
Those "heavy duty apps" you're running are requiring enough power that it uses all or almost all the power supplied by the AC adapter, thus not leaving any to charge the battery. It's the same thing as plugging an iPad into a PC to charge it, the port doesn't allow enough power to charge the battery AND to use the iPad, only one or the other.
Click to expand...

are you kidding me??? it does that??? I run Windows 7 on VMware and playing Half Life 1 on it(yes HL 1), Google Chrome, Steam(no games though, just chat), Skype, Messenger for Mac and iTunes and i have no problems. And look what the OP is running? Parallels and 2 programs from parallels, a smiley face program(yahoo messenger i guess), firefox and activity monitor!!! It shouldnt do that!!!
Click to expand...

Yes, it will happen in some circumstances. MBP quad cores have been measured to use up to 95w of power under heavy CPU load. The power adaptor can only supply 85w. I think it is time that the quad mbp cane with 110w adaptors.

Those quad cores are insanely fast CPUs but they do suck a lot if power
 
thunng8 said:


Those quad cores are insanely fast CPUs but they do suck a lot if power
Click to expand...


It's not just the cpu, the GPU also draws more power, and the combination of the two, plus spinning the disk, lighting the display, powering the network card, all combine to take more power than the 85W supply, so it stops charging and supplements with battery power.

Unless you are in this condition for a loooong time, should be no big deal. I expect, though, that this will be a much bigger problem when you plug in a 10W Thunderbolt drive, and a 5W USB drive. I use multiple external drives, one or two USB and a Firewire, concurrently and see this condition often. With my 2009 MBP, I left it running overnight, and let the BOINC grid agent have all the cpu power, but am not sure I can do that with the 2011 as when I let BOINC have the complete system it immediately goes into the 'not charging' state.
 
I have this problem when doing file conversions to my external harddrive. I called apple care they read up on the specs of the external harddrive, at max speed, the harddrive pulls 45w which only leaves 15w left for the computer, which isn't enough. He suggest I get the 85w power adapter or get an external that has its own power source so it doesn't have to draw much power from the firewire port.
 
Parallels as a root cause?

I need to run Parallels in Coherence mode constantly as a basic function of my job, and my late-model MBP (MacBookPro8,3 / i7 / 2.2 GHz) lately has been constantly running at nearly 0% battery power, even though I almost never use it unplugged. I haven't had any sudden power losses, but it's horribly frustrating to have my entire system slow down periodically when I have the relatively unusual high-CPU process I need to do. Generally speaking, I'm not under a large load of any sort doing anything very involved, although I do tend to have quite a few programs running (but inactive in the background). I just got back from a 3 1/2 hour lunch meeting during which my machine was on the screen saver and I had nothing happening on it during my meeting. Straight upon returning to work, it had 2% battery power and the fans are cooking like mad... looking at the Activity Monitor, I saw that my JIRA client (a java app AFAIK) was using 400% CPU and whatever else... while it wasn't doing anything? This isn't the rule, that may have been an anomaly, but still this issue has been happening to me pretty constantly over the last month or so whereas previously I don't recall ever having to deal with it at all!

My coworker who shares the same basic sort of usage pattern (we're both web developers) has also had a lot of issues with his machine just not charging or barely charging over a long period of time when it's plugged in, and he says that almost always he can "fix" the issue by simply suspending the Parallels VM and starting it back up again. My mileage has varied with that solution, but overall it does seem really bizarre and is horribly frustrating to constantly be battling the power supply issue with a machine that is essentially just a desktop replacement and is plugged in 95% of the time.
 
I had VMWare Fusion running Win 7, Firefox, Safari, Mail, MS Outlook, USB to HDMI, two monitors and noticed this morning that my brand new MBP 17" didn't want to charge. Quit VMWare Fusion and it's charging now...obviously, reports of the Quad Core sucking power is true. Not a big deal, can't really expect a laptop to run all of the above with just an 85W Power Supply. Would be nice to see a bigger adapter.
 
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