2012 rMBP battery dies at ~30%

[dndandrea]

I have a June 2012 retina macbook pro that has been randomly dying on me recently. It's starting to become more frequent. I will be doing something on my computer and it will just go to a black screen. I press the power button, nothing happens. Press/hold it again and a dead battery logo shows up on the screen. I plug it in, power it back up, and there's 30%+ battery left...

Is this normal? I'm assuming it needs a new battery? It's an apple product, so I assume the battery will cost about $300+ and can only be replaced by an apple employee. Any advice? Thanks.

 

[dsmedic10]

Hi. I am not an Apple hardware expert. However have you checked to see if the Mac is actually charging when you plug it in? As in, the green/amber light is on the charger and the icon shows in the menu bar shows the laptop is charging?
The laptop battery is $129 if i recall, and Apple will sell it and install it for you. My laptop had a battery problem (2012 Macbook Air) and Apple replaced it in 2 hours for free (Apple Care). For my laptop the battery is $129 without Apple Care. I'd take it in to Apple store and see what they say.
You could buy a battery and replace it yourself if you're adventurous, but I wouldn't bother. For $129 Apple will do that for you, including the battery price.

 

[joe-h2o]

It could be that your battery is coming to the end of its life.

If you don't have a battery monitoring program like Coconut battery or similar then you can look at this in the system profiler.

Apple menu > About This Mac > System Report (or "More Info" on some macs)

Find the battery listing in the left hand side and the panel will tell you what it is doing, including the number of cycles it has done, how old it is and the current health of the battery.

This will tell you if the system believes the battery is getting too old and needs replacement. If the battery is fine it might be something else like a bad connection to the logic board that might be easier to fix, or the SMC might need to be reset.

 

[Android300zx]

+1 for Coconut Battery. I think I read that if you're battery capacity is below 80% Apple will replace it if you have Apple Care on this laptop. Good luck.

 

[conkerbot]

I had a similar issue with my 2012 rMBP. At first, they replaced the Logic Board, which didn't fix the issue (I had kernel panics as well). Next, they replaced the top case (which has new battery, as well as keyboard and trackpad). This fixed the issue.

They thought that my battery was slightly faulty (well under 1000 cycles), which caused voltage fluctuations which crashed my machine and made the low battery thing appear. I had AppleCare so all the repairs were done for free. If you can get Apple to take a look at your one, I'm sure the repair would be something similar.