Adaptive Charging; Damaged by bootcamp?

[Hitchophilia]

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/battery/

I was reading the link above, and it seems the MBP's use a silicon chip to interface with the battery to improve the charging life cycle.

If you run bootcamp, and charge repetitively through that partition, will that skew or damage the battery?

If the silicon chip isn't reporting charge cycles and such to OS X, will that over time give the wrong readings and settings when booting into OS X?

It made me think that using parallels would be kinder to the battery, simply because Adaptive Charging would still be reported to the host OS?

Can anyone clarify this for me?

Thanks!

 

[fabian9]

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/battery/

I was reading the link above, and it seems the MBP's use a silicon chip to interface with the battery to improve the charging life cycle.

If you run bootcamp, and charge repetitively through that partition, will that skew or damage the battery?

If the silicon chip isn't reporting charge cycles and such to OS X, will that over time give the wrong readings and settings when booting into OS X?

It made me think that using parallels would be kinder to the battery, simply because Adaptive Charging would still be reported to the host OS?

Can anyone clarify this for me?

Thanks!

What they describe on their website is basically the same as any old Lipo charging process found in model aircraft and that sort of thing.

It's different in the way that old chargers worked (plug in - charge all cells until each cell is completely filled up), because it talks to the individual battery cells and asks how full they are - then depending on if they are full or not it'll either keep charging them or stop. This is important because Lipo batteries don't like to be overcharged and can get quite dangerous if you do overcharge them.

I don't think the battery ever talks to Mac OS X during the charging process, so it doesn't matter if you're running bootcamp or os x.

Fabian

 

[hamlinspahn]

Adaptive Charging

I think Adaptive Charging is a hardware not an OS function since charging does take place while the Mac is turned off and therefore no OS to control the function.

 

[Hitchophilia]

I don't think the battery ever talks to Mac OS X during the charging process, so it doesn't matter if you're running bootcamp or os x.

Fabian

Thank you Fabian.

So in the "about this mac" where it shows total charge cycles, OS X is reading the battery which independently stores this information?

 

[Pax]

Thank you Fabian.

So in the "about this mac" where it shows total charge cycles, OS X is reading the battery which independently stores this information?

I believe so. Because if you swap to a new battery the cycle count changes. And I think if you move your battery to another Mac the cycle count goes with it. So the cycle count must be stored in the battery chip not the Mac.

Adaptive charging must be in the SMC firmware because
- it works when the Mac isn't booted
- in the past Apple has introduced SMC firmware updates which change battery behaviour
- if the adaptive charging was to fail in any way your battery would probably be toast, and possibly your Mac as well

The adaptive charging is very simple, hardly even worth calling an algorithm:-
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-12.htm
I think Macs obey this charge graph almost to the letter

I understand that the battery chip is fairly smart, it needs to know the battery's history because there are circumstances in which it will tell the battery to commit suicide to prevent safety problems. for example if you over- or under-charge it, or it gets too hot, the chip will kill the battery so it will never charge again. Otherwise it might explode.