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Any way to purposely reduce battery health?

C

CJRhoades

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 4, 2007
548
210
Lafayette, IN
I know this is an odd question but I recently acquired a 2015 13" MBP with Applecare coverage until June this year. The battery has 440 cycles and is currently at 85% health. I know Apple guarantees 80% health through 1000 charge cycles and at the rate this battery's health is declining it will fall under 80% well before then. This likely won't happen naturally before the Applecare coverage expires unless something is done to... lets say, "accelerate" the battery wear. Is this possible? I know it isn't exactly ethical but this battery appears to be losing health more quickly than it should, at least based on the number of charge cycles, so I'd like to take advantage of a free replacement before the Applecare expires if I can.

tl;dr: How do I burn through 5% battery health in less than 2 months?
 
Use battery all the time? Fully charged and run apps that eats your power in less than 2 hours and repetitive?
 
Turn off battery saver, turn off automatic sleep, connect it to a display unit with keyboard and mouse so you can close lid and run on battery. Constantly charge and drain by constantly doing full charge cycle

Probably the best way is to use it as some type of server or a Plex media server.
 
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Sure, leave your laptop in a freezer for a few weeks. Of course, you’ll most likely have to buy a new laptop then since Apple Care doesn’t cover user abuse.

On a more serious note - what Apple guarantees is a certain minimal battery quality. You won’t get any replacement if the degradation is consistent with normal wear and tear. You can of course deliberately cycle your battery until it looses capacity, but it will also have high cycle count as a result. Apple will replace the battery under warranty if you have substantial degradation accompanied by low cycle count.
 
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CJRhoades said:
Hm, I guess I'll just fully discharge/recharge the battery once a day for a month and see what happens.
Click to expand...

That would be good. Here's mine for a 2016 MBP.
 

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You can leave it uncharged for a while, lithium-based batteries really hate that. However, I doubt that this is possible, because you are likely always using the laptop. I'd loop-run some benchmarks on battery to fully drain it quickly. You can probably accumulate half a dozen full charge-discharge cycles a day doing this.
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leman said:
Sure, leave your laptop in a freezer for a few weeks.
Click to expand...

I have found that this saves wear and tear on the battery and prolongs its lifespan. I used to do this trick to resurrect old lithium- and nickel-based batteries.

Also, as per Apple for the Macbook Pro: "Storage temperature: –25° to 45° C (–13° to 113° F)". So I don't think putting a laptop into the freezer would damage the device or render the warranty void.
 
Maxx Power said:
I'd loop-run some benchmarks on battery to fully drain it quickly.
Click to expand...

I actually did this yesterday just to see how long the battery would last in a worst case scenario. Unigine Heaven + Cinebench running on loop killed the battery in about 65 minutes. The fan running full blast at 6200RPM kept the CPU and GPU at a toasty 98C.
 
CJRhoades said:
I actually did this yesterday just to see how long the battery would last in a worst case scenario. Unigine Heaven + Cinebench running on loop killed the battery in about 65 minutes. The fan running full blast at 6200RPM kept the CPU and GPU at a toasty 98C.
Click to expand...

I see. That's not long at all.

Here is a good page about how to prolong your battery life. To shorten it, you just do the opposite.

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries.
 
CJRhoades said:
I know this is an odd question but I recently acquired a 2015 13" MBP with Applecare coverage until June this year. The battery has 440 cycles and is currently at 85% health. I know Apple guarantees 80% health through 1000 charge cycles and at the rate this battery's health is declining it will fall under 80% well before then. This likely won't happen naturally before the Applecare coverage expires unless something is done to... lets say, "accelerate" the battery wear. Is this possible? I know it isn't exactly ethical but this battery appears to be losing health more quickly than it should, at least based on the number of charge cycles, so I'd like to take advantage of a free replacement before the Applecare expires if I can.

tl;dr: How do I burn through 5% battery health in less than 2 months?
Click to expand...

So in essence you want to scam Apple to avoid paying for a part that degrades over time regardless. Nothing is even wrong you just want to potentially save one hundred some bucks by rigging the system. Nice
 
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mastermind6192 said:
So in essence you want to scam Apple to avoid paying for a part that degrades over time regardless. Nothing is even wrong you just want to potentially save one hundred some bucks by rigging the system. Nice
Click to expand...

Well, I appreciate the sentiment. But calling what the OP wants to do a scam is a little far-fetched. He is not using the machine in anyway that violates anything explicitly that I am aware of - correct me if I'm wrong on this. You can think of what he wants to do as battery stress-testing.
 
Related to this (somewhat)..
Anyone know the costs to get a new battery out of warranty?

I'm asking for my 2015, which, at some point, will need one and my AppleCare will be over when it does.

Do they even do it, or do they tell you to go buy one of their new laptops?
 
I think there is a good possibility that this is a futile effort. In my experience with our family and work laptops, they last from 250 to 1000+ cycles - and usually 3-4 years. The use case for the 250 cycle "burnout" was as a work computer, and almost always plugged into the charger. The use case for the 1000+ cycles was only charging when the battery was down to 10%. YMMV.
 
CJRhoades said:
I know Apple guarantees 80% health through 1000 charge cycles and at the rate this battery's health is declining it will fall under 80% well before then.
Click to expand...

Where do they guarantee that? Their wording is "Your battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 1000 complete charge cycles. The one-year warranty includes replacement coverage for a defective battery."

Note they don't say explicitly what a defective battery entails, just that this is a design goal, and using "up to" rather than "at least". I can tell you from experience that batteries can drop alot initially and stay pretty even for many hundred cycles. The battery in my 2016 nTB is at 81% at 944 cycles. It dropped below 90% at 300 cycles and hit 85% just beyond 500 cycles, so not much better than yours.

Many years ago I tried to get a warranty replacement for an original Apple battery on a 2008 MBP. Back then it was 80% at 300 cycles. I dropped to 76 or so at around 220 cycles like a month before the warranty was up. They denied warranty replacement saying that it was close enough to expected, that there was in fact no exact policy internally, just guidance.

Now, there were many people reporting getting their batteries replaced around the threshold back then as I'm sure there have continued to be over the years, but I believe that's at the discretion of the person you're dealing with.
 
And all of that may do nothing, battery degradation isn't linear.

My 2011 is 6yrs 9mths old, is still at 85% capacity but was at 87-89% for some 5yrs...1451 cycles...
 
You know your battery's health does not sound that good to me. Have you thought about just taking it in a saying it's at 85% now and dropping fast. Can you figure out what what is up with this battery? Also, if it is not holding charge like when it was new you should mention that.
 
CJRhoades said:
I know this is an odd question but I recently acquired a 2015 13" MBP with Applecare coverage until June this year. The battery has 440 cycles and is currently at 85% health. I know Apple guarantees 80% health through 1000 charge cycles and at the rate this battery's health is declining it will fall under 80% well before then. This likely won't happen naturally before the Applecare coverage expires unless something is done to... lets say, "accelerate" the battery wear. Is this possible? I know it isn't exactly ethical but this battery appears to be losing health more quickly than it should, at least based on the number of charge cycles, so I'd like to take advantage of a free replacement before the Applecare expires if I can.

tl;dr: How do I burn through 5% battery health in less than 2 months?
Click to expand...
I had a 2015 MBP that was at 95% capacity after just 21 cycles when I sold it about two months ago. It pretty much stayed at that capacity and was at that capacity after just about 5 cycles.

My 3 year old 2012 MBP that I bought new at BestBuy in 2015 has 27 cycles and is at 90.5 capacity.

I wouldn't worry about the battery health so much. Your computer is two years old and I think the capacity is inline with the age and use.
 
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