Yeah true. Thanks for the response. Did you take it to the Genius Bar and ask them about it? What'd they tell you? Just curious.
I did. Showed them what coconut battery was saying, and also showed them iStat menus and the 0RPM readings I was getting (thought both my battery and fan were fried).
Three takeaways:
1. Starting with the Broadwell-based Macs, there's a different set of diagnostics being used. With previous Macs a Genius has to plug the Mac in to Ethernet to boot Apple Store diagnostics that way. Now there's a wifi-based special boot up they can trigger, that runs diagnostics and sends the results to one of their iPads. Among other things, it shows battery health and runs the Fan through a range of test RPMs.
2. All these tests came back normal. Battery is fine, fan working as designed. Genius even commented that "the test results look exactly like what we'd expect from a new Mac out of the box." Apparently, there actually are instances where a 2015+ MacBook Pro will run with fan off. If a certain temperature/load is reached, the fan kicks in.
3. As the technology in Macs evolve, so does resource management. And unfortunately a lot of these diagnostic and "helper" apps don't update with the new expectations. Memory "cleaner" apps are an example of this. They cater to people who insist that an efficient computer has as much free RAM as possible, but that's not the case with Mavericks and above, which are designed to maximize the use of RAM for caching. Memory cleaner apps make these OSes run
less efficiently, and while they don't cause real harm, they don't help anything either.
Ultimately, if your 2015 rMBP isn't acting erratically, isn't shutting down on its own, and isn't throwing kernel panics, then it's most likely just fine. Take warnings from diagnostic apps with a grain of salt, especially if the app is the
only thing telling you that something's wrong and nothing's obviously out of sorts.
