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jtylee

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 23, 2016
45
28
St Marys, GA
It's an 8gb i7 with 256 ssd. Think I'm safe not upgrading anytime soon... regular office use.

Battery life is the real key factor right?

Says: Cycle Count: 88
Full Charge mAh is 6579 but I'm at 100% with 6576 ..so I only lost 3 mAh?! in four years?
 

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Especially since you have the 8GB RAM model, IMO you have a ton of life left.

The battery may be misreporting - resetting the SMC can sometimes fix some of those issues. Cycle count doesn't really tell a very good story about battery health - even the self-reported capacity can sometimes be very misleading (i.e., a battery in very poor health is reported to have a very high capacity.) The biggest indicator should be runtime, which for your usage I am guessing is not super important simply because it does not appear you use the battery a whole lot for longer drain intervals. Are you still getting acceptable runtimes?
 
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Especially since you have the 8GB RAM model, IMO you have a ton of life left.

The battery may be misreporting - resetting the SMC can sometimes fix some of those issues. Cycle count doesn't really tell a very good story about battery health - even the self-reported capacity can sometimes be very misleading (i.e., a battery in very poor health is reported to have a very high capacity.) The biggest indicator should be runtime, which for your usage I am guessing is not super important simply because it does not appear you use the battery a whole lot for longer drain intervals. Are you still getting acceptable runtimes?

I’m going to run unplugged tomorrow. I should get about ten hours. The only time I did an SMC reset was a OS X upgrade gone funny. Maybe two or three releases ago.
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I’m going to run unplugged tomorrow. I should get about ten hours. The only time I did an SMC reset was a OS X upgrade gone funny. Maybe two or three releases ago.
I guess what I’m worried about overall is any surprises like next month it drastically drops out of nowhere. If anyone has experienced that.

The new MacBooks haven’t impressed me enough to warrant an upgrade unless I have to.
 
Did yours slowly die down or was it “just one day”

I’m going to look at the coconut app to see what details it gives.
 
I have a 2012 11" MacBook Air i5/4gb/64gb

my battery still gives 4 hours use on wifi if not streaming videos.

57 cycles and 97% health.

besides small hdd amazing machine but screen size is sometimes an issue at work
 
I have a 2013 11" i7/8gb/512gb MBA and love it. Plenty of computing power for ordinary use and it even holds it own with Final Cut Pro and Logic (although I now have a 2012 quad mini dedicated for that). Battery has definitely declined, I used to get around 10 hours, now I think it would go 5 or maybe 6 (based on estimates after two or three hours use).

It's a fantastic computer for travel, but I've been more of a stay-at-home type for the last couple years, so it's usually plugged in. Recently the trackpad has been showing its age. I know this can be caused by a swelling battery, but there's no visual evidence of that. I prefer using a mouse when possible anyway, so it's not much of a big deal.

But when the battery finally needs replacing, or if I start travelling again, I'll probably just replace it (not sure what with). I guess a couple hundred bucks could fix whatever is needed, but it's looking old and beat up and I'm not keen on sinking money into 5 year old computers. This is the longest I've kept a Mac laptop - and my first was a PowerBook Duo! :)
 
I have a MBA 2013 as well with the same specs. Luckily, my battery was replaced before the Apple Care expired.
However, I feel it is slower as I need to run loads of programming libraries. I am planning to upgrade to a MBP next year.
 
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