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Is 91% battery health after 129 cycles considered good for a MacBook Air?

AbdullahS23 said:
Is it safe to charge m1 Macbook Air through usb c hub?
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yes i have a Satechi 4 port hub charging my M1 Macbook Air with an ipad and 2 usbA ipods.
these chargesr know how much power (either watts, amps, votls and those umphs) to release per device.
as the top slot usually puts out the most umphs!

i sometimes use my MBA2010 powerchord for my MBPm2012 and vice versa occasionally.
 
The cycle count isn't really a good thing to use to guage how healthy your battery is or isn't. Considering it has only counts how the times you have charged and discharged the entire charge of the battery. Which sounds important, but its not really. How fast you used the cycles, fast meaning the time you went between cycles, the cycle itself and how long it took you to get to your current cycle count.
Like, 129 cycles saying you lost 9% health is bad? What if you did all 129 cycles in 7 days? is the 9% still bad? or does that seem normal because that's extremely high power usage?

You have to consider more than just the cycle count by itself. How/where you use the battery just as much as how many cycles. Do you sit in the sun and code? or sit in a dark room and occassionally use your mac to check email? Cause one is going to kill your battery much faster than the other, which one do you think that is? (I am not asking if you actually do either of those specifically, it's just the extremes of How/Where you use the battery to show you its more than cycle count)
 
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ChrisA said:
It depends on what those cycles were. =Did you let it go to "dead" and then recharge to 100%? Doing the 129 times will use up more battery life than if you cycled from 40% to 80% 129 times.
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You do know that 129 times going from 40% to 80% does not equal 129 cycles, right? 1 cycle is basically 0 to 100, and yes it could be done in one, but it would also be 2.5 times going from 40% to 80%.
And I also agree that deep discharging will wear on batteries harder than 40-80
 
My M1 MBA after 3 years had less than 100 cycles and battery health was like 87% if I recall (I traded it in about 6 weeks ago so can’t remember exactly.
91% after 3 years sounds good in my book. Enjoy the MBA, it’s a tool after all
 
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Coconutbattery used to have a way to see how your battery aged compared to others of the same model. Not sure if they still have it...
 
smirking said:
Well, going to the battery all the time can also backfire, though.

A problem with all of these battery discussions is that we talk about cycles as if they're all the same. Battery health is complicated.

If I speed drain my battery in one hour by compressing 4K video and you drain it over 8 hours just browsing basic websites, we both have used one cycle, but my one cycle would have been much more stressful and likely to degrade the battery.
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I agree with you that battery health is complicated and different factors are involved in its overall health but from my own experience with batteries from laptops, smartphones and electric bikes I think they degrade even faster if you barely use them so it's better to just use them without stressing too much about the battery health. My iPhone 13 Pro battery is also doing great after 3 years and 781 cycles. I still get about 6 hours of screen on time.
I also think batteries are a big lottery. Some batches are bad and others aren't.
f54da said:
Coconutbattery used to have a way to see how your battery aged compared to others of the same model. Not sure if they still have it...
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That's true but I don't see this in the latest version of coconutBattery 3.9.17 (March 2024) anymore. I don't understand why the developer removed it. It was interesting to compare it and just have an average idea how well your MacBook is doing compared to others.
 
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I avoided it knowing the history. Better to play it safe especially if outside of warranty.
 
Lots of daily charging to 100%. M3 MacBook Pro base model used heavily. Lots of discharging until it nearly switches off by itself, around 3%?
Screenshot 2024-09-01 at 2.42.33 AM.png
 
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