Laptop going into store next week for battery issue

[MBP*]

One of the reasons I purchased an Apple notebook is due to the battery life, and 2.5 years on, somehow I have lost about 2 hours of use - where I got 6 hours a day, now I only get about 4 and a bit with the same usage. I also took out AppleCare for this reason.

I know that battery depletes overtime, but with my AC running out in a months time and the downward trend of my battery capacity continue to decrease, I want to try to see if I can convince a Genius to replace my battery under the AC warranty.

Can this be done, if so what arguments are best used in this situation?

 

[Billburns]

2.5 years? Batteries wear down

I’m not sure if hey will really give you a new battery but doesn’t hurt to try

 

[leman]

Batteries are subject to wear and tear, but Apple has some internal guidelines to determine whether the wear is unexpectedly high. A widely known criterion is "80%+ capacity for under 1000 cycles". That is, if your computer is still under warranty and your battery has less than 1000 cycles , it should have 80% or more of its original capacity. If it has less, they are likely to replace it.

 

[Billburns]

Wow, had I known about that guideline/rule I could have gotten my battery replaced

Mine went dead without 2 years and would hold have an hour of life before having to connect. I also have AppleCare plus

Too bad that laptop is dead and gone now

 

[ZapNZs]

If your battery has reached less than 80 percent capacity, under AppleCare it will be replaced for no charge, regardless of cycle count. If it is extremely close to that threshold and AC is about to run out, sometimes they will replace it even if not quite less-than-80%.

 

[MBP*]

But the only way they confirm 'health' is by doing a boot and going through the system health menus and bootup. Even when I called them they read our a ToS about batteries under AC and told me straight it won't be covered unless its a defect. How can they measure capacity?

 

[robvas]

Run coconut battery and report back

 

[ZapNZs]

But the only way they confirm 'health' is by doing a boot and going through the system health menus and bootup. Even when I called them they read our a ToS about batteries under AC and told me straight it won't be covered unless its a defect. How can they measure capacity?

MRI has a battery testing module built into it, which, during the MRI test, charges and discharges the battery a small amount. IIRC, the Apple Service Toolkit also contains an additional, more in-depth tool for testing battery life/health.

AppleCare covers batteries. If an Apple employee told you this, they may not realize the terms here have changed around 2015-ish.

"If you purchased an AppleCare Protection Plan for your Mac notebook, Apple will replace the notebook battery at no charge if it retains less than 80 percent of its original capacity."
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204054

 

[MBP*]

Well my appointment is today I will report back on what they tell me.

My coconut battery stats are as follows

• Design capacity 6330mAh - 89%
• Cycle count - 457
• Status - Good
• Manufacture date - 2014-09-08

 

[MBP*]

They concluded that my battery was fine and said they can only replace it if their boot up test concluded it had failed. I also realised the cost of a replacement wasn't as much as I thought it was initially.

I have about 3 years of usage left to reach the 1000 marker which I believe is considered the threshold before the battery goes wrong, or the point they believe the battery has been 'consumed'.

I feel I kinda wasted my AppleCare honestly since I really bought it for the battery cause.

 

[robvas]

If you're at 89% you didn't lose 2 hours out of 6

 

[MBP*]

Well Apple boot screen says 94% so who knows what's right.

 

[jerryk]

Those percentage are not all that reliable and indication of remaining battery time. Also battery consumption is non-linear since we run different applications, visit different web sites, go into rooms with different brightness, change music volume, etc.

 

[ZapNZs]

Even if the 89% figure is correct (Coconut Battery is IMO quite variable in its accuracy), that's still not close enough to the end of service life for being considered consumed and eligible for replacement under the 80% threshold rule.

Did Apple offer to review software causes that could relate to the decrease in runtime? If you were only getting 6 hours to begin with (and this was not under heavy load), and are now getting 4 hours, that suggests something other than the battery is the culprit for the poor runtimes. What do your launchd folders look like? What does your CPU look like during your drain intervals? While your usage has not changed, has the OS or have the Apps you use while running on battery power been updated? Is power nap enabled or disabled? If were are talking about low CPU usage with things like browsers (non-streaming/not playing music), MS Office, or email, you should be getting better runtimes if energy saving settings are optimal.

 

[MBP*]

I wasn't aware of the 80% rule prior to booking the appointment and only found out a few hours beforehand. But there's no harm in trying anyway.

They didn't offer any further help on that front. It's something I will have to investigate myself. It does tell me when I click on the battery icon that Chrome uses a lot of energy, probably because I have 3 or 4 windows open with multiple tabs in each.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

I wasn't aware of the 80% rule prior to booking the appointment and only found out a few hours beforehand. But there's no harm in trying anyway.

They didn't offer any further help on that front. It's something I will have to investigate myself. It does tell me when I click on the battery icon that Chrome uses a lot of energy, probably because I have 3 or 4 windows open with multiple tabs in each.

Chrome is incredibly resource hungry and poorly optimised for OSX, it's literally a battery drain all on its own, switch to Safari for far better battery life.

 

[MBP*]

Chrome is incredibly resource hungry and poorly optimised for OSX, it's literally a battery drain all on its own, switch to Safari for far better battery life.

I use it because my Google account is synced across all devices along with my Bookmarks and passwords. I don't use Safari on any oter machine and if I started using it it will mean I have to them revise how I use browsers on other Windows PCs

 

[Samuelsan2001]

I use it because my Google account is synced across all devices along with my Bookmarks and passwords. I don't use Safari on any oter machine and if I started using it it will mean I have to them revise how I use browsers on other Windows PCs

And that's your choice but as you have noted it will impact battery life, sometimes shutting down a few add ons or plug ins can help quite a bit.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

As mentioned above, download "Coconut Battery".
Then run it and post a screenshot of your results here.

 

[MBP*]

And that's your choice but as you have noted it will impact battery life, sometimes shutting down a few add ons or plug ins can help quite a bit.

I don't mind using Safari, in fact it seems like a more stable browser than Chrome. But can you help me with a solution whereby my bookmarks and passwords can be sync'd across to Google so I can continue using Chrome on other devices where it has been preloaded on?

 

[Samuelsan2001]

I don't mind using Safari, in fact it seems like a more stable browser than Chrome. But can you help me with a solution whereby my bookmarks and passwords can be sync'd across to Google so I can continue using Chrome on other devices where it has been preloaded on?

yeah there is an app that should do it all.

https://www.xmarks.com/

Sorry it took a while I've been a little ill.

 

[ZapNZs]

It may also be worth asking, what version of Chrome are you running and what extensions/plugins are you running? Since Chrome introduced some tab management and flash-blocking advantages with something like version 61 (in the last 3 or so months), I've seen a marked improvement in battery life. Switching from AdBlock to uBlock Origin also made a huge impact and I think disabling Chrome Autoupdates by deleting the keystone agent in the launchd folder helped also. I'm getting 10-13 hours of runtime on a MacBook using Chrome with hardware acceleration disabled (it's still a RAM hog). (Admittedly, I've been unable to break my addition to those cheeky spying buttholes at teh Googles.)
[doublepost=1507296464][/doublepost]

Sorry it took a while I've been a little ill.

Feel better!