Hey, guys,
Last year, around May, I got a new LG 27UD88-W USB-C monitor, which I always used to charge my 15" 2016 Touch Bar MacBook Pro, until the monitor started displaying a persistent vertical purple line from top to bottom, so I got it replaced. I recently noticed that sometimes, my MacBook fans would start spinning and my battery charge would start decreasing saying "Battery is Not Charging" in the menu bar, which it never did before.
I started researching and came to find that the monitor only outputs 60W (and the 15" needs 87), so how did my original monitor ever keep it fully charged? I definitely would've noticed this earlier. I read about flipping the USB-C cable, but that didn't have any effect. Are there any differences between the 27UD88-W and 27MU88-W? I'm not 100% sure which one I originally had. I'd really like to save a port and not use a separate AC cable. I'm currently running macOS 10.13.2.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: I found the culprit! I started looking through Activity Monitor to see if any apps were consuming unusual amounts of CPU to find that I had <1% idle and an instance of Google Chrome Helper was at >700%. I force-quit this process and noticed that my fans slowed down and my battery started charging again after a minute or so. This Chrome issue appears to be known as documented here. As I suspected, 60W is enough to consistently power the MacBook at stable loads. I'll leave this here in case it helps anyone else or I can also delete it.
EDIT #2: I determined that each instance of the helper is a tab/extension/process, so I cross-referenced the Activity Monitor processes with Chrome Task Manager using the process IDs, where I found it was a specific website that I often leave open.
Last year, around May, I got a new LG 27UD88-W USB-C monitor, which I always used to charge my 15" 2016 Touch Bar MacBook Pro, until the monitor started displaying a persistent vertical purple line from top to bottom, so I got it replaced. I recently noticed that sometimes, my MacBook fans would start spinning and my battery charge would start decreasing saying "Battery is Not Charging" in the menu bar, which it never did before.
I started researching and came to find that the monitor only outputs 60W (and the 15" needs 87), so how did my original monitor ever keep it fully charged? I definitely would've noticed this earlier. I read about flipping the USB-C cable, but that didn't have any effect. Are there any differences between the 27UD88-W and 27MU88-W? I'm not 100% sure which one I originally had. I'd really like to save a port and not use a separate AC cable. I'm currently running macOS 10.13.2.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: I found the culprit! I started looking through Activity Monitor to see if any apps were consuming unusual amounts of CPU to find that I had <1% idle and an instance of Google Chrome Helper was at >700%. I force-quit this process and noticed that my fans slowed down and my battery started charging again after a minute or so. This Chrome issue appears to be known as documented here. As I suspected, 60W is enough to consistently power the MacBook at stable loads. I'll leave this here in case it helps anyone else or I can also delete it.
EDIT #2: I determined that each instance of the helper is a tab/extension/process, so I cross-referenced the Activity Monitor processes with Chrome Task Manager using the process IDs, where I found it was a specific website that I often leave open.
Last edited:
