Macbook Air mid-2012 battery life issues -- a possible culprit ?

[hricca]

Hi all,

Sorry for x-posting this from the Apple forums, but it seems to me that the MR forums are more active.

I've posted and followed a thread regarding diminished battery life for the mid-2012 MBA, when Mountain Lion was released. I never could fix the problem, was contacted by Apple but that didn't solve anything either.

The troubles I was (and still am) having with my MBA were :

Battery life reduced by at least 33% when I upgraded to Mountain Lion from Lion, following a firmware update.
No change when I clean installed ML.
No change when I upgraded, and then clean installed Mavericks.
My battery, after 13 months of use, had its capacity reduced to 70-80%, and has now been stable for one year at 70-80% capacity. It now lasts approximately 3 to 4 hours, and has never lasted longer than 5 hours since I upgraded to ML, which was a few weeks after the laptop was purchased...

I've tried everything that was posted on the forums, SMC resets, etc. Now to the (maybe) interesting stuff.

I stumbled today on something interesting. I was researching my issue to see if people with the same laptop, that followed the same firmware upgrade path than I did had similar issues. Long story short, a forum post led me to something interesting, located at /System/Library/Extensions/IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/ACPI_SM C_PlatformPlugin.kext/Contents/Resources

DISCLAIMER Whatever you do, do not try to remove / move anything in this folder.

What is interesting is that my Macbook Air has the following identifier : MacBookAir5,2. However, in the above-mentioned folder, there is no MacBookAir5_2.plist, it stops at 4_2.plist and then goes on to MBP models. Now, the question that I have is could the fact that this plist is missing be related to my battery issues ? In the sense that without this file, the kernel does not know how to properly manage the power, read the battery status / thermal sensors ?

I would really love to fix this 2-year old issue that has been plaguing my laptop ever since I purchased it.

Cheers,

Hadrien

 

[GGJstudios]

My battery, after 13 months of use, had its capacity reduced to 70-80%, and has now been stable for one year at 70-80% capacity.

Did you buy AppleCare? If so, you can likely have your battery replaced. Apple notebook batteries are designed to retain at least 80% of their capacity for up to 1000 cycles. If you're still covered by AppleCare and haven't exceeded those cycles, take it to Apple.

There are many factors that impact your battery life. See the BATTERY LIFE FROM A CHARGE section of the following link for details, including tips on how to maximize your battery life.

​

The link below should answer most, if not all, of your battery/charging questions. If you haven't already done so, I highly recommend you take the time to read it.

Apple Notebook Battery FAQ​

 

[hricca]

Hi,

No I do not have an active Apple Care. I should mention that I work part time at a laptop repair center (we do HP, Lenovo and Apple) and that I know fully how these batteries work, how to take care of them and prolong their lives. The issue here, as I mentioned, happened directly after the 2012 firmware update. I also cannot install any other firmware updates for MBAs, it says that my model is not compatible although it should be. Quite a weird issue.

But the primary goal of this topic is to determine if my issues could be related to the missing plist file, so if anyone has infos on that, I'm all ears

Cheers

 

[hricca]

Would it be possible for people with Macbook Air from mid-2012 or newer (so MacBookAir5.2, 6.1 or 6.2) to check if in the path I typed in my original post, they have a plist for the MBA 5.2 ? Or newer ones for that matter ? It would make my day

Thanks !

PS: I'm running OSX 10.9.4

 

[Weaselboy]

What is interesting is that my Macbook Air has the following identifier : MacBookAir5,2. However, in the above-mentioned folder, there is no MacBookAir5_2.plist, it stops at 4_2.plist and then goes on to MBP models. Now, the question that I have is could the fact that this plist is missing be related to my battery issues ? In the sense that without this file, the kernel does not know how to properly manage the power, read the battery status / thermal sensors ?

I just checked on a default Mavericks install on my 2014 rMBP and see the same plist sequence you do (with no MBA5.2), so I'm guessing that is not your issue and the OS is using one of the other compatible battery profiles.

If you were getting battery life that bad that early on with no other hardware or software issue, it sounds like you just drew a dud battery.

 

[Newtons Apple]

I would take it to an Apple store and let them diagnose the battery. It is free.

 

[hricca]

Hi,

Unfortunately, in Switzerland, the diagnostics are not free. But yes I could try that as a last resort.

Thanks Weaselboy ! It doesn't seem to be related to my issue then.

 

[Guppy51]

I also owns a Macbook Air from mid 2012. Would this be a problem from Apple? I get around 3-4 hours in a full charge with basic web surfing.

 

[kage207]

I tried going to the path:
/System/Library/Extensions/IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext/Contents/Plugins/ACPI_SM C_PlatformPlugin.kext/Contents/Resources

I have the same stuff as you do. I also have 78% health for my battery after 348 cycles. I get more than 5 hours. I get roughly about 4-5 hours when doing web development and roughly 6+ hours if I'm just using a text editor and web browsing.

What applications are you running for this test? What is the brightness of your display? Have you check your Activity Monitor for threads that seems to be consuming a lot of resources?

Also, what browser are you using for your web surfing? This makes a tremendous difference as with Chrome I get roughly about 3-4hours and with Safari I get 6+ as I have plugins installed to block all Flash unless I click on it. Also, it matters what sites you are going to and what you are doing. Web browsing is very generalized here as you can do almost anything on the web.

 

[Owen C]

I know it's an old post but this was the one I found using google. after a lot of additional searching I found the alt location but it didn't work for me. I thought I'd post here in case anyone else was looking for this info. here's the link https://www.victz.com/story/how-to-...after-remove-1ddc4e80fed64c36b1af3d1ce2093c9a

"If you have problem to find the plist file under ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin.kext, try to locate in this directory X86PlatformPlugin.kext"this is

Moving the entire IOPlatformFamily.kext was what ended up working for me. https://apple.stackexchange.com/que...rnel-task-running-taking-more-than-400-of-cpu