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MBA battery health accurate?

P

patronumlumos

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 30, 2023
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1
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Hi,

Attached my battery health from terminal and coconutbattery. The numbers look off, is it a problem with the app or my MBA?

My MBA M1 (bought in Apr 2022) 's battery health is currently 90% at 37 cycles. It's plugged almost in all the time. Used al dente for awhile last year and went from 100 to 97 so i stopped. Then it seems like in November i went for a 10 day vacation (MBA turned off at home) and came back to it with 92%. (Not sure whether this is a thing...? I don't check the health that often but could have sworn it was around 97 before i left...)

My limited warranty expires next week (don't have +) so i'm just wondering if this is an issue and i should bring it to apple for a diagnosis?
 
If reseting SMC does not help, take it to Apple. This is weird and if this still has warranty, it is Apple problem.
 
The numbers you got in the terminal are much more accurate. Something is wrong with your Coconut Battery and you should probably update it to a newer version.
 
minik said:
It does look strange. Have you tried resetting the SMC? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295
Click to expand...
It's a M1 MBA so according to Apple there are no steps other than to restart, have restarted multiple times and still the same.

Honza1 said:
If reseting SMC does not help, take it to Apple. This is weird and if this still has warranty, it is Apple problem.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the advice!

avz said:
The numbers you got in the terminal are much more accurate. Something is wrong with your Coconut Battery and you should probably update it to a newer version.
Click to expand...
I tried the latest version but it could not work on my MBA (Ventura 13.2.1) so i tried the next older ver which gave me the above results.
 
Just unboxed a new M1 MBA today. Have used it a couple of hours. Found this thread so I ran the battery health command from the terminal, as described above.

It reports cycle count =3; design capacity = 4382; Apple raw max capacity = 4326.

(It was at 45% charge when I unboxed it; I charged it to 100% and it's now at 96%.)

So on my first use, the capacity started off at 98.7 % with 3 cycles. This is my first Mac. None of my iPhones were delivered with anything les than 100% health (per iMazing).

Is this diminished capacity at delivery normal for MBAs? (It was on Ventura 13.0, so it had to be created after Oct 2022, I'd think.)
 
aKansasKid said:
Just unboxed a new M1 MBA today. Have used it a couple of hours. Found this thread so I ran the battery health command from the terminal, as described above.

It reports cycle count =3; design capacity = 4382; Apple raw max capacity = 4326.

(It was at 45% charge when I unboxed it; I charged it to 100% and it's now at 96%.)

So on my first use, the capacity started off at 98.7 % with 3 cycles. This is my first Mac. None of my iPhones were delivered with anything les than 100% health (per iMazing).

Is this diminished capacity at delivery normal for MBAs? (It was on Ventura 13.0, so it had to be created after Oct 2022, I'd think.)
Click to expand...
This has been repeated around many times here and on the web: battery health is estimate and will vary a lot. It will go down and up, what you care about is trend. My current MBP first battery health I have recorded was 99.9% and within next month or so went as low as 98.5% and as high as 101.2%. After 4 months values are between 98.4 and 99.5%.
Do not read too much into this. These are wild guesses and cannot be trusted too much ... If you see this changing (dropping) down by 5%, that is note worthy change. 1-2% is noise.
 
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Guess what, replaceable battery is much better. No worry about battery health crap, just swap battery and go...
 
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avz said:
The only thing you should be concerned about is not to leave your MBA plugged in to power all the time. My M1 MBP is twice as old as your MBA but my battery is in much better health.
Click to expand...

I have my 2018 MacBook Air literally plugged in all the time, with like 10 battery cycle. Battery is still like 99.99% health.
 
Battery readings especially for m chips are not reliable at all
Dont use coconut battery
 
StoneJack said:
Battery readings especially for m chips are not reliable at all
Dont use coconut battery
Click to expand...
I still find coconut battery super useful to see time remaining estimate and also how much wattage my MacBook is consuming while I work.
 
Aoligei said:
I have my 2018 MacBook Air literally plugged in all the time, with like 10 battery cycle. Battery is still like 99.99% health.
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This is dangerous assumption that you have 99.99%. If you run always on charger and rarely to never let the battery discharge deep enough, system will not know enough about the battery state and then you can have issues when one time you need the battery. These are the cases when people complain about system shutting off when battery still indicates N% charge (N can easily be 75). Have been there, had that problem. It is generally suggested to run through discharge cycle once in a while, to let system understand the battery state it is dealing with. AlDente has it implemented now specifically for these always on power systems. This is a good explanation: https://apphousekitchen.com/feature-explanation-calibration-mode-2/

I suspect that if you run the system through this cycle you may find out drop in battery life after all this time on charger.
 
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Honza1 said:
This is dangerous assumption that you have 99.99%. If you run always on charger and rarely to never let the battery discharge deep enough, system will not know enough about the battery state and then you can have issues when one time you need the battery. These are the cases when people complain about system shutting off when battery still indicates N% charge (N can easily be 75). Have been there, had that problem. It is generally suggested to run through discharge cycle once in a while, to let system understand the battery state it is dealing with. AlDente has it implemented now specifically for these always on power systems. This is a good explanation: https://apphousekitchen.com/feature-explanation-calibration-mode-2/

I suspect that if you run the system through this cycle you may find out drop in battery life after all this time on charger.
Click to expand...
I agree. You can only know your true battery health after putting it under heavy sustained load like running Unigine Heaven. Just a read out of battery health that is sitting idle without use is meaningless and will most likely result in a sudden drop in health when it is actually being used.

It is like saying that my muscles are in perfect shape and I never have to do any exercises, I can just sit at the desk all day.
 
Hello all,
Thank you for the advice and input. Will try to use my MBA unplugged and see how it goes!
 
Just FYI, apple won't go by coconut battery or any other extraneous tool either.. they will look at what macOS says and what their diag tools say. Plus, I think there is a minimum amount of wear before they would even replace it within that warranty timeframe...I forget what that number is. Like others have said, you shouldn't really leave a laptop plugged in all the time. Run it down and charge up a few times and see what you get.. Good luck.
 
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