I'm not sure what just happened to my mac's battery, and I can't find anybody else who's faced this issue.
I woke up this morning to find my mac, 14", M1 Pro, the base model with 8 GPU cores, dead. This was weird because I'd charged it to full yesterday, and when I went to bed it was still at around 70% battery. I tried turning it on but it wouldn't budge. I plugged in my magsafe charger and it finally booted, allowing me to log in and check just what went wrong.
And here's where things get weird.
The battery icon has an X on top of it. Clicking on it doesn't give me any idea of what's wrong - just that the power adapter is plugged in; battery is not charging. Then I checked the battery prefpane, and it's even more confusing. The battery is at 1% and not charging. The level graph shows a sudden drop and a gap around that time I first opened it this morning, which is weird because I swear it was completely dead when I did so. The battery health modal isn't helpful; it just says capacity is at 97% and health is normal.
I've had a few macs so I know I can head to the Power section of System Report to get more details. It gets even more bizarre there: all the battery mode information details are either blank or default, except the cell revision. Cycle count is at 1 (obviously wrong), condition normal, battery capacity 98%.
At this point I'm pretty worried my battery is in dire straits, and this is a massive problem as I'll be travelling - Internationally, to boot! - in just two days. From my history with Intel macs, I knew that resetting the SMC could help, but the M series macs don't have an SMC. At a loss for what to do, I thought of resetting the NVRAM, because that rescued my intel macs from funky states before. I didn't think it would help, but I restarted into recovery and ran `NVRAM -c` in the terminal.
... and, well, it worked... sort of. As soon as I reset the NVRAM, I could click on the battery icon and see a 64% charge. I'd checked in recovery before resetting the NVRAM and it hadn't showed a charge, so this was a positive sign? I restarted back into macOS and it persisted; the battery icon showed 64% charge and the cycle count is back to a healthy 158 in the system report, but the model information is still blank.
I don't know if and don't think resetting the NVRAM actually fixed it - it might've been restarting into recovery, or leaving the adapter plugged in for a while. I'm surprised by how sudden this was, I got a solid 14 hours of SOT out of this just the day before, the case doesn't suggest the battery has swollen, and it's running fine now, but not charging, but macOS charges when it wants to, I've discovered. I updated to 12.5 the day before, and the only other thing I can think of the humidity being higher than usual around here due to the monsoon. In case it matters, I bought this just after launch, so around November 2021.
Has anybody else faced this? Should I be rushing my mac into support?
I woke up this morning to find my mac, 14", M1 Pro, the base model with 8 GPU cores, dead. This was weird because I'd charged it to full yesterday, and when I went to bed it was still at around 70% battery. I tried turning it on but it wouldn't budge. I plugged in my magsafe charger and it finally booted, allowing me to log in and check just what went wrong.
And here's where things get weird.
The battery icon has an X on top of it. Clicking on it doesn't give me any idea of what's wrong - just that the power adapter is plugged in; battery is not charging. Then I checked the battery prefpane, and it's even more confusing. The battery is at 1% and not charging. The level graph shows a sudden drop and a gap around that time I first opened it this morning, which is weird because I swear it was completely dead when I did so. The battery health modal isn't helpful; it just says capacity is at 97% and health is normal.
I've had a few macs so I know I can head to the Power section of System Report to get more details. It gets even more bizarre there: all the battery mode information details are either blank or default, except the cell revision. Cycle count is at 1 (obviously wrong), condition normal, battery capacity 98%.
At this point I'm pretty worried my battery is in dire straits, and this is a massive problem as I'll be travelling - Internationally, to boot! - in just two days. From my history with Intel macs, I knew that resetting the SMC could help, but the M series macs don't have an SMC. At a loss for what to do, I thought of resetting the NVRAM, because that rescued my intel macs from funky states before. I didn't think it would help, but I restarted into recovery and ran `NVRAM -c` in the terminal.
... and, well, it worked... sort of. As soon as I reset the NVRAM, I could click on the battery icon and see a 64% charge. I'd checked in recovery before resetting the NVRAM and it hadn't showed a charge, so this was a positive sign? I restarted back into macOS and it persisted; the battery icon showed 64% charge and the cycle count is back to a healthy 158 in the system report, but the model information is still blank.
I don't know if and don't think resetting the NVRAM actually fixed it - it might've been restarting into recovery, or leaving the adapter plugged in for a while. I'm surprised by how sudden this was, I got a solid 14 hours of SOT out of this just the day before, the case doesn't suggest the battery has swollen, and it's running fine now, but not charging, but macOS charges when it wants to, I've discovered. I updated to 12.5 the day before, and the only other thing I can think of the humidity being higher than usual around here due to the monsoon. In case it matters, I bought this just after launch, so around November 2021.
Has anybody else faced this? Should I be rushing my mac into support?
