Air does not charge to full capacity

[nightoftune]

Hey i have a problem with my macbook air m1. I can not charge it to its full capacity. Its capacity is 4380 but all battery apps and the internal app always says that 39xx is 100% charged. I already disabled the battery preserve feature but it does not help. I can not find info on why the mac safes its capacity and how to disable it. Would be good to know if someone can actually charge to full capacity.

Battery health is 100%.

 

[spiderman0616]

I think it's a software bug. I have a work Mac that I use during the day, so my M1 MBA is my night time/weekend Mac. Because of that, I only end up having to charge it about once a week. I do have optimized charging turned on, but it always charges to 100% when I plug it in because it's so rarely plugged in. Even when it's at 100% though, it always says the last full charge the battery got was on 5/25/21. It has said that for the entire month of June, in fact.

I'm not super worried about it, but have noticed it. Either the optimized charging really is keeping it from fully charging, or there is a software bug that's not allowing the charge date stamps to work correctly.

 

[nightoftune]

thanks for your reply. The macbook itself has pretty good battery life but i could sleep better if someone has the noticed the same
Maybe i already have a dead cell. The apple support is pretty useless right now because all that they say is "is the battery life not good?", the device has like 20hours of battery life at best what should i answer them

 

[mclld]

Sorry to hijack the thread but what is the best way to putting the Air on the charger. I just leave mine off and never top it off and will charge it when it gets below 10%, is this the best way to do it?

 

[spiderman0616]

Sorry to hijack the thread but what is the best way to putting the Air on the charger. I just leave mine off and never top it off and will charge it when it gets below 10%, is this the best way to do it?

I think it kind of depends. My Macs both have smart battery charging on, but they learn different behaviors for that feature based on how I use them. My work MacBook Pro is almost never undocked and detached from my desk, so it registers in battery settings as "Rarely Used On Battery". I'm on it right now, and it was plugged in all night, but is only at 79%. I know that seems a bit wonky, but here's why it does that: my company forces Power Nap on via JAMF. So at night, my work Mac wakes up a lot to do things on the network and check for updates and stuff. My work computer has learned that it needs to optimize the battery at night too because that feature eats a lot of battery. Because it usually keeps the charge level between 75-80%, there is no risk of the battery swelling or degrading prematurely, even though I literally almost never unplug the machine.

On my personal M1 MacBook Air, the charger always fully charges it up to 100%, because the Mac has learned that it never stays at 100% long. I definitely get the advertised 15 hours per charge on my MBA, so it rarely gets plugged in. When it does get plugged in, it's overnight, and then I'm back in action the next day.

I think smart battery charging started out a little rocky, but it's solid now in my opinion. My advice is use the computer however it's most convenient for you and let the AI worry about the battery health/charge. You can always tell it "Charge To Full Now" in the menu if you need to plan ahead and work somewhere away from an outlet.

 

[jdb8167]

Sorry to hijack the thread but what is the best way to putting the Air on the charger. I just leave mine off and never top it off and will charge it when it gets below 10%, is this the best way to do it?

I would try to charge it closer to 20% but other than that it should be fine. Charge it up to about 80% unless you are going to need the extra battery. Generally 80%-20% is better than 100%-10%. But I wouldn’t worry about it too much. You should get around 1000 charge cycles anyway.

 

[||\||]

Sorry to hijack the thread but what is the best way to putting the Air on the charger. I just leave mine off and never top it off and will charge it when it gets below 10%, is this the best way to do it?

Keeping Macbooks plugged in when possible is the best way to extend battery life.

 

[nightoftune]

Could someone check with battery health 2 or coconutbattery what 100% charged means in mAh to max mAh? M1 at best but should be the same for every big sur macbook.

 

[LancerEvoIII]

FYI, mine isn't charging fully, either. It'll usually peak 4073-4100mAh when charged until 100%

 

[nightoftune]

Good to know, thanks.