The only difference that I can think of between our MacBooks is the firmware which probably makes all the difference.
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Best battery for Unibody 2008 MacBook?
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The predicament you describe also limits the early 2008 MBP, as I just tested (running High Sierra).
Despite installing the Swift 5 runtime support prior to, the BCLM parameter is not present and the Charge Limiter utility will not work. This is probably because the firmware, pre-late 2009, lacks this (nvram) parameter — not unlike how, in the PowerPC days, tinkering with sleep/hibernate modes on even later G3 models running Tiger, has no impact/does not work, as those parameters were not yet defined by the firmware at that time.
In other words, the BCLM parameter maps to nothing on the older systems like ours. I must say I’m somewhat disappointed, having gone through three aftermarket (i.e., dodgy) batteries on my A1261 since 2021, and I was asking about something relating to this quite some time ago, back when I was still on the first of those batteries). Per the definitive, final answer by @AphoticD, it seems the cut-off is around that late 2009/2010 window, and Swift runtime is involved.
I have also tested Charge Limiter on my 2011 MBP (still on its original, 2011 battery), and it works correctly/as expected/as designed.
Yes, the native APFS firmware support of the Late 2009 MacBook seems to make it leaps and bounds ahead of our 2008 MacBooks despite being so close in hardware.
I’m sure had Apple bothered to update the firmware on the pre-late 2009/early 2010 models, some of these features could have been implemented. There are other, minor features I’ve observed in the past which aren’t active not because the hardware isn’t capable, but because the firmware for it doesn’t enable accommodation.
In particular, the Intel chipset settings for SATA comes to mind: the early 2008 MBP had hardware capable of SATA II, but is set to SATA I; similarly, the early 2011 MBP has SATA III for the OEM HDD location and SATA II for the ODD location, but the late 2011 MBP has SATA III for both.
The late 2008 and 2009 MBPs (and unibody MB) are a slightly different beast for other reasons — namely, use of the NVIDIA chipset in lieu of Intel. So that the BCLM parameter didn’t emerge until after Apple returned the MBP models to the Intel chipset might have something to do with its absence on the NVIDIA-chipset-based models.
(Which, I guess, leaves me to wonder if Intel implemented that parameter sometime in late 2008 or 2009 — something which someone from the Hackintosh community might be able to answer.)
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Yep, this is one of the real reasons that it's worth upgrading to newer stuff over keeping older stuff running endlessly, the damn cost is prohibitive sometimes. I'm %100 for reuse & recycle and do this as much as possible, but I also am smart enough not to cut off my nose to spite my face. Sometimes you have to admit it's not worth the cost to keep something going and move onto the recycle part of the "cycle of life" of a product or at least give up on getting "every battery and doodad working %100".
I have a 2008 Mac Pro that I really enjoy using and I currently use it to rip Blu-Ray movies since it has a Blu-Ray drive in it, but I move the ripped Blu-Ray movies over to my M1 Mac mini for processing to .mp4 files as that machine is so much faster and more energy efficient than the 2008. This is using the machines I have in a more environmentally smart way. I also keep an old G4 Powerbook for the occasional old file off of Macintosh Garden that I need to process that I cannot open on any of my newer machines, but I only use it for that task and then once the old toast (or whatever) format has been dealt with I move the file over to my newer more efficient usable machine and put the older G4 back in the storage until I need it again.
Bummer about the battery costs, but technology marches on.
(What's not a bummer is I can now buy a 5TB USB3 external drive to store all of my ripped dvd/blu-ray movies for $99 and they all fit in my pocket!! Bring on technology advances!! HELL YEAH BABY!!!!)
And when technology slows down, technology companies find new ways to monetize everything else, to lock consumers into proprietary ecosystems, and to move consumers away from modular hardware components. 💁♀️
My experience has been different. As stated earlier the 08 unibody mb Ive had since it was new in 08 (obviously not misused as Im still using the computer lol) and that original battery ultimately bulged and failed years ago, so Apple OEM or not, these batteries are not bullet proof and do fail over time. If I were to go after a spendy battery, I'd be looking at brand reputation, capacity and warranty over an old OEM replacement. To be fair, at this point, most of these aftermarket a1278 NIB batteries are not new production, solid brand reputation or not. Additionally these macbooks arent worth much more than 40-50 USD at this point, so justifying a spendy battery that costs twice the value of the computer itself is very hard for me to do. I am a big fan of @theMarble 's advice given at the beginning of the thread actually - source through a known sales platform like ebay+PP, buying from a seller with a good 98%+ customer rating. Using this platform will provide reasonable recourse on the battery if there is an issue and you can read the feedback to get a feel for the quality of the product they are selling. That proposition seems quite reasonable & logical to me in terms of time & money spent, potential recourse and market access obviously knowing that these batteries OEM or off-brand, NIB or not will not last forever.
All three A1261 replacements I’ve gone through since June 2021 came from reputable sellers on eBay (i.e., established, feedback at or just a hair under 100 per cent). One even replaced a unit which was DOA within a week.
I do, however, expect something better than 6–9 months of serviceable life for any sold-as-new battery, OEM or aftermarket/third-party, before it begins to fail (lost cells, swelling, etc.) or fails abruptly without advance signs of that failure underway. Trouble is, that’s basically been every third-party battery I’ve purchased since 2018 whose internals, frequently, are not manufactured by, say, what coconutBattery reports them as being (e.g., typically shown as Dynapack or Sony, when it’s neither, post-dissection of internals, assuming it didn’t open itself up from swelling).
The laptop battery market is unregulated in ways we absolutely would not accept from store-bought, traditional alkaline-sized forebears (which these days is just as likely to be a rechargeable lithium core or NiMH core as it might be an alkaline, sharing only form factor and relative voltages with the original, 1950s-era specs); or in lead-acid batteries (used with motor vehicles and UPS redundant power systems). And so, consumers are, widely, stuck with dodgy prospects once the OEM replacement source is ended — leaving only word of mouth and a crossing of fingers that one of the couple or few, consistently better-than-most aftermarket vendors, ships in your nation-state.
Here in Canada, I’d love to buy one of the DuracellDirect batteries for the A1261, but they’re mostly offered in Europe only, and in the Americas, appear to be constrained from selling Apple batteries entirely. I doubt it’s for a lack of demand, as MacBook-based products in circulation are plentiful now, and people are still using older, “obsoleted” models as daily drivers — people who probably even haven’t visited the MR forums.
As consumers, we ought to expect better, but without regulatory oversight, consumer recourse is limited.
Batteries can still be replaced in new Macbook Pros, I just changed one myself…and it had handy pull tabs and was actually pretty easy. I agree on the other components part though.
You can hardly call this a “technology company” issue, hell some car companies charge a yearly fee to unlock the heated seats in your car. That’s massively lame. More like a “Greedy Capitalism” thing.
😀
That is unfortunate - I’d be gunshy too if I was 3/3. Two of the three I’ve bought via eBay have lasted (and still work well) 3 years later. The third one technically works but not well, maybe 30-45m of life. It is a parts machine for the others at this point anyways as its KB died. Regulation would have one direct impact for sure - it would make the batteries I buy via eBay and use at $20-25 shipped NIB, more expensive to me which changes my money math, creating the incentive to buy a new or newer Mac. It makes sense to buy a $20 battery for a elderly Mac worth maybe 40 or 50 bucks but once we get over the market value of the a1278, dropping $65-70+ on a battery for my DD needs is foolhardy. I’d be more inclined to buy a new Mac, (well, truthfully it would not be a Mac but rather a new Linux friendly portable) so for my fiscal reality, these cheap batteries are exactly why these old macs are still in service - Useful machines overall. Regulation as consumer protector makes sense to a point but is an economic double edged sword for sure. It’s difficult to have ones cake and eat it too.
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This is definitely what I'm going through with Apple laptops at the moment. They cost money to maintain that I simply do not care to spend on them. For what it's worth though, desktops don't really have this same problem, or at least not to the same extent. Your power supply may die after 20 years (more or less, depending on when it was made due to cap plague) but those are still available and you can put just about anything in there as long as it falls in the same range of power. Same goes with GPU, run without one altogether or keep replacing them for $15-$20 when they die. Thermal paste is cheap, and these things run cool anyway.
I see little to no long-term costs for running desktops, the issue with Apple laptops to me comes down more so to the decision to downclock the CPU without a battery. Most Windows laptops only do this if your charger can't provide enough power, the OEM spec charger will run the machine at 100%.
It’s unclear what the “other edge” would be here. If it’s “cost”, then we must also factor the price of living in a society and the actuarial costs of life, limb, and property lost from the absence of regulation. After all, a life insurance policy can’t replace life.
By regulation, it might not only standardize battery tech and basic form factors as they mature (I’m thinking about Li-Po at the moment, but sodium-based storage coming online also applies), but it may also promote more stringent quality controls to be passed before a product is certified safe for use by the general consumer — whether nationally, multi-partite, or worldwide.
If anywhere there’s a strong case and sector to benefit right now from industry-wide, ISO-level technical standards and consumer-oriented regulation, it’s in rechargeable lithium tech and its ubiquity across everything from automobiles to laptops to pedelecs to phones to energy storage systems to vaping devices to entire transport vessels transporting high concentrations of Li-Ion-based product.
At the moment, most of these rely on Li-Ion, not Li-Po or more recent lithium storage modes. To enact regulation is to hold manufacturers liable for established safety standards (as well as certifications, e.g., Underwriters Laboratories, granted for engineering to even higher standards). These carry over to improved quality control, so long as that regulation is checked and enforced internationally, nationally, and locally.
The tl;dr point, of course, is industry compliance and international regulation is not only a way to reduce loss of life, limb, and property, but also to vet and standardize how to handle that energy storage medium in a way which is open, replicable, and certifiable as safe at all steps in expected handling and usage circumstances. Standardization and regulation, as with other areas, can improve competition and innovation around adjacent components. They can reduce proprietary, un(der)regulated products from being rushed to consumer use before a designer/manufacturer has certified overall safety (replete with established protocols for containment under typical circumstances in not just manufacturing, but also packaging, transporting, consumption, recharge, disposal, and so on).
As it is, standardization and industry regulation, beyond the fairly localized level, has mostly eluded lithium energy storage in ways which don’t tend to fly with other concentrated energy media known to harm life when left poorly regulated in extraction, refinement, transport, storage, and containment. These includes not only petroleum, but also fissile ores and the handling of hydrogen for fuel cell applications.
(If it isn’t apparent somehow, I’ve not been happy about lithium tech being played fast and loose for as long as it has.)
I very much doubt that, selling low-margin components for 15 year old hardware that people don't want to spend money to replace is not the road to riches.
This is the point I'm reaching/have reached also. With the lack of any reliable, reasonably affordable OEM batteries, I've long dropped any expectation of third-party batteries being useful for anything outside of preventing the system from downclocking, or keeping the system alive while I move it from one wall socket to another*. Compounding the cheapness of the internals is also the fact that these batteries, even if they're new, are years old. (The "brand new" A1278 battery I'm trying to work with is 2633 days old, according to CoconutBattery.)
With the third-party A1181 and A1211 batteries I've dealt with, I'm glad if I can get maybe 1-2 hours worth of life out of them at best.
*I'm sure OWC's batteries are good, but oof, the cost...the other exception would be iFixit; the battery I've bought from them to replace the wonky original in my 2017 MacBook Air is just as good as the OEM battery.
This is my current struggle since making this thread, as I too had already abandoned the idea of the batteries being useful for actual long-running use. I use them stationary 99% of the time. However, upon inspecting my units, the batteries in the ones I had left in storage are completely warped by swelling. Enough so that the machine doesn't even sit totally stable. Meaning I still have to replace the batteries every few years even if I no longer care about their capacity.
Compared to say a Mac mini or another desktop machine, which have no recurring costs in this manner, I am simply unwilling. I could possibly go for an OWC and just hope it doesn't swell, but for the amount of MacBooks I have it's going to cost the same as buying a brand-new MacBook, a laughable cost. Instead I have regrettably elected to slowly dispose of the machines. There are some that are more useful to me and I'll keep around, but I'm pruning them now.
If you've got several machines of the same model, what you could do is junk the bad batteries, and just keep one or two of the best batteries you have left, and then swap between your machines as needed.
Also, I wanted to say that this isn't just an issue with Apple laptops, AFAIK – in my experience with Dell, HP or IBM/Lenovo machines, they have similar issues with third-party batteries too.
Unfortunately no two of my machines are the same model, otherwise I'd definitely consider it.
Admittedly I have little experience with consumer grade Windows laptops, but for the business ones I think they only down clocked the CPU if you were running off the wrong wattage charger. I know that my Dell Latitudes will expressly state this in POST if you're not using the right charger. The system will work, but will be down clocked though not even to the extent that Apple does which is halfway.
Have to keep in mind though that things may be different for business machines, as several of those Latitudes even had the option for hot-swapping more than one battery at a time. You could have two batteries in the laptop at once. Different needs...
Edit: I may have misunderstood your point, if you mean that Windows laptops have similar shoddy quality third party batteries then absolutely, they are very flawed as well. I believe there are a bit more in the way of high-quality options, but you're still likely buying a decade old battery in those cases.
Windows laptops definitely do have the edge in terms of more OEM battery options (multiple battery bays on Dell Latitudes is certainly an example, but I'm also thinking of extended capacity batteries that were available for some HP and Lenovo/IBM machines too), but yeah, I was referring to the quality of third-party batteries.
The batteries I've gotten for HP machines I've worked with are just as good/bad as the ones I've used for A1181s. And my project to revive a cute little ThinkPad X41 has been stymied by the fact that the only batteries I can find are knock-offs selling for almost $200.
The NewerTech battery that I purchased from OWC is now 4 years old and still has 100% capacity.
While many variables can affect battery life and longevity, disconnecting the computer it from the mains during non-use/storage and keeping it in a cooler environment (50-70 F) should help extend its life. I do this with all my old laptops and have had good experiences. Hope this helps.
The OWC battery is currently on sale for US $59.99.
While many variables can affect battery life and longevity, disconnecting the computer it from the mains during non-use/storage and keeping it in a cooler environment (50-70 F) should help extend its life. I do this with all my old laptops and have had good experiences. Hope this helps.
The OWC battery is currently on sale for US $59.99.
I've been thinking about this since I picked up this model for a project not too long ago.
It being a one-off by Apple certainly doesn't help. Luckily I have a battery that's still in pretty decent condition, but I've decided that I am only going to plug it in every few months to try and keep an already ~15 year old battery fresh.
It is currently at a cycle count of 90 with ~4128 capacity.
I share the same opinion as others on here. OWC is probably the safest bet unless you can somehow find a seller on eBay who is offering up a fresh, very low cycle/100% capacity part.
It being a one-off by Apple certainly doesn't help. Luckily I have a battery that's still in pretty decent condition, but I've decided that I am only going to plug it in every few months to try and keep an already ~15 year old battery fresh.
It is currently at a cycle count of 90 with ~4128 capacity.
I share the same opinion as others on here. OWC is probably the safest bet unless you can somehow find a seller on eBay who is offering up a fresh, very low cycle/100% capacity part.
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Which sounds fine and dandy for US folk, but here in Canada (and IIRC @retta283 said they were Canadian?) the conversion rate is a real killer...OWC's Canada store is charging ~$81 + $11 shipping (to my address at least; who knows what retta283 would be paying).
I'd expect OWC's batteries to be pretty good quality, but when the cost of the battery is almost more than the cost of the machine itself + upgrades – and if I'm pretty much buying a battery to ensure the machine has some semblance of portability or doesn't downclock – the value proposition isn't a slam dunk to me, IMO.
I can appreciate your concern about the value proposition. I wanted to purchase a new battery for this machine before the batteries completely went out of production. Although, it seems like they’re still being produced.
The machine (MacBook5,1) still looks and works like new, so it was more an emotional decision than a practical purchase.
Just a word of caution: it is still a good idea to let it run all the way down to 1-5% under heavy load a few times in order to "shake off" the "fudged" maximum capacity number. Don't be alarmed if MacBook shuts itself down at %20 charge still remaining. It seems that it is "pre-programmed" to loose around 4-5 mAh of capacity every charge and only after it gets to approximately 4100 mAh it starts to behave more like a "normal" OEM battery with capacity not only going down but also occasionally going up. YMMV.
This is singly the most important piece of advice. I mean those batteries should be kept and operated in cool temperatures. I have a MacBook late-2009 and it's (original Apple) battery's health status had recently changed from 'Normal' to the annoying 'Service Battery' I think that happened because I had been using it heavily during those hot summer days. The room in which I used the MB had a temperature higher than 25°C (Celsius degree) (77°F) ! I live in a place close to the western coasts of Anatolia (Egean Sea) which can be quite hot in summer. The temperatures in August climb up to 40°C (104°F) ! I can't run the air conditioner all day and every day through July and August, 'cos the electricity bill for only those 2 months would cost close to the cost of MB itself!
After I saw your message I've stopped using the MB in my current, hot room and brought it to the basement. The basement temperature is about 19-20°C (66-68°F) which I think is the right level for the battery. After I kept the MB in that temperature for a day, the battery health status returned back to normal again. That's so pleasing.