Indeed! Time will tell. They both have AC+. If there's one lesson I've learned it's to always buy extended warranties on laptops. I will definitely monitor the batteries as time goes by.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
I'm pretty disappointed with the MBP 16" battery health situation.
- Thread starter khalitzy
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Indeed! Time will tell. They both have AC+. If there's one lesson I've learned it's to always buy extended warranties on laptops. I will definitely monitor the batteries as time goes by.
.5 was when battery health management came out. I believe that was the question. But yes, 10.15.6 is the latest version.
I realize that my 2014 13" MBP is an entirely different generation of MacBook Pro, but I had to check to see how my battery is doing. macOS says the condition is "Replace Soon" and here is what coconutBattery reports. My battery was made by Dynapack and has 1298 charge cycles on it. Still seems to last a decent amount of time for my purposes although I'll get it replaced (with the top case assembly & keyboard) soon before my model is listed as vintage.
Attachments
mine received July 16
Simplo battery : 36 days age, 4 cycle, 98.2% health
i9, 2.3, 32G, 1T, 5600M
Simplo battery : 36 days age, 4 cycle, 98.2% health
i9, 2.3, 32G, 1T, 5600M
OK, but what if I didn't even use bootcamp? So installing bootcamp and using it is the only way to see the "real" percentages? That sounds pretty weird.
P.S. attach my statistics for MBP 16
At some point in just a day, the capacity dropped from 97 to 88, now it is even lower. I still hope that this does not reflect the real life of the battery (it is unlikely that the real battery capacity could fall by 10% in a day), and I didn't notice any significant changes in battery drain time since I bought the laptop. But I am still concerned about these indications, because where I live it is very problematic to make a warranty replacement.
Attachments
Last edited:
My original post:
<<I bought my Macbook Pro 16 last Xmas and it is already down to 94%. Good to know I'm not crazy, just another Apple QC victim. Will we ever really be able to trust Apple?
7/24/2020: Battery health now at 93%.
7/29/2020: Battery health now at 92%.>>
Update 8/15/2020: I tried resetting the SMC, then, instead of unplugging in the morning and trying to work as long as possible on a single battery charge, I decided to plug in a few times throughout the day to recharge. My battery 'Current Max' began to vary from <8100 mAh (92%) to approx 8250 mAh (94%), depending upon what I was doing. I closed the Mac Book or let it go to sleep a few times throughout the day and switched to my HP laptop and this seemed to 'pump' the battery max a bit. The longer I work on a single charge and the more processor intensive things I do, the lower the battery max seems to go. I am still irritated by how much time I have spent thinking about this but perhaps there is hope that I won't need to replace this battery after a year.
<<I bought my Macbook Pro 16 last Xmas and it is already down to 94%. Good to know I'm not crazy, just another Apple QC victim. Will we ever really be able to trust Apple?
7/24/2020: Battery health now at 93%.
7/29/2020: Battery health now at 92%.>>
Update 8/15/2020: I tried resetting the SMC, then, instead of unplugging in the morning and trying to work as long as possible on a single battery charge, I decided to plug in a few times throughout the day to recharge. My battery 'Current Max' began to vary from <8100 mAh (92%) to approx 8250 mAh (94%), depending upon what I was doing. I closed the Mac Book or let it go to sleep a few times throughout the day and switched to my HP laptop and this seemed to 'pump' the battery max a bit. The longer I work on a single charge and the more processor intensive things I do, the lower the battery max seems to go. I am still irritated by how much time I have spent thinking about this but perhaps there is hope that I won't need to replace this battery after a year.
As I understand it, staying plugged in at 100% for extended time is not good for Lithium batteries.
While that might be true in general, my 2017 MacBook Pro was mostly used plugged in for two years, with barely 40 cycles on the battery during those two years, and still had over 100% battery health when I sold it.
My wife's 2015 MacBook Pro 15" had about 800 cycles on its battery before we decided to replace the battery. After 800 cycles and 5 years of usage (and she often drained the battery to 0%) it was still at 78% capacity.
So things have changed. It might indicate that Apple has decided to purchase cheaper battery chemicals and components.
I dunno, it supposedly leads to some sort of polarization of one of the electrodes. Linus Tech Tips explained it pretty well on their channel.
With my 2018 MBP 13", I turned on Battery Management a few weeks or months ago, whenever the latest update came out. Anyway, I use Battery Health 2 and it usually said 98% battery health and I only have 115 cycles on it. After enabling battery health, I don't think it charged the battery fully since I use it plugged in a lot, so Battery Health 2 dropped to 93%. So, I turned off the MacOS feature and now it is back at 97%. Do you think the battery app developers just don't take into account that the OS is not fully charging the battery intentionally (i.e. to preserve life)? It is not a matter of the capacity actually dropping due to age/wear.
I think you're right. I turned off the battery management, and installed AlDente instead. After a few cycles (3-4), the capacity returned from 88 to 96%. I don't think that battery management kills the capacity, rather it's just a counting error. But it seems to me that keeping the charge at 100% and sometimes going down to 90, as the battery management does, is a less effective way to maintain the maximum of battery life, unlike AlDente which can instead keep the charge level in the range of 40-80% when the power source is connected. I still disconnect the MacBook from the power a couple of times a week and drain the battery a little by 10-20%, so I don't think that using AlDente will have any negative impact on the battery life.
I'm using Charge Limiter to do the same. I very rarely need 100% battery, so I keep mine charged at 70% max.
I've always done the same on the Lenovo ThinkPad's I've used through work, as they provide this feature natively in their software, for example: Charge till 80%, only start charging if below 60%.
The number one killer of batteries though is high temperatures. But from what I can see the MacBook Pro 16 battery temps are actually around 6-8c lower on average than the 2017 MacBook Pro. This is probably due to the bigger body and better thermals. So that looks promising.
Yes, you are right about the temperature. I monitor the battery temperature through TG Pro, with an external monitor connected, the temperature reaches 37 degrees Celsius, usually no more than this. But it mostly stays around 32-35 degrees Celsius. I think this is a fairly safe temperature, so you should only worry about a constant increase in temperature above 40 degrees or so.
Yes. My 2017 MBP's batteries usually idled around 38-40c all the time from just having the computer on. I always thought that was a bit high. And during heavy usage the battery temps went up to 42-43c which is really not good.
Hey guys, good news.
I disabled the Battery Health Management and after a day the battery is now showing a good capacity.
It's hard to imagine a product does not have a designed measurement! It's cheating! Quality control is an essential part of modern industry.
Did you just disabled it and just use the laptop as you had before? Or did you do anything else different too?