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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

Apple's know-how in battery management is always a couple of generations ahead of its closest competitor.

My 2008 MacBook Pro was able to detect battery problems one year before they started to manifest physically. They did it by adding another controller and an independent firmware to the battery itself, but there was no better tech at that time.

M powered MacBooks added auto hold-off (discharge to 80%, keep it there) or postpone charge (because the battery is used too rarely), to the list of tricks they know, and these are just the visible ones to the user.

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> Apple's know-how in battery management is always a couple of generations ahead of its closest competitor.

> M powered MacBooks added (...)

Things that Lenovo laptops have had for a generation?

IBM Thinkpads have "cap charge at n%" setting since 1999 or something, but it's not smart. You set it.

It was also present in HP and Dell's business notebooks for quite some time, but again, it's not smart. Just a pre-defined percentage.

Apple manages maximum charge capacity automatically depending on the way you use your computer.

I've had smart charging in other laptops for ages as well. I'm not saying Apple isn't doing good, I'm just disputing the "Apple is on another league" sentiment, when it's mostly based on a lack of knowledge of what's happening outside the Apple ecosystem.

Well, I didn't witness on any other current generation device, at least yet. I'm not a fanboy. I'll be happy if others are doing this in some form, esp. if it's independent of the OS itself.

My colleague just had to replace his HP Elitebook Notebook because the battery had bulged so much it had cracked open the case.

For this to be happening in 2023 means that some manufacturers at least, seem to be not managing this potential problem at all.

N=1 doesn't really tell you much of anything about anything.

Well, my wife's work supplied EliteBook's battery has been replaced today due to excessive swallowing, and it's definitely younger than my 2014 MacBook Pro.

An entire production run of Macbook Pro 2015s had to be recalled and replaced because the batteries were inflating and bursting into flames.

...and Samsung recalled two series of their flagship phones to replace their batteries, and fail (and cancel the model altogether). Because of their failure, planes started and still continue to announce phone charging related security measures during take-off.

Every company makes big mistakes. Also Apple once built laptops with self-cooking GPUs, a couple ones very fragile keyboards, a series with too-sensitive screen coatings.

We can write tons of problems with every producer. The most important metric is whether they're learning from that or not. As far as I can see Samsung and Apple learnt their lessons.

> Apple manages maximum charge capacity automatically depending on the way you use your computer.

Apple cannot predict where you are going to use laptop on AC power at home or whether you are going somewhere and need a full charge. So manual control is better.

There are apps for that if you want, and if it enables hold-off, you can always say "No, I need full charge now, so please charge".

That’s the weird part, they actually can. It’s supposedly one of the machine learning features, where it learns your schedule and makes daily accurate guesses of by when you’ll unplug and plug it back in.

> ... they actually can.

Yes, it does. Even my 7 years old iPhone X does it. I use some features at very specific times, and it suggests me "do you want to do X?" around the time I do that. So the models work well.

Also, the phone generally enables optimized charging if I put it to charge too early. Scheduling to finish a couple of hours before I wake.

> I use some features at very specific times, and it suggests me "do you want to do X?" around the time I do that.

You're conceding that you have a predictable schedule. Folks on the other side of this (who believe it can't work nearly as well as manual control) don't have a predictable schedule. Think of it like {hybrid workers who use a desk all day the same 3 days a week, and are nomads the other 2 days a week, and the ML system can figure this out} vs {on-site workers who use a desk all day 5 days a week, but are nomads a few random days a year, which always catches the ML system off guard}.

Both are valid. A setting that caps it at 80% unless you hit a button for "I'm about to spend a lot more time unplugged than usual, so prepare the battery for that" is the only way to handle unpredictable circumstances. Just like preparing an EV for a road trip.

As said by me and others elsewhere on this thread, this is of course a valid requirement, and tools have been developed for permanently capping charging percentage on Macs for quite some time. I don't have an objection to that.

My Macs charge routine is way more hectic than my phone's which is very predictable, and both of them guesses what I'm trying to do correctly 99% of the time, and that's fine by me.

What I said is, it's working fine for me, but the system is open to tuning both out of the box (I need this now, please charge), or with some small tools (it was called Aldente IIRC), for differing, equally valid needs.

I don't think we're in disagreement here.

BTW, your nick reads ********. Is it hunter2 or something? ;)

It’s not new in Apple devices, either…

> My 2008 MacBook Pro was able to detect battery problems one year before they started to manifest physically.

That may or may not be noteworthy. Despite half my family using MacBooks, and some having had major battery problems, I’ve never heard of such a notification as you describe (including at least one where I’d certainly have expected to hear about it). And the similar system SMART for storage devices is notoriously unreliable: I’ve personally had devices with dire warnings chug along merrily for plenty more years, and observed one or two failures that never received any warnings.

I used three batteries on that particular MacBook and it always shown a "! Service Battery" warning before things went bad. The battery life, and shape of the battery was indicative of anything, either.

Oh, don't bring up SMART. I remember long-testing >100 disks, and most of them passed (it took hours), and all of them failed within 10 days after facing real workloads. We needed a temporary storage for migrating things, but we lost no data, because it was just a copy operation.

> discharge to 80%, keep it there

Where? AFAIK this is a feature you need a third party app like Aldente for. The OS does not offer any way to control battery charging level. Yes, it tries to be smart and guess when you need full charge and sometimes decides to charge to only 80% but that doesnt work for all users except the ones with very regular routines and there is no manual control.

I meant the automatic one. My charge cycles are not very predictable, but periodically my Mac says that It'll hold-off charge, and uses battery until 80%, then uses power adapter. Then charges the battery fully later in the day if I'm connected.

Sometimes it flat out refuses the charge. Then I disconnect and use the battery until 30% or so. Then charge when convenient (clarification: It'd possibly charge if I hit a certain percentage, but I always disconnected voluntarily, to give a good use to battery. I lasts a day. Why not?).

My MacBook Air M1 has 165 cycles in 3 years, at 90% of design capacity. I think this is a very solid management of the battery for a computer used every day literally.

My MacBook Pro is at ~85% after 8 years. I don't remember total cycles now.

> Why not?

I find running on battery, lots of things are throttled or disabled. CPU is slower for example. That's probably a good reason for why not.

I generally do mundane tasks like SSH sessions or zoom meetings when I'm on battery. Heavier tasks are always offloaded to my desktop system, most of the times, so running on battery here and there doesn't impact many things in my case.

A video call though isn't that mundane. Google Meet often has my cpu and fans spinning. I do prefer Zoom as it uses fewer resources. But of course, it will work on battery.

For an M1 powered MacBook Air, none of them creates a significant power spike on the system. I use both regularly, generally one hour at a time, and battery percentage doesn't take a noticeable hit after the call, and the computer doesn't warm up.

>I find running on battery, lots of things are throttled or disabled. CPU is slower for example.

FWIW, the performance and CPU features are the same on Mx based MacBooks whether they're plugged in or not.

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