Mavericks – power use / service battery | Hacker News Reader

Mavericks – power use / service battery

discussions.apple.com

74 pointsgabea59 comments

Holy shit a 2 page Apple discussions thread when probably 20 million users upgraded in a one week span. Someone wake up cnet, there's clicks to be had!

I wonder if any of those users are having wi-fi issues. Or crashes. Reports from World of Warcraft are that Onyxia has been deep breathing more since Mavericks released.

There may be a real issue here. Or this may be the eleventyth installment of Apple sells a lot of devices.

Sorry, but Apple is having an easy job there, they have a really small amount of hardware versions compared to microsoft.

This happens frequently with OS X updates, and it's why I usually wait a month or two before upgrading:

2012 - Mountain Lion: http://www.webpronews.com/mountain-lion-may-be-hurting-your-...

2011 - Lion: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1194978

2010 - Snow Leopard: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10426564-263.html

As always with any major OS release, you have people crawling out of the woodwork that are pinning every problem with their systems on the new OS. It couldn't possibly be the hardware that they're using.

I'm not saying Apple is perfect, but when you've got millions of people downloading an OS - many of which are jumping 2-3 entire major OS versions - even 0.01% of people having the same problem is going to result in hundreds of people with that problem. When you combine that with a public discussion forum run by the company (that's regularly indexed by the major search engines) and a small but vocal portion of the customer base that feels entitled to immaculately perfectly functioning devices because "they bought an Apple computer" (read: luxury) and you end up with runaway threads of coincidence-now-fault.

"Wow, Apple is giving away 10.9 for free? Even for old machines running 10.6? Gee, I've got a 5+ year old laptop with the original battery I haven't used in a while - wonder how it'll work with that."

Saw that someone mentioned the MacBook Air Gen 1 (they probably meant Gen 2 since Gen 1 had 32-bit EFI and maxed out at running OS X 10.7) - which originally came out with 10.5 ... but you could still get 10.9 onto it if you did the USB installer trick. In point of fact - Apple actually added the visual indicators for servicing your battery in 10.6. If people are installing 10.9 over the top of 10.5 (it works if your machine can run 10.9), they will likely be seeing a battery warning indicator for their 5-6 year old machine that has been a valid issue for quite some time (especially since the battery isn't considered user serviceable on a Unibody Mac) - it just never popped up in their face. I would be more believing of this thread if every single person posted their battery readings and all turned out to have amazing low cycles combined with amazingly reduced capacity (which is when the Service Battery dialog appears).

If you find yourself to be in the same boat as the people in this thread, you should probably read this KB article from Apple and immediately have your laptop retrain its battery knowledge:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

"Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)"

After performing normal troubleshooting, these symptoms may indicate that an SMC reset may be necessary:

-Power-: [...] The battery does not appear to be charging properly. [...]"

a small but vocal portion of the customer base that feels entitled to immaculately perfectly functioning devices because "they bought an Apple computer" (read: luxury)

This is more because one of Apple's slogans for OS X is "It just works.", not "it just works, but only on most hardware".

I agree, it's unreasonable to expect everything ever to run smoothly, but this is the expectation you set when you are brazen enough to market your gear as "it just works".

I had the service battery warning show up on Mountain Lion: did the SMC reset, it went away for a little bit, then came back. Installed Mavericks, it went away for a day. :) Got a new battery a month ago, and it's still indicating over 100% of design capacity. (6958/6900 mAh MBP 8,2)

Yeah. When you install a new major OS, it's supposed to trigger a SMC reset and relearn the battery profile - which it sounds like it did for you on 10.9.

After calibrating it did indeed determine that, yes, you still had a failing battery.

I'm not quite in the same boat as you - my machine is a MacBook Pro 2008 pre-Unibody. But I've been through the "Service Battery" warning on this 5 year old machine before. And they were right! Chemically, the battery had degraded and could barely hold a charge for more than 25 minutes. The machine would power off randomly without the 10 minute "charge me now!" warning because the power curve was so bad, it could never predict I only had 30 seconds left.

Apple goes to great lengths to try to educate their consumers about how to protect the life of the batteries of their laptops:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html - Long term storage tips, maintenance tips, best practices, a little calendar reminder you can add to iCal to remind you to do these things, etc.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1446 - What you can do to increase your battery life, how to diagnose battery problems, etc.

10.9 itself! http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5873 - Click on the battery icon. It will tell you what processes are running right now that demand high power. The Activity Monitor has a new "Energy" tab showing per-process power utilization. At the bottom are various charts and statistics about your battery usage.

People abuse the hell out of laptop batteries by leaving the laptop connected to the charger all day, every day, like it was a desktop. They're perpetually 99%+ charged which stresses out the battery. The battery is meant to be used - use it!

And like you, I'm not experiencing the issues in this thread under 10.9.

> People abuse the hell out of laptop batteries by leaving the laptop connected to the charger all day, every day, like it was a desktop. They're perpetually 99%+ charged which stresses out the battery. The battery is meant to be used - use it!

How do you figure?

i've "abused" countless laptops over the years this way. none of them seem to have been affected negatively. in comparison, my wife routinely lets the battery on hers run close to empty- her last laptop could barely hold a charge for 5 min.

http://www.marco.org/2009/09/24/laptop-battery-myths

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

I've had my Dell Latitude docked 95% of the time for the last 4 years and when I do occasionally need the battery, it seems to run about the same as it did new. Your mileage may vary.

I leave my Mac plugged in perpetually, or nearly so. It's 53 months old and the battery is at 80% capacity. So instead of 7 hours I get 5.5 or whatever. It's not really noticeable yet.

Maybe I'm just lucky. I had to replace my wife's macbook pro battery a month ago, same age as mine. Her's swelled up though, and was preventing the trackpad from clicking.

80%...! Very impressive. What's the cycle count on your battery? My mbp is of a similar vintage, but after 900 or so cycles, the battery is down to 1700mah at "full". But w/ mavericks that's still about 2.5 hrs of runtime (1.75 hrs on Lion).

170 cycles...due to mainly keeping it plugged in.

Was there a common solution (or fix) that did the trick in all those cases?

I'll bet money that this "battery flaw" is just Spotlight indexing. The service battery warning is probably an actual bug, but anyone losing battery life after upgrading will probably see their battery life improved once indexing is over. That's what happened in my 2012 Macbook Air.

For me, so far no. Even after the Spotlight indexing, I've noticed a very significant decrease in battery life after upgrading. I don't know why, and the Power tab in Activity Monitor doesn't give any hints. It doesn seem that the fans are also running more frequently than they used to, even on battery power.

It's almost always the case of some third-party program causing power draw (or other bugs like not sleeping when the lid is closed). Remove things until the problem goes away, and add them until they come back.

Maverics even shows warning after installation that "system is being optimized" and this process can impact performance and battery life.

This is why I advise everyone to actually wait before upgrading your existing OS. See, if this was any other software, say like a word processor, you can probably use a replacement as a temporary measure, but as for the OS, you should never gamble, because it's one of the most painful experiences to install and re-install an entire OS and all the necessary programs after that.

Also, I would like to point out (again) that if you are running Adobe's Creative Suite 6 and below, Mavericks has compatibility issues with some programs for some users. Ex: Photoshop's 'save as' doesn't work, and stuff like that. If your business is dependent on any of these softwares like in my case, I suggest you wait for a few months before these bugs are squished (which Apple of course is pretty good at).

Cheers.

To be fair the same thing could happen with any OS update, even from regular security patches, not just from the actually semi-meaningful upgrade Mavericks is.

So if you are the kind of person to be super conservative obviously you should just never upgrade or wait for at least 3 years because you can never be sure that there won't be problems.

And you know, not having access to the 'Save As' menu in Photoshop is going to create millions in support costs, so it's worth exposing all your users to untold hordes of security vulnerabilities from an unsupported and outdated operating system.

(Or at least that's how things work if you're a large Enterprise heavy on MS technologies?)

(Please don't take this post too seriously.)

I think you misunderstood that I was implying asking people to wait indefinitely while I just meant for them to wait for a few months.

And, if the software that's making my both ends meet doesn't work on a newer OS version as expected, I think it's fair that I (or anyone else) wait for a few months just to be sure that it works as expected so we don't end up in the streets, you know.

(Please take my comment seriously)

> [a very] painful experiences to install and re-install an entire OS

Don't want to be contrarian but I just installed an Ubuntu on an old laptop for my own use, and it took around 1.5 hours, with only a few minutes requiring my attention.

I follow and update a personal step-by-step installation guide, and most tweaks and installations after the main OS install are commands I just blindly copy-paste in a terminal. I can even use command-line to configure apps and gnome layout.

Not to say I am an Ubuntu fanboy. I hate it actually, and wipe some warm tears each time I have to install it (why did they drop gnome 2!?). But I still hate it less than other non-Linux systems, and didn't take time to explore other Linuxes.

Please. Installing MacOS is a breeze, you don't even need tweaks and installations via the command line unless you need a package manager.

The point is that downgrading an OS is no fun and that's true for any OS.

Sometimes the web is an eerie place. I just searched for Adobe and Maverick conflicts, and this is near the top on google (having been updated "47 minutes ago"): http://hackers.tgdaily.com/rt_story/hackers_tech/mac-os-x-ma...

Do you have a cite for the Photoshop "Save As" problem? I've seen this mentioned multiple times as a reason to not upgrade, but I've never been able to find a first-hand report of it actually happening other than in early betas. I don't think this is actually still a problem, but if it is, I would like to know about it.

We tried it in three of our office computers and about two of them had this problem so we had to revert back to Lion. Also a quick googling:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1596253

http://blogs.adobe.com/vikrant/2013/10/creative-cloud-creati...

(^Check the comments)

Call me old fashioned, but my rule of thumb is to always wait a good month or so for a few hotfixes to be released before I upgrade an OS. I'd rather other folks get bragging rights to the new OS than risk myself getting into a crisis over unforeseen QA problems

TL;DR many laypeople don't understand cause and effect, and this drives up the cost for everyone.

Thanks, now I have a problem I didn't know I had ;) I haven't upgraded to Mavericks, yet, but after reading this thread I clicked on my battery indicator (mid-2009 MBP) and there is a "Service Battery" warning.

I haven't noticed any issues, and typically get 4-5 hours of usage from a full charge. /shrug

Wasn't Mavericks supposed to improve battery life?

It's useful to distinguish between bugs and features/refinements. This is a bug.

Since I upgraded to Mavericks I've been watching battery life (hoping for an improvement) and it does feel like it's draining quicker now.

But in reality I'm sure this is just because I'm watching it more closely than I ever did before. I have no quantitive measure of how battery life has changed for me.

I suspect this is a common problem when you announce that an upgrade improves something like battery life. All of a sudden users start looking when they didn't really look before and report issues based on feelings.

Of course this doesn't apply so much for users who're now reporting 'service battery' warnings on new batteries...

There always will be some lucky from millions of users, whose mac will die after installing new update, but this does not mean the update was the reason.

Where are all the "data scientists"?

Hmm, I hadn't noticed but I do have a "service battery" warning as well. I don't use my personal laptop a lot anymore but it seemed to be drained every other time I would pick it up. So it does seem that something is amiss. I'm not too worried, it'll get fixed.

Though to be honest, there is some risk of damage to the battery if the firmware is not doing its job properly. But Apple has usually done the "right thing" about big problems like this.

My (new) MBA 2013 has been perfect with Mavericks, haven't noticed any battery drain like this.

It added about half an hour to my mid-2011 15 inch MBP. I'm pretty happy with that.

Mavericks was all about performance I thought. Could be a bug they will fix in an update.

Sounds like it. They've been releasing firmware that fixes battery issues on a semi-regular basis, as well as the recall of certain defective batteries.

Mavericks does improve battery life:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/18/#battery-b...

This, and TextMate 1 plugin incompatibility, is why I have deferred my upgrade.

There was an email sent by Textmate talking about plugin issue.

If you wish to use TextMate 1.x on OS X 10.9 then to fix bundle items that do not work with ruby 2.0 you will need to open the bundle >editor and change the first line of the command (called shebang) to the following:

#!/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

Can't you fix that with RVM?

How?

Most of these people have 3 year old machines.

Gee, I wonder why the batteries need service…

Apple OS version x.0 excitement! My battery life improved on 2011 MBP, but it will crash on boot if I have an external display plugged in through an HDMI > MDP adapter.

I have 5 macs, they're all working great.

Why would you need 5 Macs? I'm really curious.

I'm an iOS developer among things...

1 iMac for home, 1 MBA for myself, 1 MBP for the wife, 1 iMac at work (primary work machine), 1 Mac Mini as a build machine at work,

I'm planning on buying another mini as an HTPC as well :) Now, go ahead and ask me how many iPad's I have lol

Living alone and working from home, I don't see the need to have that much computers for myself but I can understand the need for you.

Yea, I think it would be best to just have one machine. It's very difficult to keep 4 dev environments in sync (mackup is some help).

As for living alone, you can decide if that's best :)

I've got these ones:

  - MacBook Pro
  - iMac at work running OSX
  - iMac at work running Win7
  - iMac at home
  - Mac Mini at home as a server
  - Mac Mini at work as a server

Soon we'll have another laptop...

that six by my count

Eeeks!.. i just updated to Mavericks last night.. i hope i do not face the same issue.

I am using Mavericks on my MacBook Pro 15-inch, Early 2011 without any problems.

Man, Apple's had a real string of dog products lately. My 5s has crashed a couple times and I've only had it for 2 weeks. Prior to this I'd never had an issue with the 4. Can't wait to see how poorly the MBP fares.

Have you tried restoring it? If that doesn't help take it to the Genius bar for a replacement because your hardware may be defective.

My 5s has been completely solid, and I haven't heard of any problems from the several people I know who have them.

My father in law called recently to get help on a strange email issue he was having. I suggested a restart. This worked. It turned out the poor thing hadn't been restarted in nearly a year, with heaps of use every day. Another anecdata point.

inb4 the thread gets nuked by apple :(

Here's a snapshot, just in case: http://archive.is/B9g9D

For when the censorship kicks in: https://mega.co.nz/#!a8RwCB7D!dOj9HAyof01vALrVKnZ9wQlrhdscc_...

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