macbook pro 2019 entry level battery issues

[0906742]

Kept it on during charge as I was working. Fully charged and unplugged after Full charge + 90 min the first two times. Third time I let it charge overnight. I'm thinking this is what brought the battery to "normal."

OK, that additional time could be maybe the reason. I have never kept mine for longer than maybe few minutes after battery reached 100% and charging really stopped (I mean verifying by Coconut that it is no longer charging it because menu item turn 100% way before it is really full).

I have usually charged mine while machine was running but I did also charge it twice when turned off but did not see any change from that.

2.7% drop. Dipped in most recent test from 5118 to 5114 and bounced up to 5152 after completion.

OK, that sound like strong battery, In my unit it is always more like 3,5-3.7%.

I think it's cycling properly since the count goes up by one every time I drop from 100 to around 50%. This would mean the battery had 1.5 cycles when I got it. Since I plugged in at 10% this last time I'll be checking to see if the count goes up at 40%. If it doesn't and ticks up meaningfully earlier that's obviously no bueno.

Not sure I got you right, but it is way too fast if it goes up every time you go from 100 to 50%! it is not supposed to work like that because charging does not count. So you should get two 100% to 50% use until it increase by one.

Please let me know your findings.

How many charge cycles currently on your unit? Do they seem so far reasonable?

In my unit charge cycle just increased again by 1 and this time took only 67,5% real used battery percentages and pretty even 7 hours of use on battery!!
I had charged it twice during this and it took like 50 to 60 minutes of use each time until battery percentage in Coconut dropped under 100% the first time, but still it will not add up to even close to 100%.

30-35 under regular use.

Do you mean battery temperature is 30-35c? I was talking about battery temperatures.

Ramps up quickly to 60+ when I run W10 in a VM and then the fans kick on. This seems to be normal for these machines, as they do run a little warm.

That 60c cannot be battery temp?

 

[oldtime]

Not sure I got you right, but it is way too fast if it goes up every time you go from 100 to 50%! it is not supposed to work like that because charging does not count. So you should get two 100% to 50% use until it increase by one.

Please let me know your findings.

Do you mean battery temperature is 30-35c? I was talking about battery temperatures.


That 60c cannot be battery temp?

What I mean is that the first time I powered on I had 1 cycle. When I got down to 50% it went up to 2. So this likely means there were 1.5 cycles on the machine when it was new. So the next cycle should have registered after a full discharge from that point, which would be the next time it hit 50% since I was discharging to 0. This indeed reoccurred each full 100-->0% discharge. Last discharge I only used 90% of the battery before plugging in (or -40% from last cycle) so next cycle count increase should occur at 40%.

Regarding temp, yeah I was looking at CPU. Right now it looks like battery is 35.2 under medium load.

 

[0906742]

OK, now it makes sense. Please keep an eye on it to see where it changes. I'm looking forward to hear that soon. It might be good idea to follow frequently until you see the exact spot where it changes because if you just use it until 40% you see it increased but you have no way to know if it increased much earlier already.

Running Cinebench few time accelerates nicely battery consumption, it you don't want to wait for too long.

About battery temp, yours is about identical in temperature. Depending on use I get similar, at the moment I'm only at 32,7c but just couple safari tabs open with no Youtube running background this time(that seems to get battery around 35c and the whole machine feels rather warm all around then).

 

[oldtime]

Yeah I've kept Coconut Battery open and tucked on the side of the screen all day. I glance at it every 5 mins or so. Battery temp has been between 29 and 36 today.

 

[kayastv]

After getting my MacBook fixed (by myself)

SMC reset at 100% and then let it drain twice afterwards, I have no issues.

Currently using it as normally as I can. I am able to reach 5% with a low battery warning indicator and now shuts off at 0%. My light use (web surfing) is equivalent to 10% drain per hour. So sort of the "10 hours battery life" apple claimed.

I'm only on my 6th cycle count.

My full charge capacity fluctuates between 5074 - 5104 mAh. Where my design capacity is 5103 mAh.

69 day old battery, made by simplo, 2019-06-04 manufacturer's date.

 

[0906742]

Yeah I've kept Coconut Battery open and tucked on the side of the screen all day. I glance at it every 5 mins or so. Battery temp has been between 29 and 36 today.

How cycle count looks at the moment? How much use on 1 cycle so far in percents?



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My light use (web surfing) is equivalent to 10% drain per hour. So sort of the "10 hours battery life" apple claimed.

Do you have many tabs open? How much it usually reports (Coconut) your power draw wattage during this?

In my unit power draw is noticeable more than 10% per hour with just few tabs open and wattage (power draw) fluctuates between 5-10W.

I'm only on my 6th cycle count​

Does it match your use precisely?​

 

[kayastv]

How cycle count looks at the moment? How much use on 1 cycle so far in percents?


[doublepost=1565687414][/doublepost]
Do you have many tabs open? How much it usually reports (Coconut) your power draw wattage during this?

In my unit power draw is noticeable more than 10% per hour with just few tabs open and wattage (power draw) fluctuates between 5-10W.

Does it match your use precisely?​

on 1 cycle, I would say around 90% use. fluctuates between 90 and 95.

I have around 3-4 tabs open. Power draw is 5-7W.

Yes it does match my use. I also use dark mode to save more energy.
10% per hour also when streaming Netflix with 1 or 2 more tabs open.
10% per hour when I only have 6-7 tabs open.

 

[0906742]

on 1 cycle, I would say around 90% use. fluctuates between 90 and 95.

OK. So you are not reaching 100% real use either? It is weird because you should. It is even clearly stated in Apple's own documents describing how charge cycle is counted.

Anyway yours seem better than what I usually see. I just browsed thru my readings in the past and it seems that 4th to 5th cycle took 89,5% and from that on the next ones at 74%, 85,1%, 83,3%, 79,6%, 90,2%, 83,7%, 87%, 79,8%, 77,5%, 77,3% and 67,5%. So I'm currently at 16th cycle. I don't know what to think but maybe these batteries just get so weak soon...

Not that I seriously expect any currently sold battery to last 1000 charge cycles let alone more that year or two, but if it would, even then it would be only 800 real cycles since calculations will exaggerate seriously how much battery is used really.

I have around 3-4 tabs open. Power draw is 5-7W.

That seems low but I guess it depends on what web sites are running in tabs, some seem to eat more battery than others (ads and scripts I guess). I currently have this page and 2 other tabs open and screen is full -5 clicks brightness and power draw is around 5 -5 5,5W. But just open Youtube and play some music there in one tabs and you get easily 2-3W or even more draw on top of that.

Yes it does match my use. I also use dark mode to save more energy.

Actually the way LCD monitors work, dark mode will eat a little more energy, due to that when lcd panel is displaying black it is drawing power and when full white it is in "off" mode, basically backlight is running all the time at the same level so no saving from there either (I haven't paid attention if Apple reduces backlight automatically in that mode but I doubt they don't).
Where you would see dark mode saving power is OLED screens as they will draw power when displaying white and the are in "off" mode when black. So other way around than lcd panel.

10% per hour also when streaming Netflix with 1 or 2 more tabs open.
10% per hour when I only have 6-7 tabs open.

You are talking about percentages and not Wattage? Pretty low figures for that many tabs and/or Netflix. I haven't tried Netflix myself on MacBook but I guess it would be something similar what you see Youtube power draw (which no way runs that low power in my unit, my MBP even warm up noticeable during Youtube).

You haven't seen anymore any issues with battery or FCC drops under load (like Cinebench on different battery charge levels)?

 

[kayastv]

My estimates for 10% battery per hour is very rough because I only dipped to 40% and start charging again. But cumulatively, every 100% I go through, adds another cycle count.

Not issues on cinebench on different battery charge levels, pretty consistent, mbp levelled itself out.

 

[Howard2k]

on 1 cycle, I would say around 90% use. fluctuates between 90 and 95.

I have around 3-4 tabs open. Power draw is 5-7W.

Yes it does match my use. I also use dark mode to save more energy.
10% per hour also when streaming Netflix with 1 or 2 more tabs open.
10% per hour when I only have 6-7 tabs open.

Dark mode probably uses more energy.

 

[0906742]

My estimates for 10% battery per hour is very rough because I only dipped to 40% and start charging again. But cumulatively, every 100% I go through, adds another cycle count.

OK. Because in my unit it really depends on lot about what websites I have open in tabs. It seems that just having Youtube playing music videos in one tab cause machine to warm up noticeable and increase battery use (easily 12-14% hour). However yesterday I got 6 hours 32 minute of battery use from 100% to 45,3% with just 3-4 tabs open and no Youtube (I did not even use Safari during all that time), and I only once ran Cinebench during this time (it pulls already about 3,5% battery per run!). This adds up to about 8,37% per hour. Pretty nice but really I get two hours less less usage when I use it "normally".

In your unit charge cycles really seem to work as they are supposed to work. I have tracked mine so carefully as you can see the numbers I posted earlier, that it get nowhere near 100% in my unit.

Not issues on cinebench on different battery charge levels, pretty consistent, mbp levelled itself out.

Interesting. I guess in my unit battery is just not that good, as it keep increasing these charge cycles the way it does.

I had finally opportunity to test shop demo 1.4GHz model with Cinebench. At first it seemed strong battery but I guess unit had been plugged in charger for a long time, I almost gave up after first runs because FCC seemed strong but since there was nobody else around wanting to test the machine at the moment, I kept running CB few times in a row and then after short break between test I ran it again and FCC dropped to 4815mAh when battery charge about was 80% at the moment. I tried again and the same thing! When battery was 100% full and I just unplugged the charger FCC only dipped negligible amount to about 5060mAh or so.
Charge percentage seemed to act pretty consistently in that but again tests were run at 75% or high battery charge.
That unit also had Simplo battery and battery in that unit was manufactured about 2 weeks earlier than mine.

There was also 2.4GHz model side by side, so I could compare the screens. To my suprise in 1.4 the screen was a little brighter (but colder in color temp) and it had 100% uniformity across the screen but 2.4 model looked pretty much the same as mine and it had slightly pinkish left side and slightly bluish right side, just like in mine (pretty mild and mostly can be seen with True Tone and Night shift on and screen brightness at low).

Question to those of you who have gone thru several 1.4 machines for battery problems, did you notice variation between the screens? So far in other shops where I have seen 2.4 13" and bigger 15" models they all had pinkish left and bluish right side, so I guess it is rather common, so it was quite suprising that the cheaper Pro demo model in one shop had 100% perfect screen.

 

[oldtime]

I've dipped from 100-75% today in 1 hour so far. Light work within FF, about 12 browser tabs open. Shouldn't be such a drain. We'll see how the rest of the day goes. I talked to someone at the local Apple Store about the battery problem and I asked if I could swap out my computer for "new stock" hoping to get a better battery and he said there was no way they could do that and that machines they received this week could still have 3 month old batteries. So I guess it really is a lottery of sorts. I'm thinking of just returning and then purchasing a BTO since it seems all of us with issues have the 8GB models (correct me if i'm wrong about that).

 

[0906742]

I'm afraid this is pretty much what the batteries are today in terms of quality with almost all vendors and probably getting a fresh battery today, you will likely get the same issues when it is three months old.. They are just not build to last the way they were some years ago. Keeping that in mind I see no point to invest in notebook with a lot of ram and ssd space to future proof it, the battery will make sure it is not future proof. And this is not just concerning Apple, in my opinion they are all more or less like that these days and too bad very rare products these days have user replaceable batteries.

Anyway besides battery weakness it also seems that battery life is not very optimized when you do anything more demanding with the machine. It is as if OS is not as advanced what you see in Windows world.
For example today I used my MBP with very light load (lighter than usual) and I used machine precisely 1 hour 58 minutes and during that time battery dropped from 100% to 93.6% (that was measured from Coconut, as OS reported just dropped from 100% to 99% in the last minutes of that use). I've noticed that even using Safari with multiple tabs seem to melt the battery at times, especially when web sites have a lot of ads and scrips running, or you run something like Youtube in one of the tabs. You can verify that by keeping an eye on Coconut when you test various numbers of tabs with certain websites running. Drain can be pretty much anything from 5W to over 20W (that's the highest I saw once), and very easily you see above 10W drains, so just do the math for how long 58,2W battery give you juice at certain load.

How battery cycles seem to accumulate in your unit? You see the same issue as I?

 

[oldtime]

My battery cycles seem to accumulate every 90-95%, so not as bad as your experience. I find it hard to trust any conclusions to that end, though, given how inaccurate the readings from coconut and the mac itself seem to be. Even after several SMC resets, I've seen the battery stuck around 98-100% for hours before finally starting to catch up. And then today it dropped 25% in the first hour and has only gone down another 7% in the 90 minutes since. All light/medium use. I don't feel comfortable trusting these numbers at this point. Anything other than looking at # of hours for a full discharge seems pointless right now.

 

[0906742]

Could be some kind of metering issue, but given how long li-ion batteries have been used I would expect them to have already reliable lookup tables to estimate charge level pretty precisely without need for constant battery meter calibrations. But again this may be due to that batteries are what they are these days - way too much difference between performance of the individual cells... Could it be these are as simple as just voltage based reading used to estimate battery capacity? Because I've noticed these voltage levels do change pretty much unpredictable way in mine. That fluctuating voltage could very well explain why battery meter acts the way it does if battery is weak that drops voltage under load. I've seen similar thing with our iPhones, one with strong battery and another with weak, there is difference how they can keep up the voltage when different load is applied, strong one keeps steady and the weak one dips.

Seem that nobody else is seeing their battery charge cycles increasing as fast as in mine.

 

[Slimtrimkid]

I've had my MacBook Pro 2019 for two weeks and have only taken it off the charger once and drained it to 20%. I checked my cycle count through system report and through Coconut Battery and they both say I've used "3" cycles. I'm curious as to why. I turn my notebook off every night after I unplug it from the charger and when I wake up, I plug it back in, it says either 99% or 100%. I'm wondering if I have a faulty battery. Thankfully, I have AppleCare, but it's still worrisome. Any clues as to what I may be doing wrong? I'll keep an eye on it from here on out.

 

[0906742]

It seems that charge cycles increase in some units at crazy speed. I can only imagine what causes that but I guess cycle represent battery real capacity like if you get to use 100% until it increase you have full 58,2W battery capacity available, and when it increases at lower use, it probably equals lesser available capacity (weak battery).

I just got increase to 17th cycle in my unit. This time it took 77,8% of real battery use. It took almost 1,5 hours use until battery charge dropped under 100% in CoconutBattery after I charged it last time, so if I add like 12% estimate on top of that (it was very light use at that time), it equals 89,8% of real battery use. I guess that means battery in my unit has 58,2W x 89,8 / 100 = 52,26W (battery health 89.8%?).
I think that 10% lost full charge capacity matches pretty well to what I've seen happening with iPad 2018, it has practically lost 10% of FCC in after just few tens of charges. Again this is just a theory but more and more I think about it, more it makes sense to what I see with my MBP.

So to sum up my unit's measured charge cycle vs. real battery usage percentages below is list so far.
4th to 5th cycle took 89,5% and from that on the next ones at 74%, 85,1%, 83,3%, 79,6%, 90,2%, 83,7%, 87%, 79,8%, 77,5%, 77,3%, 67,5% and 77,8% (89,8%). I'm currently at 17th charge cycle.

There are also those who report getting nearly 100% of real use per charge cycle, so I guess their battery health is close to 100%.

I'm not sure if this issue is worth to spend my time anymore trying to analyze it more, because these units have 4 year extended warranty on keyboards and from what I gathered from iFixit teardown the battery is glued on the top case, so doesn't that mean you get also new battery anyway for each keyboard replacement?

 

[Lyrca]

New 1.4/16/512 MBP 13". I ran down the battery to 5% without any issues regarding the machine turning off.

 

[0906742]

New 1.4/16/512 MBP 13". I ran down the battery to 5% without any issues regarding the machine turning off.

Did yours come with DSY or SMP battery? Is it manufactured in the first or second half of this year?
How your charge cycles look like? You get to use 100% of battery percentage until it increases?

 

[Lyrca]

Did yours come with DSY or SMP battery? Is it manufactured in the first or second half of this year?
How your charge cycles look like? You get to use 100% of battery percentage until it increases?

SMP battery, manufactured in the second half of 19'.

How your charge cycles look like?

Cycles are 3 which is in line with my usage.

You get to use 100% of battery percentage until it increases?

Yes, I get get to use 100% of my battery as expected.

 

[0906742]

Yes, I get get to use 100% of my battery as expected.

I meant by that you get to use 100% of charge until charge cycle increase and not some random 80-95%?

What it reports full charge capacity?

Have you tested Cinebench load test if full charge capacity in yours dip during test when load is highest?

 

[Lyrca]

I meant by that you get to use 100% of charge until charge cycle increase and not some random 80-95%?

What it reports full charge capacity?

Have you tested Cinebench load test if full charge capacity in yours dip during test when load is highest?

No, I haven't really looked at how the battery cycles increase. I'm happy with the way things are.

 

[0906742]

I guess most of us never pay attention to those. I have and in my opinion it is not right that battery cycles increase about every 80%, that essentially means that when the machine says you have used 1000 charge cycles, you have actually used only 800. But I think it does not really matter anything because batteries these days rarely last more than year of two even if you did not use many charge cycles.

 

[Refault]

Received my MBP 2019 13in 1.4GHz from Amazon yesterday. Was using it today when it suddenly powered off at 28%. Many remarks of “the ****?!” later, I’m relieved and disappointed to find out that I’m not the only one with this issue. My model is an FZ1 with an SMP battery. The battery indicator will fluctuate between 0% and a “Service Needed” warning and 30% and “Normal.” I tried resetting SMC but to no avail.

I will try kayastv’s solution and update later.

 

[0906742]

That SMC reset with certain way probably works as a workaround to avoid this happening but probably wont cure the root cause.