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Service Battery?

mmntech

mmntech

Lifer
It seems there is a bug or something in Snow Leopard concerning Macbooks. A lot of people have noticed that after upgrading, battery life on Macbooks and Macbook Pros is significantly reduced and the system now shows a "Service Battery" advisory in the battery status menu. I've been having this problem for a couple days now. In my case, the battery shows that it is constantly in a charging state. It didn't appear right away but has now been doing this for a few days. Apple hasn't released any official information on it either. Some folks have said resetting the SMC, PRAM, and calibrating the battery solves the problem. I tried all that to no avail. I know there's nothing wrong with the battery as I've barely used it. Mostly on AC power, just 16 cycles.

I'm just curious if anybody else is having the same problem. I might revert back the Leopard because of this issue.
 
I put Snow Leopard on my MacBook and although I did see the 'Service Battery' thing, I didn't notice any decrease in battery life.
 
Mine says "Condition: Replace Now", and rightfully so 🙁
I've got higher priority demands for discretionary income at the moment. My battery is nearly 3 years old and saw heavy use for 1.5 years at university. About 1000 mAh capacity remaining. I totally lust after the new built-in design.
 
Oh, that is a shame, you could have gotten that replaced for free. There was essentially a recall on that run of batteries (my macbook was affected as well) because they had a tendency to 'go bad' and lose capacity before the 300 cycle mark.

Unless yours has like 12000 cycles of course in which case that is basically expected that you would have at best 20% capacity left.
 
I checked and as far as I know it was outside of the affected battery production run. The battery was still good for maybe 2 hours after a year. Now it is good for 40 or so minutes or much less if watching flash videos.
 
I noticed the issue where it keeps indicating "charging" despite the battery being full is present in Vista as well. I'm thinking this might be driver related. I wonder what would happen if I applied Leopard's bootcamp drivers, see if that clears things up. Failing that I'll have to take it to the Apple store and see if they'll replace the battery. I bought it last November. Think they'll still honour the parts warranty? It's supposed to be one year I think.
 
Well, I ended up taking it in this afternoon. They're going to run some checks on it. I'm pretty sure it's an OS bug though. So now I'm Macless for the evening. Feels like I've had an arm cut off. lol
 
I got that error too, but got rid of it by doing a couple "battery conditioning" cycles. Basically charge it up all the way and leave it alone for a couple hours. Then, drain the battery and leave it sleeping\off for a few more. Rinse, repeat as needed. It's time consuming, but I got my MacBook's battery capacity up from ~3600 mAh to about 4000 after two or three cycles.
 
Ah, I took it to some Apple authorized service place I had gone to for years. I told the jerks it was urgent; get the usual "ok, ok, that's fine" spiel. Walk in today half an hour before I need to be at school and they didn't even look at it. "Oh, we're busy and we're doing you a favour putting it to the front". They don't even have replacement batteries in stock. Ok, now I'm mad. I guess I'll take it to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store next Monday.
 
Well, I got it fixed. It was a bad battery after all. Interesting how sudden and widespread the problem cropped up though. So now I'm not mad at SL for drawing attention. Handy feature actually.
 
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