
Mavericks – power use / service battery - gabea
https://discussions.apple.com/message/23505531#23505531
======
Steko
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_.

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

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akamaka
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-...](http://www.webpronews.com/mountain-lion-may-be-hurting-your-
macbooks-battery-life-2012-08)

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

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

~~~
pudquick
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](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. [...]"_

~~~
MaysonL
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)

~~~
pudquick
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](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](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](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.

~~~
sneak
> 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?

~~~
jimboyoungblood
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.marco.org/2009/09/24/laptop-battery-myths)

[http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html](http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html)

------
IBM
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.

~~~
gnaffle
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.

~~~
bluedino
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.

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neya
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.

~~~
Glyptodon
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.)

~~~
neya
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)

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rwhitman
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

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

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IbJacked
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

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newman314
Wasn't Mavericks supposed to _improve_ battery life?

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

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benjamta
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...

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juskrey
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"?

------
Timothee
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.

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

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

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

~~~
zdw
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...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/18/#battery-
benchmarks)

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

~~~
bound008
Can't you fix that with RVM?

~~~
helpfulElf
How?

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mproud
Most of these people have 3 year old machines.

Gee, I wonder why the batteries need service…

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rangibaby
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.

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od2m
I have 5 macs, they're all working great.

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

~~~
od2m
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

~~~
batuhanicoz
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.

~~~
od2m
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 :)

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

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

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beedogs
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.

~~~
stephen_g
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.

~~~
lostlogin
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.

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kbar13
inb4 the thread gets nuked by apple :(

~~~
kuyan
Here's a snapshot, just in case:
[http://archive.is/B9g9D](http://archive.is/B9g9D)

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w1ntermute
For when the censorship kicks in:
[https://mega.co.nz/#!a8RwCB7D!dOj9HAyof01vALrVKnZ9wQlrhdscc_...](https://mega.co.nz/#!a8RwCB7D!dOj9HAyof01vALrVKnZ9wQlrhdscc_8DNSLKgDRxqyw)

