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10.2.4 Killing Battery Life
Milanek writes "The iBook/PowerBook battery seems to be permanently incapacitated by the 10.2.4 update.
" I had this problem as well - had to get my battery replaced last week. It was a painless exchange, but still annonying.
The /. summary makes it sound like all Power/iBooks are experiencing battery drainage after updating to 10.2.4 - my 2002 600 mHz iBook updated just fine, and battery life is the same.
Battery Reset is well-hidden on Apple's Download site Yeah, it's for iBook/PBG3, but who knows ....
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I have a 12" PB 867Mhz -- I see no difference since 10.2.4.. I get 3 hours with full brightness and full performance, and upto 4 hours with brightness at 25% and reduced performance. It always charges to 100% and the amber light turns green.
I doubt this is a software issue.
People seem to complain about battery life after every update. Remember how people said battery life is reduced with Jaguar (10.2)?
My battery is just over a year old, and I haven't noticed anything unusual since moving to 10.2.4. I'm pretty hard on my battery, too - never shut down except to reboot after upgrades, rarely take my battery below 50% charge.
Hope it doesn't happen to me...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Solved the problem by resetting the Power Manager:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=144 49
and I am now getting 3.5+ hrs battery life from both batteries.
Hope this might be useful as a first line strategy, before having to contact Apple, to see if it is indeed the battery which is at fault.
Bullshit this is not. Lithium Ion batteries (like the ones used in the iBook, as well as most any other laptop made recently) have a half-life of about 300-500 charge cycles.
If you are not charging your laptop every day, then these cycles will last you years. However, if (like me) you end up seeing several charges a day, you can easily kill a battery in a matter of months.
I've never used the IBM 600 series laptops. Any chance those aren't even Lithium Ion batteries?
This is how inventory works in retail-service shops.
/not./ If sales and service are pulling from the same pool of stuff, things will get hosed quickly. Some might say, "Why not talk to the service manager, too?" Well, that's great, if they can say, "We'll need X units from App--oh, shit, yeah, our ordering process is completely different, sales goes through a distributor and we don't, and we can't stock exchange parts. Never mind."
/streamlined for service./
/streamlined for sales./
/Slashdot./ ;-)
The regular Slashdot "I know more than you, here's how it should be" people will chime in, but I don't give a shit. I've been doing this for years.
If my ordering guy orders twenty PowerBook G4 batteries to put on the shelf, I can't just take one and stick it in someone's machine and call it a day when I need to replace a battery.
Doing so adds extra fucked-upedness to my ordering guy's inventory system, and DOES NOT integrate with Apple's Global Service Exchange system for tracking and completing repairs. It's not meant to.
Apple has its own DIRECT channels--that's right, kiddies, most of the stuff you see in the store comes not from the manufacturer directly, but a wholesaler like Ingram Micro--to get service parts to service providers.
By using the in-place service system and channels, the customer gets:
1. Service that's integrated tightly with Apple.
2. The ability to track their own repair on Apple.com.
3. To avoid middle men like Ingram Micro. They suck. Hard.
Doing it the "give me one off of the shelf, you stupid lackey" way gets you:
1. Nowhere.
2. Absolutely no record of your computer ever having been repaired by a service provider; your machine won't have any history with Apple. This is a BAD THING, because if you start to have stranger issues down the road, and tell Apple you had X problem before, and they don't have a case or dispatch number to look up, you're "S.O.L.", as they say.
3. Charged for a battery, 'cause the service provider can't send a battery to Apple for no reason. (Think about it: You get a battery off of the shelf, and they send the defective/failed battery back to Apple. Apple didn't send one out, but they just got one back for some unknown and inappropriate reason. Apple to service provider: "WTF?")
Also, here's something else to consider which might not be apparent unless you've worked in retail-service situations before:
You order your stuff for the showfloor, FOR the showfloor. You order your demo units FOR the demo counters. You order service stuff--you get the point. You can always say, "I ordered twenty iBook power adapters for the shelf," and know that's how many you're going to have until people start buying them. You know how many you have to order, because a smart ordering guy will conference with the sales manager (and staff, depending on the size of the operation) and find out he needs to order another dozen because demand is trickling off as of the past month.
Service is a different beast. Sometimes, it has patterns similar to sales, most times it does
No, not all places go through Ingram. Some go through Apple directly. Not all. Even the ones who do face the rest of the other problems.
Efficient customer service requires an efficient, right-method-for-the-job, organized back-end.
I need service parts, I go through service channels
I need to sell someone something, I go through sales channels
I need to get flamed, I post to
Anyway, those are my dual shiny, copper discs. Flame on.
-/-
Mikey-San
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Don't have time to register, hence the anonymous thing...
s .
I work for a school district as the Apple Service technician, and I've seen a sudden upsurge of batteries needing to be replaced of late... I've noticed a few things:
1) Our batch of iBook (dual USB) batteries seem to be slowly giving up the ghost after being in service for about 14 months - for example, my own personal machine from this batch will work fine till about 50% (with brightness all the way up) or 30% (with brightness down to 1 bar) before it suddenly drops into sleep mode - no warning whatsoever. Other problems seen include a battery that will only charge while computer is shut down or in slee and one battery that registered 100% charge but would completely die after 10 minutes of use.
2) Our newer iBook (16VRAM) machines are doing similar things but much quicker. These machines have only been in service since September!
3) Except my own personal machine (which is 10.2.4), all these iBooks are running under 10.1.5.
Finally, battery charge can be very subjective and time consuming to trace down... I saw a link to a little app, X-Charge, which simply graphs your battery charge - very handy for charting your battery life. Link is http://www.pol-online.net/index.php?page=freeware
Anyway, that's my 2 cents, hopefully it helps a bit.
Jeff
For the record, I'm getting less than 5 min of life on my battery (which I now use only because it still works for sleep). Now that I think about it, it has been progressing this way since after upgrading to 10.2.4.
Any hope for a software fix? My trusty Wallstreet never had this problem.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
it will turn out that you need a new logic board
;).
The motherboard - No! Really, no it's not!
As mentioned I'm not a hardware engineer - but I am a systems engineer - and (or so I like to think) not a complete muppet.
If your battery starts acting up, but has been otherwise fine for over a year and half, it's not going to have been your motherboard. Really.
If you installed FIRMWARE on your motherboard then broke the firmware in such a way that you couldn't then flash it and that firmware then caused some interference with the recharding (all of which being massively unlikely and very definately not in my case, or I suspect anyones) - then yes, you would need to do that, but my firmware flashes just fine so no it's not that.
I think you may be getting confused between on board batteries (which hold things such things as the system date and time, and - once a upon an OS long long a go - the background pattern on your desktop). I've certainly heard of unscrupulous sales weasles telling people their computers (e.g. iMac's) have 'expired' and they need to get new ones when this happens, but in reality even this can be replaced (for the cost of a new battery, which costs all of around $5 from your local PC hardware store).
oh wait, two years old and you're f'd
In fairness you can buy Apple Care anytime, if you buy a standard minimal extention at purchase time your covered for three years.
I'd *always* recommend this for any iBook or PowerBook (it's not like one of those horrible rubbishy in store insurance rip offs), it may *seem* like a lot but Apple are VERY good at replacing stuff if covered by Apple Care, even when you've done something stupid to abuse your computer. Not much point in it if you have a iMac or Desktop though (unless you have pre-teenage children or are amazingly clumsy
Doesn't bother me much, I've now have my PowerBook G4 in a rackmountable Cisco 2500 chassis while I mull over whether to go for a new 12" PB or a 17" PB with DVD burner...Hmmmm......
(Interesting: I've been informed by our local rep they have loads of trouble with the 15" case design - and I can't think that he'd have any reason to lie as he know I'd probably just opt for the smaller 12" instead. The 12" and 17" design certainly seems a lot more sturdy, the 12" in it's iBook like case certainly more so, though I think the screen is a little cramped - think I'll wait till they increase the resolution on it).
Dumbass. As this guy points out, 10.2.4 fixed a VERY critical bug for many of us, which caused kernel panics fairly often upon logout. I don't know about you, but I like software upgrades that make my machine more usable. Thankfully I wasn't affected by the battery issue, but for anyone who was affected by both, your snotty 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' attitude certainly isn't the solution either.
One of the biggest disappointments for me when I went from a Firewire G3 PowerBook (don't remember all the code names) to an 867MHz G4 TiBook this past June was the dismal, by comparison, battery life.
3 0217044725215&query=battery) from Max OS X Hints, which some people think is a bad idea and others good. My result was about a 15 minute increase in the listed charge time, but I'm not sure if it actually added real world minutes. I do have two G4 batteries and both last about the same amount: 1-1/2 to two hours, which is really not long enough to be all that useful.
My G3 PB could easily get four+ hours of battery life when using apps and at least 3-1/2 when doing something really processor intensive like modifying PhotoShop files or watching a DVD (the latter seems to be the real killer). With the ability to put dual batteries in the bays (I loved those bays and miss them dearly!) I frequently worked all day (8 full hours) on battery life when not near an outlet. And, I never replaced either of my two batteries in the three years I used the G3.
My TiBook on the other hand gets MAYBE two hours of battery life, and that's on a good day. I've seen lots of stuff online about how to "extend" the life of a TiBook battery and recently tried this (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200
My mother's iBook 2001 500, 10.2.3 -> 10.2.4, what appears to be a problem, the problem persists but seems lessened after resetting PMU.
I think I'll perform a clean installation and combo upgrade on the iBook tomorrow. :-[
For those who posted above "you're totally wrong" or talked about battery cycles or whatever, this is an actual issue.
I have three PowerBooks (TiBook, Pismo, Wallstreet). The batteries of the three vary and at least one is, in fact, very new. After upgrading each to 10.2.4, I saw the exact same behavior, which was previously present in none of them.
- The reported battery life is about half what it was before the update was installed.
- If you work through the low power warnings, you'll be rewarded with a fair amount of life in them as the power meter reads 0%.
- At some point, the book will just sleep with no warning. No, this point isn't quite where you would have expected timewise -- it's not just the reporting of the available power that's at fault.
I've had a stack of powerbooks going back to the Powerbook 100. I still have a 520c -- if you want to talk about battery cell lifetime issues, that's the one to start with.
This is totally new behavior for each of the affected systems. The recent system update makes it a culprit, although it's very possibly something else.
I got a 15" PowerBook G4 a couple of months ago, with 10.2.3, and it had battery problems from the beginning. It would not charge above 96%, and the battery meter would report that it was calculating the time until it would be fully charged. I usually have the computer plugged in, so it went for weeks like that.
I started trying different things: draining the battery to near 0, resetting the PMU, booting into OS9, and charging with the machine powered off. I also upgraded to 10.2.4 around this time. It's maximum charge started to drop. First in the 60s range, then 30s, and 20s. When I finally drained the battery completely, it would not go above 0%.
I called Apple and had a replacement battery sent, which seemed to work fine at first. After a few days, the charge was at 97% and had been plugged in all that time. Before I called up Apple again (this time fearing the computer itself was defective), I decided to look it up in their online help database, and came across this, which says that in OS X, the battery is kept charged between 95 and 100%, and charges back up to 100% after going below 95%. This is for various PowerBook and iBook models running Mac OS X 10.0 and later.
I don't trust this very much, since I have never noticed this type of behavior on other laptops. It seems to work fine now though. If I power off, it charges back up to 100%, otherwise it seems to stay around 97%.
I had the exact same thing happen with my clamshell (firewire) iBook. However, if the energy saver kicked in, it wouldn't wake up unless I plugged it in.
I tried something I saw in the Apple Support discussions that seems to have worked. I got a VST charger and recharged the battery fully--and everything seems to work fine now. It seems as if the iBook wasn't recognizing the battery and the charger reset it or something.
I found the charger on eBay for $5! Here's the Dutch auction:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=25437&item=3405556190&rd=1
thank you for sharing this information. i could not otherwise find an indication the hardware-scope of this problem (some pmu issues in the past have been hardware-model-specific) since it's easy to assume most everyone running os_x is running 21st c. devices.
my story: running 10.2.3, my (4 year old) wallstreet battery went from ~2 hours of life per charge to dead one day a few weeks ago. i just bought a new battery, but now i'm afraid to use it until 10.3...would that there be a 10.2.5!