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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.
I was talking with our computer techs at work about this situation and he told me that since my battery is a year old, that it's normal (for all laptops) that they need to be replaced. If the battery is around a year, I don't see how you can blame the 10.2.4 update.
I swapped my new laptop battery for an older one that was working a-okay. The old one, although reporting full charge, was run down to absolute flat in about an hour. I charged it again overnight and retried and after a few tries it runs flat now in under 30 mts. So i swapped back to my new battery which is lasting me a good 3 hrs or so. I was happy to blame the old battery (it was made in 2000) but it does seem odd that this behaviour should coincide with upgrading to osx10.2.4 - and so many others are also reporting this problem now.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
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)?
What model type and age is your powerbook or ibook (and how old is the battery, if different). What makes you think you are not just imaginging this?
Does the energy saver control panel time/% agree with the one in the menu bar?
When your battery is nearly empty, how many lights does the battery show when you press the button on it
How long a life (uninterupted by sleep or screen dims)are you observing when using the stock (not custom) power-saver setting. Is your airport on or off. do you have any accessories plugged in?
is it reproducible or intermittent. have you found a workaround?
Come on folks, if you read slash dot you can do a proper bug report
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
My PowerBook G4 battery won't go beyond '84%' charged now.
:/
:)
While this may well be an 10.2.4 issue, I'm thinking it's very more likely to be due to the age of the battery (I've had my origional G4 'Book for 2 years now and I've been overdue for a replacement for a while).
Now guessing randomly.........
Caution: Just blowing smoke out my ass...
It seems unlikley but it *may* be that 10.2.4 is reporting the charge of the battery more correctly than previous releases? Could it actually be highliting that your battery charge is not as high as it should be if it was a new battery?
Or is that bullshit?
(Don't ask me, I'm just a software monkey
After reading some posts, I was wondering if anyone sees the relationship between the date reset problem reported when people upgrade to this release (10.2.4) and the Power Manager, which when reset causes the date to be reset as well?
thoughts?
Cheers
I just got my PowerBook battery replaced, and this was the situation:
Charge to 100%
Unplug
At about 70%, the battery would instantaneously go to zero and sleep.
Rinse and repeat.
However, what the article *seems* to describe is batteries not charging fully, or batteries with reduced lifespan.
My new replacement battery has a lifespan of 4 hours and 20 minutes
My old spare battery has a lifespan of 3 hours and 40 minutes
The dead replaced battery had a lifespan of about 20 minutes before dropping to zero, even though it reported a full charge.
Is this what others are seeing? The 10.2.4 problem doesn't seem to sound like any of these. The new battery is fine, the spare battery just sounds old, and the dead battery sounds like it was broken.
GPL Deconstructed
These claims seem to crop up everytime Apple releases a new update to OS X. I remember reading the exact same claims when 10.2.3 was released, in the Apple support forums.
Lithium Ion batteries (the type used in the iBook/TiBook) simply don't last very long. Best estimates I've heard is 300-500 charge cycles. Depending on how often you charge your battery, its easy to go through this problem.
I had awful problems with my iBook battery, after only 5 months. In a matter of weeks, it went from 4 hours of battery life to under an hour. But when I did the math out, my estimated charge cycles in those 5 months was around 400.
Nothing to do with the OS update...just a battery at the end of its life. Good thing it was still under warrenty...after a few calls to Apple tech support I got a new battery.
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)
I'm typing this from my iBook dual USB (2001 500 MHz) on the original battery. I was about to buy a new battery until I saw this article because of recent rediculously short battery life I've been getting (30 mins or less) Well, I tried something after I saw this article and, lo and behold, I've been running on 0% battery life (incl the green LED's) for the past 30 minutes. I'd be curious to know how many of those who report very short battery life have tried going beyond the system warning... cause mine is still running.
okay. i'm seeing several comments about battery life and that liion batteries should be treated differently from nicad and nimh batteries.
i know in nicad days, it was best to let them run down and then charge them fully. from my experience with cell phones and nimh batteries, that's a relatively good idea there with them too, although their propensity to develop memory was weaker.
but, what's best with modern liion batteries? should i keep my laptop on the charger whenever possible? let it run down to xx% and then charge it? is there a difference in how i should treat them in my cell phone vs. my laptop?
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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%.