10 ms·

I've noticed that on newer (past few years) MacBook Pros, if their battery runs down too far they refuse to start up, even when plugged into the charger. The ba

by wrs 7y ago

I've noticed that on newer (past few years) MacBook Pros, if their battery runs down too far they refuse to start up, even when plugged into the charger. The battery has to charge for 10-15 minutes with the "dead battery" icon on the screen. It's exactly the same behavior as iPhone/iPad. In past MacBook models, the battery could be dead--or even completely removed--and the charger would power the laptop fine. Anyone know why this extremely irritating change had to be made?

vbezhenar 7y ago
My guess is they want to be able to perform clean shutdown if charger is removed.
ratww 7y ago
I've been explained that this is because those computers might need more power than the AC Charger is able to provide, so the battery is also used as a "backup" for burst loads. This [1] seems to confirm it. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20081225111200/http://support.apple.com:80/kb/HT2332 https://web.archive.org/web/20081225111200/http://support.ap...
- konschubert 7y ago
  That would mean that it would not charge while being used. That’s not the case I assume.
  - zeusk 7y ago
    No, that only means it can't be charged will on burst load (turbo boost). Intel's chips can consume > 200% of their TDP during all-core turbo.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    the case where the laptop draws more power than the AC adapter can provide is probably some sort of brief turbo state for the cpu and/or gpu. it can't maintain this for long without overheating.
  - ben-schaaf 7y ago
    From what I've seen, none of the high end Mac book pros have a good enough charger to provide enough power for a mixed CPU/GPU workload. And with the switch to USB-C and it's 100W power limit they can't even fix it now.
- knodi123 7y ago
  ha, well I've noticed my battery discharges if I play Civ 6, even when plugged in. so that confirms it too.
  - aaron_m04 7y ago
    Same here. When I started working from home, I set up an external monitor with an HDMI-to-USB-C adapter. Whenever it's plugged in, my battery goes down about 4% per hour with the AC adapter plugged in.
    - kosievdmerwe 7y ago
      Are you sending your power via a USB C adapter too? If you use one of these[1] then your laptop will charge more slowly than if you just plugged in the power directly. [1] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MUF82AM/A/usb-c-digital-av-multiport-adapter https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MUF82AM/A/usb-c-digital-a...
      - wingworks 7y ago
        I've only ever seen my laptop's battery discharge while plugged in via one of those USB-C hubs which allow PD "pass-through". But have yet to find one that passes all the power through.
        TorKlingberg 7y ago
        The adapter claims some of the power for itself and downstream USB devices. I think it has to reserve power statically, so it's always claiming 5W or so.
      - aaron_m04 7y ago
        My charger is an Apple product; it was the lowest-price charger they had available ($73 after tax). Two components: * charging block * male USB A to male USB C cable EDIT: I just clicked your link; no I'm not using that. The cable is plugged into the charging block on one end and the laptop on the other end.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  That reminds me of the original PowerBook Duo, which couldn’t run plugged in if the battery was missing.
  - varjag 7y ago
    I think this was a "feature" among all pre-Jobs Powerbooks.
    - blihp 7y ago
      Not all... I remember my 540c running without a battery.
      - geerlingguy 7y ago
        My 180c would run without its battery, as well as my 3400c. I believe the 190 too.
        varjag 7y ago
        Interesting. My 180 would not run without the battery.
    - kalleboo 7y ago
      Naw, I have a PowerBook 145B and 540c, both have batteries that are long-dead and removed and they run fine.
      - FabHK 7y ago
        The PowerBook 145b was my first Mac. Wonderful little machine. 4 MB RAM, 80 MB hard disk. I ran a web browser on it, MacWeb, and could surf the web as it was back then perfectly fine. Not today, I suspect.
- falcolas 7y ago
  If you look at how the charging amperage is in current chargers, as compared to those of a few years ago, it's pretty easy to tell that this is the case. Sure, some of it is due to improved efficiency of the components, but when combined with power drain while on a charger under high loads, it's fairly obvious.
- TrinaryWorksToo 7y ago
  The apple computer shows an icon when this is happening. It shows a black battery icon instead of the normal white outlined in back icon.
- philwelch 7y ago
  This probably goes hand in hand with the unremovable batteries. Back when they had removable batteries you could run it on AC with no battery installed and it would work fine.
  - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    No, thats purely to prevent repair. Its perfectly possible to have a removable battery and to just not boot when one is not inserted. Thats how phones used to work ~2013
    - philwelch 7y ago
      I’m not saying one is a requirement for the other, just that you don’t have to worry about the battery-removed state when it doesn’t exist. From the tear downs I’ve seen, it seems like the primary motivation for the non-removable battery is so they can cram it into every spare piece of space.
      - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
        I guess there are also multiple states of removable. 2012 macbooks had the battery in multiple packs in odd spaces like the new ones but they had a screw in bracket holding them in place which made it trivial to remove and put a new one in. The new ones have it glued down so heavily that the battery replacement process is "Take the screen off, put it on a new bottom case, throw out the old bottom half"
    - closeparen 7y ago
      A removable battery requires its own protective shell, which costs weight and thickness. When it's not user serviceable, it can just be a bag of acid resting on the main board, piggybacking on the device's own case for the required protection.
      - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
        The protective shell can be only the bottom side which replaces the bottom of the case. The internal laptop batteries are quite safe to handle if you don't use anything sharp on them. We let people handle phone batteries for ages and they weren't nearly as protected as those old laptop battery tubes.
- incognito_limey 7y ago
  Thanks for the info. I recently discovered this by running folding at home on my 16inch pro overnight, and waking up to my battery being at 5%. I suspect running the CPU full bore over night was too much for the charger to keep up with.
  - gullyfur 7y ago
    This makes sense. My USB C portable charger also cannot keep up with charging my laptop while I have the screen on full brightness + normal activities.
  - joncrane 7y ago
    Isn't this bad design? Surely if plugged in, you should be able to use everything on your laptop at 100% utilization (screen, CPU, disks, fans, etc) without having to worry about it. Otherwise, what's the point of having those things?
    - Shish2k 7y ago
      > Isn't this bad design? It’s a trade-off - they COULD build a laptop which can run everything at 100% 24/7 indefinitely, but it’d be heavier and more expensive, with zero benefits to their target audience of "people who only run at 100% for a few hours per day"
      - q92z8oeif 7y ago
        Everything that does not expose to the user what is happening, and ideally give the user control over what can happen and when, is as bad design as clippy was on Microsoft Word. Only too-clever-for-their-own-good-designers like automagic things. No user does.
      - 411111111111111 7y ago
        No, He is talking about the laptop not getting enough power while plugged in. If there was any added weight it would be with the charger, not the laptop so... Incredibly unlikely. It's way more likely that Apple just didn't design the connector to be able to deliver that amount of power. So they'd have to add a second one or switch connectors/design a new one. Both would be suboptimal as well.
- aquadrop 7y ago
  Isn't better way just limit possible amount of power needed(downclock CPU or something) instead of just refusing to give user anything?
  - krageon 7y ago
    Why? Keeping the behaviour as it is makes you buy more, which is the objective of a company that shamelessly marks up hardware by arbitrary amounts.
    - nizmow 7y ago
      Strangely enough, they did exactly as suggested when batteries started wearing out on iPhones (unable to reliably provide the voltage at full drain for peak performance) and you're the exact kind of person who jumped on them for planned obsolescence.
      - danielscrubs 7y ago
        Bingo
leejoramo 7y ago
I haven’t noticed this on my 2017 MacBook Pro. However, waiting for a initial charge has always been true if you use a smaller power adapter than the one that shipped with your MacBook. For example you use a MacBook Air 40w charger with your Pro
KarlKemp 7y ago
That's been the default behaviour for as long as I can remember. I'm fairly certain of my 2008 Macbook Air doing this. Less so (but still better than even odds) for my 17" PowerBook. You'd want some minimum charge to, at least, safely start up and immediately shut down again. Maybe throw in a little extra to be on the safe side. The higher-performance MacBooks also operate within a an extreme width of power requirements, from about 5W to close to 100W. I'm not sure if they can throttle based on battery status. But if not, you'd need a buffer to accommodate load spikes. I guess you could criticise them for not trusting you to keep it plugged in. But any UI to clearly communicate that unplugging now might cause data loss is bound to be a horrible sludge. It could also easily fail if you happen to trip over the cable or the power went off.
- flyingswift 7y ago
  I have one of these for work and it's the first Macbook I have used I have never experienced this behavior on any other laptop I have ever used. When I ran into this for the first time, I was completely appalled, it is a horrible user experience
- nicoburns 7y ago
  They definitely throttle based on battery status, mine gets noticably slower (laggy UI, etc) when it dips below 5%, and picks up immediately if I plug it in.
copperx 7y ago
This is the most irritating thing about the iPhone. Phone shuts down in the middle of an important call? Sorry, you'll have to wait 15 minutes before you can call again. This doesn't happen in my Pixel phones. Plug it it, turn it on. I would be irritated to no end if this happened to my laptop.
- gjs278 7y ago
  manage your battery better. do you routinely run out of gas driving as well?
- valuearb 7y ago
  Get a better charger
- supernova87a 7y ago
  Well here's the challenging thing -- your phone may be way overdue for a battery replacement, or you've run your phone like this well over the average user -- so it's been doing this to save you from having no phone at all. But you don't credit Apple with the 2nd part, and blame it for the 1st part. It's tough to make something for customers, huh? Not making a personal jab at you -- just illustrating the difficultly that everyone who makes a product faces when managing user expectations.
  - vaylian 7y ago
    I'm not an iPhone user, so maybe I am wrong about this. But I would expect my phone to give me a warning when it is about 3 minutes before shutdown. This way I still have a reasonable amount of time to bring whatever I am doing at the moment into a graceful stop.
    - benjymo 7y ago
      iOs warns if the battery is at 20% and at 10% with a button to enable low power mode.
  - JamesMcMinn 7y ago
rubatuga 7y ago
My MacBook Pro 2015 showed this behaviour, however my MacBook Air 2019 starts up immediately with the stock charger, however it takes a few minutes with a lower 15W adapter.
ken 7y ago
My initial guess was MagSafe, since that’s where I first saw it. With a breakaway cable, it’s less likely you’ll be able to keep a solid power connection. I’m a little bummed to learn that this apparently isn’t the (only) reason.
fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
I’ve had this experience on every MacBook Pro I’ve ever owned (starting with an ‘08 MacBook). On the older models, they’d run if you plugged them in and completely removed the battery, but it the battery was in, they wouldn’t boot until the battery had a certain minimal charge.
yellow_postit 7y ago
I run into a (to me) more annoying behavior on a 13” MacBoon Pro - the machine will start and let me login with < 3% displayed and then shut off within a few moments after login, presumably because startup actions pegged the battery and drained it back to a shutoff state. Would much prefer the machine not start until I can login and work.
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  I don't think it's actually possible to do that. You would have to be able to know 100% of the side effects of every possible configuration of software and attached(USB) peripherals and their potential full future power draw _before_ your machine starts anything.
whywhywhywhy 7y ago
Noticed this change straight away with my switch to the usb-c generation. Really hate it, makes my laptop feel more like a “device” if you know what i means and makes it feel like the charger is insufficient for its job. Almost 20 years of using PowerBooks and even completely dead you could just plug them in and power worked straight away, now you have to do the 10 minute power button dance and the thing doesn’t even have a startup chime to tell you it’s worked.
mrfusion 7y ago
Mine started freezing lately if I run graphic intensive programs and hangs on a gray screen when trying to restart. I wonder if the battery could be the issue.

by wrs 7y ago

vbezhenar 7y ago

My guess is they want to be able to perform clean shutdown if charger is removed.

ratww 7y ago

I've been explained that this is because those computers might need more power than the AC Charger is able to provide, so the battery is also used as a "backup" for burst loads. This [1] seems to confirm it. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20081225111200/http://support.apple.com:80/kb/HT2332 https://web.archive.org/web/20081225111200/http://support.ap...

konschubert 7y ago
That would mean that it would not charge while being used. That’s not the case I assume.
- zeusk 7y ago
  No, that only means it can't be charged will on burst load (turbo boost). Intel's chips can consume > 200% of their TDP during all-core turbo.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  the case where the laptop draws more power than the AC adapter can provide is probably some sort of brief turbo state for the cpu and/or gpu. it can't maintain this for long without overheating.
- ben-schaaf 7y ago
  From what I've seen, none of the high end Mac book pros have a good enough charger to provide enough power for a mixed CPU/GPU workload. And with the switch to USB-C and it's 100W power limit they can't even fix it now.
knodi123 7y ago
ha, well I've noticed my battery discharges if I play Civ 6, even when plugged in. so that confirms it too.
- aaron_m04 7y ago
  Same here. When I started working from home, I set up an external monitor with an HDMI-to-USB-C adapter. Whenever it's plugged in, my battery goes down about 4% per hour with the AC adapter plugged in.
  - kosievdmerwe 7y ago
    Are you sending your power via a USB C adapter too? If you use one of these[1] then your laptop will charge more slowly than if you just plugged in the power directly. [1] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MUF82AM/A/usb-c-digital-av-multiport-adapter https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MUF82AM/A/usb-c-digital-a...
    - wingworks 7y ago
      I've only ever seen my laptop's battery discharge while plugged in via one of those USB-C hubs which allow PD "pass-through". But have yet to find one that passes all the power through.
      - TorKlingberg 7y ago
        The adapter claims some of the power for itself and downstream USB devices. I think it has to reserve power statically, so it's always claiming 5W or so.
    - aaron_m04 7y ago
      My charger is an Apple product; it was the lowest-price charger they had available ($73 after tax). Two components: * charging block * male USB A to male USB C cable EDIT: I just clicked your link; no I'm not using that. The cable is plugged into the charging block on one end and the laptop on the other end.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
That reminds me of the original PowerBook Duo, which couldn’t run plugged in if the battery was missing.
- varjag 7y ago
  I think this was a "feature" among all pre-Jobs Powerbooks.
  - blihp 7y ago
    Not all... I remember my 540c running without a battery.
    - geerlingguy 7y ago
      My 180c would run without its battery, as well as my 3400c. I believe the 190 too.
      - varjag 7y ago
        Interesting. My 180 would not run without the battery.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    Naw, I have a PowerBook 145B and 540c, both have batteries that are long-dead and removed and they run fine.
    - FabHK 7y ago
      The PowerBook 145b was my first Mac. Wonderful little machine. 4 MB RAM, 80 MB hard disk. I ran a web browser on it, MacWeb, and could surf the web as it was back then perfectly fine. Not today, I suspect.
falcolas 7y ago
If you look at how the charging amperage is in current chargers, as compared to those of a few years ago, it's pretty easy to tell that this is the case. Sure, some of it is due to improved efficiency of the components, but when combined with power drain while on a charger under high loads, it's fairly obvious.
TrinaryWorksToo 7y ago
The apple computer shows an icon when this is happening. It shows a black battery icon instead of the normal white outlined in back icon.
philwelch 7y ago
This probably goes hand in hand with the unremovable batteries. Back when they had removable batteries you could run it on AC with no battery installed and it would work fine.
- Polylactic_acid 7y ago
  No, thats purely to prevent repair. Its perfectly possible to have a removable battery and to just not boot when one is not inserted. Thats how phones used to work ~2013
  - philwelch 7y ago
    I’m not saying one is a requirement for the other, just that you don’t have to worry about the battery-removed state when it doesn’t exist. From the tear downs I’ve seen, it seems like the primary motivation for the non-removable battery is so they can cram it into every spare piece of space.
    - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
      I guess there are also multiple states of removable. 2012 macbooks had the battery in multiple packs in odd spaces like the new ones but they had a screw in bracket holding them in place which made it trivial to remove and put a new one in. The new ones have it glued down so heavily that the battery replacement process is "Take the screen off, put it on a new bottom case, throw out the old bottom half"
  - closeparen 7y ago
    A removable battery requires its own protective shell, which costs weight and thickness. When it's not user serviceable, it can just be a bag of acid resting on the main board, piggybacking on the device's own case for the required protection.
    - Polylactic_acid 7y ago
      The protective shell can be only the bottom side which replaces the bottom of the case. The internal laptop batteries are quite safe to handle if you don't use anything sharp on them. We let people handle phone batteries for ages and they weren't nearly as protected as those old laptop battery tubes.
incognito_limey 7y ago
Thanks for the info. I recently discovered this by running folding at home on my 16inch pro overnight, and waking up to my battery being at 5%. I suspect running the CPU full bore over night was too much for the charger to keep up with.
- gullyfur 7y ago
  This makes sense. My USB C portable charger also cannot keep up with charging my laptop while I have the screen on full brightness + normal activities.
- joncrane 7y ago
  Isn't this bad design? Surely if plugged in, you should be able to use everything on your laptop at 100% utilization (screen, CPU, disks, fans, etc) without having to worry about it. Otherwise, what's the point of having those things?
  - Shish2k 7y ago
    > Isn't this bad design? It’s a trade-off - they COULD build a laptop which can run everything at 100% 24/7 indefinitely, but it’d be heavier and more expensive, with zero benefits to their target audience of "people who only run at 100% for a few hours per day"
    - q92z8oeif 7y ago
      Everything that does not expose to the user what is happening, and ideally give the user control over what can happen and when, is as bad design as clippy was on Microsoft Word. Only too-clever-for-their-own-good-designers like automagic things. No user does.
    - 411111111111111 7y ago
      No, He is talking about the laptop not getting enough power while plugged in. If there was any added weight it would be with the charger, not the laptop so... Incredibly unlikely. It's way more likely that Apple just didn't design the connector to be able to deliver that amount of power. So they'd have to add a second one or switch connectors/design a new one. Both would be suboptimal as well.
aquadrop 7y ago
Isn't better way just limit possible amount of power needed(downclock CPU or something) instead of just refusing to give user anything?
- krageon 7y ago
  Why? Keeping the behaviour as it is makes you buy more, which is the objective of a company that shamelessly marks up hardware by arbitrary amounts.
  - nizmow 7y ago
    Strangely enough, they did exactly as suggested when batteries started wearing out on iPhones (unable to reliably provide the voltage at full drain for peak performance) and you're the exact kind of person who jumped on them for planned obsolescence.
    - danielscrubs 7y ago
      Bingo

leejoramo 7y ago

I haven’t noticed this on my 2017 MacBook Pro. However, waiting for a initial charge has always been true if you use a smaller power adapter than the one that shipped with your MacBook. For example you use a MacBook Air 40w charger with your Pro

KarlKemp 7y ago

That's been the default behaviour for as long as I can remember. I'm fairly certain of my 2008 Macbook Air doing this. Less so (but still better than even odds) for my 17" PowerBook. You'd want some minimum charge to, at least, safely start up and immediately shut down again. Maybe throw in a little extra to be on the safe side. The higher-performance MacBooks also operate within a an extreme width of power requirements, from about 5W to close to 100W. I'm not sure if they can throttle based on battery status. But if not, you'd need a buffer to accommodate load spikes. I guess you could criticise them for not trusting you to keep it plugged in. But any UI to clearly communicate that unplugging now might cause data loss is bound to be a horrible sludge. It could also easily fail if you happen to trip over the cable or the power went off.

flyingswift 7y ago
I have one of these for work and it's the first Macbook I have used I have never experienced this behavior on any other laptop I have ever used. When I ran into this for the first time, I was completely appalled, it is a horrible user experience
nicoburns 7y ago
They definitely throttle based on battery status, mine gets noticably slower (laggy UI, etc) when it dips below 5%, and picks up immediately if I plug it in.

copperx 7y ago

This is the most irritating thing about the iPhone. Phone shuts down in the middle of an important call? Sorry, you'll have to wait 15 minutes before you can call again. This doesn't happen in my Pixel phones. Plug it it, turn it on. I would be irritated to no end if this happened to my laptop.

gjs278 7y ago
manage your battery better. do you routinely run out of gas driving as well?
valuearb 7y ago
Get a better charger
supernova87a 7y ago
Well here's the challenging thing -- your phone may be way overdue for a battery replacement, or you've run your phone like this well over the average user -- so it's been doing this to save you from having no phone at all. But you don't credit Apple with the 2nd part, and blame it for the 1st part. It's tough to make something for customers, huh? Not making a personal jab at you -- just illustrating the difficultly that everyone who makes a product faces when managing user expectations.
- vaylian 7y ago
  I'm not an iPhone user, so maybe I am wrong about this. But I would expect my phone to give me a warning when it is about 3 minutes before shutdown. This way I still have a reasonable amount of time to bring whatever I am doing at the moment into a graceful stop.
  - benjymo 7y ago
    iOs warns if the battery is at 20% and at 10% with a button to enable low power mode.
- JamesMcMinn 7y ago

rubatuga 7y ago

My MacBook Pro 2015 showed this behaviour, however my MacBook Air 2019 starts up immediately with the stock charger, however it takes a few minutes with a lower 15W adapter.

ken 7y ago

My initial guess was MagSafe, since that’s where I first saw it. With a breakaway cable, it’s less likely you’ll be able to keep a solid power connection. I’m a little bummed to learn that this apparently isn’t the (only) reason.

fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago

I’ve had this experience on every MacBook Pro I’ve ever owned (starting with an ‘08 MacBook). On the older models, they’d run if you plugged them in and completely removed the battery, but it the battery was in, they wouldn’t boot until the battery had a certain minimal charge.

yellow_postit 7y ago

I run into a (to me) more annoying behavior on a 13” MacBoon Pro - the machine will start and let me login with < 3% displayed and then shut off within a few moments after login, presumably because startup actions pegged the battery and drained it back to a shutoff state. Would much prefer the machine not start until I can login and work.

sieabahlpark 7y ago
I don't think it's actually possible to do that. You would have to be able to know 100% of the side effects of every possible configuration of software and attached(USB) peripherals and their potential full future power draw _before_ your machine starts anything.

whywhywhywhy 7y ago

Noticed this change straight away with my switch to the usb-c generation. Really hate it, makes my laptop feel more like a “device” if you know what i means and makes it feel like the charger is insufficient for its job. Almost 20 years of using PowerBooks and even completely dead you could just plug them in and power worked straight away, now you have to do the 10 minute power button dance and the thing doesn’t even have a startup chime to tell you it’s worked.

mrfusion 7y ago

Mine started freezing lately if I run graphic intensive programs and hangs on a gray screen when trying to restart. I wonder if the battery could be the issue.