9 ms·

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"

by 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.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Are you using the smaller Macbook-vanilla charger or something? I game on my Macbook Pro + two monitors without discharge unless I accidentally use my girlfriend's OG Macbook charger instead of the Pro's charger that's twice the brick. And it can definitely handle Civ 6 (2017 and 2019 MBP).
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    I believe some of the MacBook Pros ship with chargers that cannot power them when running at full tilt. (Interestingly, I believe the original iPad Pro did as well.)
    - dalemyers 7y ago
      Yup. I've got last years Macbook Pro, fully specced, and when I run lots of compilations in Xcode the battery steadily drains. I ran an intense script overnight a month or two ago and when I got back in the morning my battery was down to just a few percent. Thankfully the script finished just after that so I got incredibly lucky that it didn't run out all the way and lose all the progress.
      - kartickv 7y ago
        Funnily, the base model is unlikely to have this problem, which makes it a better laptop (at least in this case) for cheaper. Your script won't stop and lose progress.
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      That was the case for my rMBP 2012. Though it was only when running a game and battery discharged very slowly, so was not really an issue, at least for me.
  - rpastuszak 7y ago
    Not sure about the parent, but my friend an I had exactly the same issue, both of us are on 16inch MBP 2020 (Civ 6 on Steam). Incredibly annoying once your laptop suddenly slows down and dies after 5h of gameplay. How is this even acceptable? Regardless whether it's a $400 or $3k laptop, I'd expect it to work when charging. I'm two apps (photoshop, lightroom) away from switching to Linux.
- serf 7y ago
  this kind of behavior would warrant a return from me. do you consider that to be a faulty behavior, or just par-for-the-course of heavy workloads on mobile platforms? i'd hate for that to be the new norm, I use the hell out of my mobile computers, I don't need them draining before I even unplug.
  - knodi123 7y ago
    oh, actually it was my fault. I have an air charger and a pro charger, and it turns out they're not interchangeable. The pro charger is, like, 30% bigger, and the laptop battery will not discharge while I'm using that one. My laptop is one of the older magsafe ones, so the people talking about USB-C might be a YMMV kind of thing.
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

by ratww 7y ago

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.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Are you using the smaller Macbook-vanilla charger or something? I game on my Macbook Pro + two monitors without discharge unless I accidentally use my girlfriend's OG Macbook charger instead of the Pro's charger that's twice the brick. And it can definitely handle Civ 6 (2017 and 2019 MBP).
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I believe some of the MacBook Pros ship with chargers that cannot power them when running at full tilt. (Interestingly, I believe the original iPad Pro did as well.)
  - dalemyers 7y ago
    Yup. I've got last years Macbook Pro, fully specced, and when I run lots of compilations in Xcode the battery steadily drains. I ran an intense script overnight a month or two ago and when I got back in the morning my battery was down to just a few percent. Thankfully the script finished just after that so I got incredibly lucky that it didn't run out all the way and lose all the progress.
    - kartickv 7y ago
      Funnily, the base model is unlikely to have this problem, which makes it a better laptop (at least in this case) for cheaper. Your script won't stop and lose progress.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    That was the case for my rMBP 2012. Though it was only when running a game and battery discharged very slowly, so was not really an issue, at least for me.
- rpastuszak 7y ago
  Not sure about the parent, but my friend an I had exactly the same issue, both of us are on 16inch MBP 2020 (Civ 6 on Steam). Incredibly annoying once your laptop suddenly slows down and dies after 5h of gameplay. How is this even acceptable? Regardless whether it's a $400 or $3k laptop, I'd expect it to work when charging. I'm two apps (photoshop, lightroom) away from switching to Linux.
serf 7y ago
this kind of behavior would warrant a return from me. do you consider that to be a faulty behavior, or just par-for-the-course of heavy workloads on mobile platforms? i'd hate for that to be the new norm, I use the hell out of my mobile computers, I don't need them draining before I even unplug.
- knodi123 7y ago
  oh, actually it was my fault. I have an air charger and a pro charger, and it turns out they're not interchangeable. The pro charger is, like, 30% bigger, and the laptop battery will not discharge while I'm using that one. My laptop is one of the older magsafe ones, so the people talking about USB-C might be a YMMV kind of thing.

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