6 ms·

Mavericks – power use / service battery

74 points by gabea 13y ago

kbar13 13y ago
inb4 the thread gets nuked by apple :(
- kuyan 13y ago
  Here's a snapshot, just in case: http://archive.is/B9g9D http://archive.is/B9g9D
newman314 13y ago
Wasn't Mavericks supposed to improve battery life?
- wahnfrieden 13y ago
  It's useful to distinguish between bugs and features/refinements. This is a bug.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
helpfulElf 13y ago
This, and TextMate 1 plugin incompatibility, is why I have deferred my upgrade.
- bound008 13y ago
  Can't you fix that with RVM?
  - helpfulElf 13y ago
    How?
- linc01n 13y ago
  There was an email sent by Textmate talking about plugin issue. If you wish to use TextMate 1.x on OS X 10.9 then to fix bundle items that do not work with ruby 2.0 you will need to open the bundle >editor and change the first line of the command (called shebang) to the following: #!/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby
yalogin 13y ago
Mavericks was all about performance I thought. Could be a bug they will fix in an update.
- zdw 13y ago
  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-benchmarks http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/18/#battery-b...
w1ntermute 13y ago
For when the censorship kicks in: https://mega.co.nz/#!a8RwCB7D!dOj9HAyof01vALrVKnZ9wQlrhdscc_8DNSLKgDRxqyw https://mega.co.nz/#!a8RwCB7D!dOj9HAyof01vALrVKnZ9wQlrhdscc_...
beedogs 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
rwhitman 13y ago
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
thejosh 13y ago
My (new) MBA 2013 has been perfect with Mavericks, haven't noticed any battery drain like this.
- stephen_g 13y ago
  It added about half an hour to my mid-2011 15 inch MBP. I'm pretty happy with that.
rangibaby 13y ago
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.
neya 13y ago
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.
- zippergz 13y ago
  Do you have a cite for the Photoshop "Save As" problem? I've seen this mentioned multiple times as a reason to not upgrade, but I've never been able to find a first-hand report of it actually happening other than in early betas. I don't think this is actually still a problem, but if it is, I would like to know about it.
  - neya 13y ago
    We tried it in three of our office computers and about two of them had this problem so we had to revert back to Lion. Also a quick googling: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1596253 http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1596253 http://blogs.adobe.com/vikrant/2013/10/creative-cloud-creative-suite-6-and-mavericks-10-9/ http://blogs.adobe.com/vikrant/2013/10/creative-cloud-creati... (^Check the comments)
- Glyptodon 13y ago
  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.)
Steko 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Sorry, but Apple is having an easy job there, they have a really small amount of hardware versions compared to microsoft.
IBM 13y ago
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.
- rimantas 13y ago
  Maverics even shows warning after installation that "system is being optimized" and this process can impact performance and battery life.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
akamaka 13y ago
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-macbooks-battery-life-2012-08 http://www.webpronews.com/mountain-lion-may-be-hurting-your-... 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 13y ago
  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. [...]"
od2m 13y ago
I have 5 macs, they're all working great.
- batuhanicoz 13y ago
  Why would you need 5 Macs? I'm really curious.
  - m_eiman 13y ago
    I've got these ones: - MacBook Pro - iMac at work running OSX - iMac at work running Win7 - iMac at home - Mac Mini at home as a server - Mac Mini at work as a server Soon we'll have another laptop...
    - smallhands 13y ago
      that six by my count
  - od2m 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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 :)
Timothee 13y ago
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.
juskrey 13y ago
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"?
benatkin 13y ago
TL;DR many laypeople don't understand cause and effect, and this drives up the cost for everyone.
IbJacked 13y ago
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
mukundmr 13y ago
I am using Mavericks on my MacBook Pro 15-inch, Early 2011 without any problems.
vayarajesh 13y ago
Eeeks!.. i just updated to Mavericks last night.. i hope i do not face the same issue.
benjamta 13y ago
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...
mproud 13y ago
Most of these people have 3 year old machines. Gee, I wonder why the batteries need service…

74 points by gabea 13y ago

kbar13 13y ago

inb4 the thread gets nuked by apple :(

kuyan 13y ago
Here's a snapshot, just in case: http://archive.is/B9g9D http://archive.is/B9g9D

newman314 13y ago

Wasn't Mavericks supposed to improve battery life?

wahnfrieden 13y ago
It's useful to distinguish between bugs and features/refinements. This is a bug.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

helpfulElf 13y ago

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

bound008 13y ago
Can't you fix that with RVM?
- helpfulElf 13y ago
  How?
linc01n 13y ago
There was an email sent by Textmate talking about plugin issue. If you wish to use TextMate 1.x on OS X 10.9 then to fix bundle items that do not work with ruby 2.0 you will need to open the bundle >editor and change the first line of the command (called shebang) to the following: #!/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

yalogin 13y ago

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

zdw 13y ago
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-benchmarks http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/18/#battery-b...

w1ntermute 13y ago

For when the censorship kicks in: https://mega.co.nz/#!a8RwCB7D!dOj9HAyof01vALrVKnZ9wQlrhdscc_8DNSLKgDRxqyw https://mega.co.nz/#!a8RwCB7D!dOj9HAyof01vALrVKnZ9wQlrhdscc_...

beedogs 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

rwhitman 13y ago

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

thejosh 13y ago

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

stephen_g 13y ago
It added about half an hour to my mid-2011 15 inch MBP. I'm pretty happy with that.

rangibaby 13y ago

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.

neya 13y ago

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.

zippergz 13y ago
Do you have a cite for the Photoshop "Save As" problem? I've seen this mentioned multiple times as a reason to not upgrade, but I've never been able to find a first-hand report of it actually happening other than in early betas. I don't think this is actually still a problem, but if it is, I would like to know about it.
- neya 13y ago
  We tried it in three of our office computers and about two of them had this problem so we had to revert back to Lion. Also a quick googling: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1596253 http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1596253 http://blogs.adobe.com/vikrant/2013/10/creative-cloud-creative-suite-6-and-mavericks-10-9/ http://blogs.adobe.com/vikrant/2013/10/creative-cloud-creati... (^Check the comments)
Glyptodon 13y ago
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.)

Steko 13y ago

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 13y ago
Sorry, but Apple is having an easy job there, they have a really small amount of hardware versions compared to microsoft.

IBM 13y ago

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.

rimantas 13y ago
Maverics even shows warning after installation that "system is being optimized" and this process can impact performance and battery life.
gnaffle 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

akamaka 13y ago

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-macbooks-battery-life-2012-08 http://www.webpronews.com/mountain-lion-may-be-hurting-your-... 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 13y ago
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. [...]"

od2m 13y ago

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

batuhanicoz 13y ago
Why would you need 5 Macs? I'm really curious.
- m_eiman 13y ago
  I've got these ones: - MacBook Pro - iMac at work running OSX - iMac at work running Win7 - iMac at home - Mac Mini at home as a server - Mac Mini at work as a server Soon we'll have another laptop...
  - smallhands 13y ago
    that six by my count
- od2m 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 :)

Timothee 13y ago

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.

juskrey 13y ago

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"?

benatkin 13y ago

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

IbJacked 13y ago

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

mukundmr 13y ago

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

vayarajesh 13y ago

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

benjamta 13y ago

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...

mproud 13y ago

Most of these people have 3 year old machines. Gee, I wonder why the batteries need service…