9 ms·

That's nice to know. However, i'd rather buy a new battery after 5 years (if my laptop is still fit and the battery is dead), than having to complicate my life

That's nice to know. However, i'd rather buy a new battery after 5 years (if my laptop is still fit and the battery is dead), than having to complicate my life and think about when to unplug or charge my laptop multiple times each day for 5 years... My Macbook air from mid 2011 is currently at 100/6700*5629 = 84% battery health. (6700 = design capacity, gathered from "ioreg -l -n AppleSmartBattery -r".

bkanber 12y ago
Agreed. I do avoid leaving my laptop plugged in overnight, but I'm also not too careful about leaving it plugged in during the day. I'll often pop the charger out when I notice the battery at 100%, but I'm not going to lose sleep if I forget about it or operate slightly sub-optimally.
- tertius 12y ago
  I have a Lenovo Yoga Pro 2, it's got an app that manages this for me. I turn on "conservation mode" and it keeps the charge at 55%-60%. The only negative here (and it would be there with doing it yourself) is that if I run out without the charger I'm essentially at 1/2 capacity.
rexf 12y ago
I agree with you. Instead of optimizing for battery life by constantly checking & adjusting my charging, I'd rather live my life focusing on other things. What I do is super simple: plug it in whenever possible.
- hsitz 12y ago
  Same here. I have no reason to dispute the expert who says Lithium-ion batteries "don't love 100%". Fine, but they don't seem to dislike it too much, either. So far I haven't had any batteries that didn't perform well when they were mostly plugged in, occasionally discharged in mobile use. I see some similarities to, e.g., medical pronouncements that some particular food increases risk of cancer. It's easy to get alarmed, but there's a big difference between it increasing my likelihood of getting cancer by 0.05% and making cancer, say, (just to illustrate the point) 100 times more likely. The former I would likely ignore and the latter would probably make me give up the food instantly.
  - moopling 12y ago
    I get what you're trying to say, but there's an interesting point to be made here about absolute vs relative risk: imagine for instance your absolute chance of getting cancer was less than 0.0005%
- pareidolia 12y ago
  A ThinkPad takes care of everything https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/10659i9B544944A68527A9?v=mpbl-1 https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/10659...
JoshGlazebrook 12y ago
Is your machine even operational? My macbook air from 2011 (with Yosemite) is sluggish to the point of being unbearable to use and just collects dust.
- x0054 12y ago
  Switch to OSX 10.9, problem solved. My 2012 rMBP with top end specs is also sluggish on 10.10.3. Not sure what Apple is thinking. On the other hand I am still using my 2003 Panasonic CF 73. It's not quick, but for the limited tasks of automating my DSLR it works perfect.
- macns 12y ago
  my macbook 2008 running os x 10.7.5, 128gb ssd and 4gb ram is still fast enough and gets the job done. It's even faster than the latest middle to low end windows PC's (dual boot with windows 7)
- rndn 12y ago
  Define unbearable. Up until 10.10.2 the OS X window server was a bit sluggish. Now it's tolerable for my purposes.
- lh7777 12y ago
  My 2011 11" Air (i7) runs 10.10 just fine. I haven't noticed any slowdown over the past 4 years, although I do disable all the unnecessary transparency and animations Apple keeps adding for seemingly no reason. By the way, my battery health is also around 85% after 500 cycles and being plugged in and charged to 100% whenever possible.
- 0942v8653 12y ago
  Yosemite is a total mess, but it has gotten slightly better with 10.10.3 (if you are willing to ignore the Photos app, which launches constantly for no reason). If you are willing to mess with drivers, you may want to try installing Linux. On a 2013 Air, battery life and performance (even graphics!) are surprisingly better with Debian Jessie than with OS X. Of course, it is a newer model than yours, but the drivers will only be more stable and mature with a 2011. Especially if you have 4 GB RAM and you're running into a memory barrier with OS X, you should see a significant improvement.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ingsoc79 12y ago
Agreed. My mid-2012 Macbook Pro Retina has been plugged in @ 100% nearly all the time it's been in use. Pretty much the only time it's not plugged in is when traveling. Battery is at 7845/8460 CurrentCapacity/DesignCapacity or 93%.
- misframer 12y ago
  I treat the 2012 MacBook Air I use at work the same way. It's plugged in all the time, and it stays in the office. I think its capacity is 95% or higher.
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 12y ago
  Same but slightly worse, mine is generally always plugged in. 100/8460*7633 or 90.22%
pjmorris 12y ago
Just another data point: I'm at 77% (4431/5770) on an April 2010 MBP. I tend to leave it plugged in when possible, and often run it far down when not near an outlet. I take it that's about the worst I can do, but the convenience has seemed worth it.
johnymontana 12y ago
Could you clarify how you arrived at 84% battery health? After the command "ioreg -l -n AppleSmartBattery -r" I see DesignCapacity, but where does the other number (5629) come from? I'd like to compute battery health myself...
- bluedino 12y ago
  He's just dividing the current battery capacity by the 'new' battery capacity. You can just let a program like Coconut Battery do it for you.
  - mauz0r 12y ago
    Coconut Battery is nice. You can let it take snapshots and compare it with other batteries online. You can view my battery health here http://ccbonline.coconut-flavour.com/index.php?bid=d78a6c124d5a70bceb8e25bca21ddc0e http://ccbonline.coconut-flavour.com/index.php?bid=d78a6c124.... I try to unplug at 100% and recharge it at 10-20%. Once per month I drain it all the way to 0%. After reading this thread I try to keep my battery at a 50-80% charge :) Except when I do some CPU intensive stuff like compiling or rendering, then it is being charged thought the process.
- jffry 12y ago
  running ioreg -l -n AppleSmartBattery -r | grep -i capacity gives me "MaxCapacity" = 8329 "CurrentCapacity" = 8002 "DesignCapacity" = 8440 I'm guessing MaxCapacity or CurrentCapacity (I'm at 100% charged on a ~1 year old MBP, so I don't know which number is appropriate)
  - ChristianBundy 12y ago
    Your battery percentage is going to be: 100 / DesignCapacity * MaxCapacity Or, in the way that makes way more sense to me: MaxCapacity / DesignCapacity * 100 Which, with your results, yields something to the effect of: 98.68% It's kind of (read: very) dirty looking, but you can get the same result with: echo $(ioreg -l -n AppleSmartBattery -r | grep MaxCapacity | awk '{print $3}') / $(ioreg -l -n AppleSmartBattery -r | grep DesignCapacity | awk '{print $3}') \* 100 | bc -l
myth_buster 12y ago
Could you elaborate on how you arrived at the "5 years" lifespan for batteries having charge state of 0-100%?
- DavideNL 12y ago
  That was just a personal estimate, obviously if the battery health is for example at 75% you also lose 25% of 'the time' to work without plugging it in... so if that becomes a problem when traveling i might want to buy a new one. For others this might not be a problem of course.
  - myth_buster 12y ago
    Ok. I was wondering if the breakeven is set as 5 years but if the cycle of tilt to full makes the life shorter for the battery, then it may not be worth it. I agree that if I've to weigh battery life vs my time, I would go with the latter.
sown 12y ago
On ubuntu, you can do something similar with upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT1 | grep capacity | awk '{print $2}' You can see all of your power options with upower -e
- 0942v8653 11y ago
  On Debian: bc -l <<< "100 * $(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/energy_full) / $(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/energy_full_design)"
Datsundere 12y ago
With thinkpad acpi modules you can write scripts to automate this. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tp_smapi https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tp_smapi

bkanber 12y ago

Agreed. I do avoid leaving my laptop plugged in overnight, but I'm also not too careful about leaving it plugged in during the day. I'll often pop the charger out when I notice the battery at 100%, but I'm not going to lose sleep if I forget about it or operate slightly sub-optimally.

tertius 12y ago
I have a Lenovo Yoga Pro 2, it's got an app that manages this for me. I turn on "conservation mode" and it keeps the charge at 55%-60%. The only negative here (and it would be there with doing it yourself) is that if I run out without the charger I'm essentially at 1/2 capacity.

rexf 12y ago

I agree with you. Instead of optimizing for battery life by constantly checking & adjusting my charging, I'd rather live my life focusing on other things. What I do is super simple: plug it in whenever possible.

hsitz 12y ago
Same here. I have no reason to dispute the expert who says Lithium-ion batteries "don't love 100%". Fine, but they don't seem to dislike it too much, either. So far I haven't had any batteries that didn't perform well when they were mostly plugged in, occasionally discharged in mobile use. I see some similarities to, e.g., medical pronouncements that some particular food increases risk of cancer. It's easy to get alarmed, but there's a big difference between it increasing my likelihood of getting cancer by 0.05% and making cancer, say, (just to illustrate the point) 100 times more likely. The former I would likely ignore and the latter would probably make me give up the food instantly.
- moopling 12y ago
  I get what you're trying to say, but there's an interesting point to be made here about absolute vs relative risk: imagine for instance your absolute chance of getting cancer was less than 0.0005%
pareidolia 12y ago
A ThinkPad takes care of everything https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/10659i9B544944A68527A9?v=mpbl-1 https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/10659...

JoshGlazebrook 12y ago

Is your machine even operational? My macbook air from 2011 (with Yosemite) is sluggish to the point of being unbearable to use and just collects dust.

x0054 12y ago
Switch to OSX 10.9, problem solved. My 2012 rMBP with top end specs is also sluggish on 10.10.3. Not sure what Apple is thinking. On the other hand I am still using my 2003 Panasonic CF 73. It's not quick, but for the limited tasks of automating my DSLR it works perfect.
macns 12y ago
my macbook 2008 running os x 10.7.5, 128gb ssd and 4gb ram is still fast enough and gets the job done. It's even faster than the latest middle to low end windows PC's (dual boot with windows 7)
rndn 12y ago
Define unbearable. Up until 10.10.2 the OS X window server was a bit sluggish. Now it's tolerable for my purposes.
lh7777 12y ago
My 2011 11" Air (i7) runs 10.10 just fine. I haven't noticed any slowdown over the past 4 years, although I do disable all the unnecessary transparency and animations Apple keeps adding for seemingly no reason. By the way, my battery health is also around 85% after 500 cycles and being plugged in and charged to 100% whenever possible.
0942v8653 12y ago
Yosemite is a total mess, but it has gotten slightly better with 10.10.3 (if you are willing to ignore the Photos app, which launches constantly for no reason). If you are willing to mess with drivers, you may want to try installing Linux. On a 2013 Air, battery life and performance (even graphics!) are surprisingly better with Debian Jessie than with OS X. Of course, it is a newer model than yours, but the drivers will only be more stable and mature with a 2011. Especially if you have 4 GB RAM and you're running into a memory barrier with OS X, you should see a significant improvement.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ingsoc79 12y ago

Agreed. My mid-2012 Macbook Pro Retina has been plugged in @ 100% nearly all the time it's been in use. Pretty much the only time it's not plugged in is when traveling. Battery is at 7845/8460 CurrentCapacity/DesignCapacity or 93%.

misframer 12y ago
I treat the 2012 MacBook Air I use at work the same way. It's plugged in all the time, and it stays in the office. I think its capacity is 95% or higher.
1qaz2wsx3edc 12y ago
Same but slightly worse, mine is generally always plugged in. 100/8460*7633 or 90.22%

pjmorris 12y ago

Just another data point: I'm at 77% (4431/5770) on an April 2010 MBP. I tend to leave it plugged in when possible, and often run it far down when not near an outlet. I take it that's about the worst I can do, but the convenience has seemed worth it.

johnymontana 12y ago

Could you clarify how you arrived at 84% battery health? After the command "ioreg -l -n AppleSmartBattery -r" I see DesignCapacity, but where does the other number (5629) come from? I'd like to compute battery health myself...

bluedino 12y ago
He's just dividing the current battery capacity by the 'new' battery capacity. You can just let a program like Coconut Battery do it for you.
- mauz0r 12y ago
  Coconut Battery is nice. You can let it take snapshots and compare it with other batteries online. You can view my battery health here http://ccbonline.coconut-flavour.com/index.php?bid=d78a6c124d5a70bceb8e25bca21ddc0e http://ccbonline.coconut-flavour.com/index.php?bid=d78a6c124.... I try to unplug at 100% and recharge it at 10-20%. Once per month I drain it all the way to 0%. After reading this thread I try to keep my battery at a 50-80% charge :) Except when I do some CPU intensive stuff like compiling or rendering, then it is being charged thought the process.
jffry 12y ago
running ioreg -l -n AppleSmartBattery -r | grep -i capacity gives me "MaxCapacity" = 8329 "CurrentCapacity" = 8002 "DesignCapacity" = 8440 I'm guessing MaxCapacity or CurrentCapacity (I'm at 100% charged on a ~1 year old MBP, so I don't know which number is appropriate)
- ChristianBundy 12y ago
  Your battery percentage is going to be: 100 / DesignCapacity * MaxCapacity Or, in the way that makes way more sense to me: MaxCapacity / DesignCapacity * 100 Which, with your results, yields something to the effect of: 98.68% It's kind of (read: very) dirty looking, but you can get the same result with: echo $(ioreg -l -n AppleSmartBattery -r | grep MaxCapacity | awk '{print $3}') / $(ioreg -l -n AppleSmartBattery -r | grep DesignCapacity | awk '{print $3}') \* 100 | bc -l

myth_buster 12y ago

Could you elaborate on how you arrived at the "5 years" lifespan for batteries having charge state of 0-100%?

DavideNL 12y ago
That was just a personal estimate, obviously if the battery health is for example at 75% you also lose 25% of 'the time' to work without plugging it in... so if that becomes a problem when traveling i might want to buy a new one. For others this might not be a problem of course.
- myth_buster 12y ago
  Ok. I was wondering if the breakeven is set as 5 years but if the cycle of tilt to full makes the life shorter for the battery, then it may not be worth it. I agree that if I've to weigh battery life vs my time, I would go with the latter.

sown 12y ago

On ubuntu, you can do something similar with upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT1 | grep capacity | awk '{print $2}' You can see all of your power options with upower -e

0942v8653 11y ago
On Debian: bc -l <<< "100 * $(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/energy_full) / $(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/energy_full_design)"

Datsundere 12y ago

With thinkpad acpi modules you can write scripts to automate this. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tp_smapi https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tp_smapi