A couple of weeks ago, my wife got a notification on her MacBook Pro that said “Service Battery”. If you check the help files for OS X, you find this explanation:
Service Battery: The battery isn’t functioning normally, and you may or may not notice a change in its behavior or the amount of charge it holds. Take your computer in for service. You can continue to use your battery before it’s checked without harming your computer.
Her Mac is about six years old. It’s a mid-2010, 13-inch model, the first of the unibody MacBook Pros that don’t include an easily removable battery. That doesn’t mean the battery can’t be replaced, but you have to open the case to do it. Apple says it’s not “user serviceable”, but replacing it is a fairly trivial thing to do, as this video indicates.
While the “Service Battery” notification doesn’t necessarily mean she needs a new battery – there are “Replace Soon” and “Replace Now” status messages that could appear – I decided that, since this computer was pretty old, I’d go ahead and swap it out.
I could have bought a third-party battery online and saved quite a bit of money, but typically those are knock-offs that don’t last long and, in some cases, can damage your MacBook. Instead, I opted to buy a genuine Apple battery from iFixit, the folks known for their teardowns of electronic products and detailed repair manuals, for $99.
The battery arrived a few days later and I installed it, which took only a few minutes. But when I did, it didn’t work as I expected. Here’s what happened:
- The MacBook Pro would not turn on unless the AC adapter was connected to it. When I removed the MagSafe connector, the computer blinked off.
- Normally, the MagSafe adapter’s indicator light shows green when initially connected, then switches to orange to indicate the battery is being charged. When it’s fully charged, the light turns green again. But in this case, the light stayed green.
- Battery indicator showed it was 47 percent charged. But it also said “Not charging”, and no matter how long I left the adapter connected, the indicator stayed at 47 percent.
I put her old battery back in, and it worked fine. It charged, the MacBook Pro could be powered off the battery, and the indicator show charging progress. It still said “Service Battery”, though.
I contacted iFixit via support email and explained the issue. This was on a Saturday afternoon, and I got a response the next day, even though iFixit’s contact info says weekend queries won’t be answered until Monday. (Kudos, iFixit, for the excellent service!)
Joe, the tech, suggested I do several things with the new battery installed – run a Repair Permissions (or Disk First Aid on OS X 10.11, the version on my wife’s Mac); reset the NVRAM, a memory cache that stores some settings; and reset the SMC, which controls hardware configurations on the Mac. I tried his suggestions, but none worked.
He also asked me to send him some screenshots if those failed. Joe had me install Coconut Battery, an excellent (and free!) battery diagnostic for OS X, and screenshot that as well as a capture from the Energy tab on the Activity Monitor. Here are those screenshots.
One interesting thing to note from the Coconut Battery results: The new battery is 1,461 days old, or four years. That’s not necessarily surprising, since this is an old model and Apple probably isn’t making fresh ones. Joe assured me this particular battery had been bench-tested before it was shipped, and it tested well.
I’m still waiting to hear back now that Joe has these screenshots. But this is an interesting puzzle. What’s going on here?
There are a few possibilities:
- The new battery is defective. That’s the simplest and mostly likely explanation, but the fact that iFixit supposedly tested it before it left their warehouse is a caveat.
- The logic board or power converter on the MacBook Pro has problems. But if this was the case, I would think the old battery wouldn’t work, either. That is, unless the problem manifests itself in the old battery with a “Service Battery” notification, but with the new battery, the symptoms are more acute.
- Something else I am not considering or understanding is going on.
It’s very possible that I should have bit the bullet and taken my wife’s computer to Apple for a look-see. I may have assumed too much by just replacing the battery. And I may yet end up doing that.
I’ll update this blog post when I have a resolution, but in the meantime: What do YOU think is going on? Let me know in the comments, or reply via Twitter.
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