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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".



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.


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.


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%


A ThinkPad takes care of everything https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/10659...


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.


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.


My Photos app was launching because it got reset at the default action when my iPhone connected. It's possible that's what is happening to you too.


My iPhone and a couple flash drives do this, probably because it thinks my scanner is a camera. Unfortunately I can't stop it from launching (assuming I can disable it in Preferences) until it will actually launch—I have left it beachballing for a very long time and it still has not finished launching, so I just force quit it.


Open the Image Capture application, and you can change the setting at the bottom-left of the window. It seems to get increasingly hidden with each OS release.


This used to be the only place to change the setting—which was ridiculous because virtually no one ever used Image Capture (especially because iPhoto opened by default). But to Apple's credit, you can now also change this preference in Photos. Of course, as the previous poster pointed out, you have to actually wait for Photos to finish launching. But at least it's there now!


If you want to stay on OSX:

Always 'Quit' open apps you don't use, never, NEVER have 2 sessions open at the same time, and try using lighter applications when you can (VLC instead of iTunes for music, Skim instead of Preview for PDFs, Preview instead of Photos for images, etc)

I have to use a 2012 MBP with Yosemite from time to time and if I follow these rules it is definitely bearable.


I recommend VOX over VLC because it has Soundcloud integration and looks nice.


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.


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.


Define unbearable. Up until 10.10.2 the OS X window server was a bit sluggish. Now it's tolerable for my purposes.


MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011) 2.3Ghz i5, self-upgraded hardware to 16GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM, Samsung SSD 120GB, caddy with 500GB HD, replaced battery with cheap Chinese, running 10.10.3 like a charm (only my SD-card slot never worked).


Yes, mine still runs smooth, that's why i always buy the fastest model (processor) available, it's more expensive when buying but usually saves money in the long run. (i have the 1.8GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7)


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)


MBP 2009 here... works as good as new. Only upgrade was a SSD for the hdd. Still only 4GB RAM. Wouldn't want to do much video/graphics processing but everything else is fine.


Mid-2010 MBP upgraded with SSD runs perfectly on 10.10.3


Same here, only boots extremely slow (I have the original HDD but 8gb memory)


You should really upgrade to SSD. Makes a huge difference (easily 5-10X speed-up for many tasks).


I run Windows on mine and it runs fine (late 2010 13", 4GB model). Only use it when travelling though.


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.


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.


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...


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)


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


    ioreg -l -n AppleSmartBattery -r | awk '/MaxCapacity/{mc=$3};/DesignCapacity/{dc=$3};END{print 100*mc/dc}'


mine is at 103.211


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.


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=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.


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.


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


On Debian:

    bc -l <<< "100 * $(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/energy_full) / $(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*/energy_full_design)"


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%.


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.


Same but slightly worse, mine is generally always plugged in.

100/8460*7633 or 90.22%


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


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


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.


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.




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