new macbook pro. Is it best to let the battery run 100% out first time?

[dsurin66]

I have a lovely new MBP with retina and it has some existing charge on it. Should I be letting it run out totally or waiting until its below 20% of whatever?

I seem to remember 5 yrs ago the salesperson told me to let it run out fully the first time. He said its better for the battery

What do you think?

thanks

[taotoo]

Take a look at the battery to see what chemistry it is, then look here:

batteryuniversity.com

[KhunBENQ]

https://www.apple.com/batteries/maximizing-performance/

Not much new on this site.

It is quite clear that it does not make sense to discharge the battery.

Especially: don't store it for a longer time in discharged state.

Best to store it in 50% load.

It is missing that stroring in 100% charge or permanently keep it fully loaded is also not good for LiIon batteries.

I have some simple laptop and do remove the battery (half full) when working stationery from the power supply.

Guess this will not be possible with an Apple device

[thedemon]

There is no need to either fully charge or discharge Li-Ion batteries because they don't suffer from the memory effect that afflicts NiCad batteries.

In fact I believe that the most wear on Li-Ion batteries occurs at under 20% and over 80% of charge level.

Really though, I don't think you need to worry about it. The battery will wear no matter what you do but they last quite a long time. At least 2-3 years to reach 50% wear. By that time the machine won't be shiny and new anymore so you will most likely buy a generic non-OEM battery which are pretty cheap.

[phazey]

Run it down to 15% once a month. I'm 3 years into this battery and can still pull 5 hours with full bright and keyboard illumination.....if i travel, maybe 6

[Pib]

Periodic discharge of the lithium ion battery is recommended by many laptop manufacturers since it "recalibrates the charge level indictor" but it does nothing to extend the life of the battery.

Edited September 19, 2015 by Pib

[jonwilly]

I had problems with my MacBook Pro.

I took it to Khun Krit, shop just off Huey Keaw, Chiangmai Mai.

He had a look asked if I always used it plug in to mains, I answered Yes and he recommended a battery change.

B2,000 and I was up and running.

He recommended I run it down to about 20 per cent once a month.

John

[Pib]

I had problems with my MacBook Pro.

I took it to Khun Krit, shop just off Huey Keaw, Chiangmai Mai.

He had a look asked if I always used it plug in to mains, I answered Yes and he recommended a battery change.

B2,000 and I was up and running.

He recommended I run it down to about 20 per cent once a month.

John

Yeap, leaving a lithium ion battery at full charge all the time...like a laptop plugged in all the time/used like a desktop...stresses the battery by being fully/100% charged for an extended period of time...it will shorten its lifespan. And if you put a lithium ion in storage for some reason "do not" store it at 100% charge...store it with a 40 to 50% charge to avoid battery degradation....lithium ion batteries don't like to staying at 100% charge for long periods as it cause some internal chemical reactions that degrades its lifespan. And usually when you buy a new lithium ion battery it comes from the factory with only around a 60% charge because they didn't know how long it might set on a store shelf/in a warehouse before being sold.

My Lenovo laptop has a utility called Energy Manager which manages battery charge and does some other things. The Energy Manager has a conservation mode setting which keeps you battery charged at approx 60% when plugged in versus 100%. Now if I turn the laptop off like I do nightly I must remember to turn the conservation mode back on when I power up the laptop the next morning otherwise the battery will charge to 100% and stay at 100% as long as it plugged in and conservation mode is not turned back on. And when I do forget to turn the Energy Manager on for a couple of days and the battery has been setting a 100% for those days it has been keeping track of that and a warning message will popup recommending I turn on conservation mode to avoid battery life reduction due to a long period of full//100% charge.

See below snapshot of the Energy Manager where it talks Conservation Mode.....and to periodically discharge the battery for battery meter calibration purposes (gives you a more accurate reading of battery charge) as I mentioned in an earlier post. My old Toshiba laptops recommended the same thing about discharging the battery down to around 3 to 5% every few months for battery meter calibration purposes....it don't extend the life of the battery or give it a higher charge...it just re-calibrates the battery meter.

[dsurin66]

I had problems with my MacBook Pro.

I took it to Khun Krit, shop just off Huey Keaw, Chiangmai Mai.

He had a look asked if I always used it plug in to mains, I answered Yes and he recommended a battery change.

B2,000 and I was up and running.

He recommended I run it down to about 20 per cent once a month.

John

Yeap, leaving a lithium ion battery at full charge all the time...like a laptop plugged in all the time/used like a desktop...stresses the battery by being fully/100% charged for an extended period of time...it will shorten its lifespan. And if you put a lithium ion in storage for some reason "do not" store it at 100% charge...store it with a 40 to 50% charge to avoid battery degradation....lithium ion batteries don't like to staying at 100% charge for long periods as it cause some internal chemical reactions that degrades its lifespan. And usually when you buy a new lithium ion battery it comes from the factory with only around a 60% charge because they didn't know how long it might set on a store shelf/in a warehouse before being sold.

My Lenovo laptop has a utility called Energy Manager which manages battery charge and does some other things. The Energy Manager has a conservation mode setting which keeps you battery charged at approx 60% when plugged in versus 100%. Now if I turn the laptop off like I do nightly I must remember to turn the conservation mode back on when I power up the laptop the next morning otherwise the battery will charge to 100% and stay at 100% as long as it plugged in and conservation mode is not turned back on. And when I do forget to turn the Energy Manager on for a couple of days and the battery has been setting a 100% for those days it has been keeping track of that and a warning message will popup recommending I turn on conservation mode to avoid battery life reduction due to a long period of full//100% charge.

See below snapshot of the Energy Manager where it talks Conservation Mode.....and to periodically discharge the battery for battery meter calibration purposes (gives you a more accurate reading of battery charge) as I mentioned in an earlier post. My old Toshiba laptops recommended the same thing about discharging the battery down to around 3 to 5% every few months for battery meter calibration purposes....it don't extend the life of the battery or give it a higher charge...it just re-calibrates the battery meter.

Capture.JPG

Interesting reply. So when should one recharge the battery exactly? when it gets to 10% OR lower or higher than that?

[taotoo]

The Energy Manager has a conservation mode setting which keeps you battery charged at approx 60% when plugged in versus 100%.

That's good - does it also power the laptop directly from the mains, or is the battery still being drained and charged all the time (e.g. down to 55% then back up to 60%)?

[Pib]

The Energy Manager has a conservation mode setting which keeps you battery charged at approx 60% when plugged in versus 100%.

That's good - does it also power the laptop directly from the mains, or is the battery still being drained and charged all the time (e.g. down to 55% then back up to 60%)?

You are still hooked to the mains...if the battery is over 60% charged when turning on the Energy Manager Conservation Mode then the charging is stopped until the battery charge drops to 55-60% and then keeps its at say the 60% charge level by then probably allowing "just enough" to keep the the battery at hat 60% level and all the rest of the power goes to running the laptop. You do not see the charge level change from 60%...like drop to 59% and then start charging back to 60% and then turn off....whatever charge holding level it picks (the Energy Manager specs say 55-60% but it almost always uses 60% from my observations). Maybe I would see if a change if left on for more than a day due to natural battery self-discharge, but I turn my laptop off at night.

Like this morning after turning on the laptop I forgot to immediately turn on the Energy Manager Conservation Mode and the battery charged up to 73% before I activated Conservation Mode. With the laptop still plugged in the mains and Conservation Mode activated it stopped charging and began discharging until it reached 60%...and it will continue to hold at 60% until I turn the laptop off. Right now when I hover my mouse pointer over the battery charging icon in the lower right hand corner of the screen it will say, "60% Available (plugged in, not charging). And when opening Energy Manager to look at the battery charge display there it shows the gauge at 60% and 60% in the battery cutout...if it was charging there would be activity occurring in the battery cutout. See image below.

Now I can not say with certainty if the Energy Manager has "completely disconnected the battery from the charging circuit" and/or is giving it a minute trickle charge to keep it at exactly 60%....or maybe after X-days of being plugged in but not charging the battery would naturally lose a little bit of it's charge (all battery do self discharge just a little even when not in use) and once it say dropped a little to 59% or maybe down to 54% (remember the Energy Manager Conservation Mode specs say it maintains a 55-60% charge level in conservation mode) that at 54% it would start charging the battery again until it reached 55 to 60%. The battery is still in the laptop's power circuit as I can the power cord/charging adapter and the battery is then powering the laptop without the laptop skipping a beat/noticing anything....that's the good thing about laptops is even if you are running them off mains, you suddenly lose mains power, the battery takes over powering the laptop...the battery is like a UPS. A UPS people need to buy for desktops unless they want to lose data/their work when power cuts off.

Another good thing about maintaining the battery at a constant level "below 100%" (which like already mentioned degrades a lithium-ion battery's lifespan) is "charging cycles" are not being racked up. Each time a battery goes through a charging cycle the internal chemical activity shortens the battery's lifespan and its maximum charge level. Well, actually for the first few charge cycles a new lithium-ion battery is suppose to reach its maximum charge capacity and then that repeated charging/discharging begins its long, slow degradation of the battery. In many lithium-ion battery specs you will see they are also rated for a maximum number of charging cycles...like 300-500 cycles...or maybe just say 500 cycles or whatever number...maybe even a few thousand for a very high quality (and very pricey) lithium-ion battery....but 500 cycles seems to be a common cycles rating.

A whole cycle is a complete discharge and recharge from 0 to 100%. So say using a Smartphone lithium ion battery as an example since they are not plugged into charging all the time say the way you use it is you always try to recharge once it gets down to around 50%...two discharges to 50% with recharges to 100% represents one whole charge cycle (50 + 50 = 100%)....4 discharges to 75% with recharge to 100% represents one charge cycle (25+25+25+25 = 100%)....one discharge to 0% with recharge to 100% represents one charge cycle. So, minimizing the number of charge cycles and/or not letting your battery stay fully 100% charged all the time extends its life span. How much, I don't know...never seen any definitive data on that...but battery manufacturers & technical articles say its a fact just due to the physical/chemical characteristics of a lithium-ion battery.

So anything you can do to minimize bad chemical activity for the particular kind of battery you have extends the battery's life and charge capacity. Now for a lead-acid battery like used in vehicles you "do" want to keep it fully charged all the time to minimize a particular type of bad chemical activity call sulfation which degrades its lifespan...in fact periodically applying an equalization charge (a.k.a., "overcharge) is recommended by many lead-acid battery and battery charger manufacturers. But chemical make-up and activity in a lead-acid battery is different than lithium-ion batteries so different charging requirements apply...but even a lead-acid battery has a "number of cycles" lifespan. Kinda like how most of our body parts are constantly regenerating new cells, but that cycling process eventually takes its toll (i.e., too many cycles) and we die one day.

[Pib]

Interesting reply. So when should one recharge the battery exactly? when it gets to 10% OR lower or higher than that?

From what I've read it means fully discharged but be sure to check the manual for your laptop to see what its recommendation is.

Now "over discharging" a lithium-ion battery can be a bad thing but most lithium-ion batteries, especially laptop lithium-ion battery packs, have built-in protection circuits to prevent over discharge (like little circuit breakers)...you couldn't over charge or over discharge if your tried. If you ever tear a laptop battery pack apart (like I have several times) you will find a small circuit board in them that prevent over discharge and overcharge...it's a protection circuit above and beyond what protection is built into your laptop motherboard's battery charging circuit.....by overcharging I mean trying to charge the battery above 100% for an extended time.

But some of the bare bones lithium-ion batteries used to power other devices may not have built-in protection and rely on protection provide by the device your use them in.

Below is a snapshot from my Toshiba laptop manual which says "fully discharge"...to me that means down to 0%...but to get it down to 0% you would need to turn off certain power options settings in your computer's Windows settings that are usually preset to put the computer into sleep/hibernation mode or just turn it off when you get down to around 5% or whatever setting you may have changed it to.

What I would always do with my Toshiba laptops is let them dischage to around 1 to 3% and then let the start recharging again "if I was around to monitor them that closely." Otherwise I would just let my power options settings which warned me and/or turned the computer off at around 5% charge level and then I would plug in the power adapter/power back up the laptop so it could charge back up to 100%.

Now some computers actually have a gauge reset setting which goes through a process of discharging and recharging the battery...my Lenovo has such a setting in Energy Manager (shown below) but I've never watched it that close during a gauge reset to see what it discharges to before beginning recharge...in fact it says "not" to unplug the computer or "even use the computer" during the gauge reset procedure. I've done this battery gauge reset a couple of times over the 22 months I had the laptop....it did it overnight...wasn't watching what it did discharge/charge-wise on the charge level indicator. But usually what happens to me is occasionally I'm using my laptop "off the mains/have went mobile with the laptop" to where it gets discharged to pretty close 0% before I have to go plug it in again...this process is basically doing a battery gauge re-calibration...probably not as good as the actually gauge reset procedure used in the Lenovo Energy Manager but my battery gauge still seems accurate. And some laptops have such a re-calibration feature built into their BIOS. It varies among laptop manufacturers as to what they recommend and how they do it. Check out the manual for your laptop...I expect they have a recommendation regarding battery maintenance/extending its lifespan/battery gauge calibration.

Toshiba Manual Snapshot

Lenovo Energy Manager Snapshot

[taotoo]

Another good thing about maintaining the battery at a constant level "below 100%" (which like already mentioned degrades a lithium-ion battery's lifespan) is "charging cycles" are not being racked up.

This is what I was wondering about - if the battery is still in the loop I imagine it must still be getting cycled. It sounds like it must be in the loop if the manual says it will drop to 55% (even if the display shows it always on 60 which might otherwise suggest a trickle charge).

[Pib]

Another good thing about maintaining the battery at a constant level "below 100%" (which like already mentioned degrades a lithium-ion battery's lifespan) is "charging cycles" are not being racked up.

This is what I was wondering about - if the battery is still in the loop I imagine it must still be getting cycled. It sounds like it must be in the loop if the manual says it will drop to 55% (even if the display shows it always on 60 which might otherwise suggest a trickle charge).

The manual does not say it will drop to 55%...it just says conservation mode will maintain the charge at somewhere in the 55 to 60% ballpark...the great majority ot the time it does hold it at exactly 60%...but I've seen times where it holds at another percentage like 57%. Got to have some kind of plus or minus tolerance/range.

When conservation mode is turned on and once it reaches its holding charge somewhere between 55 to 60% (usually 60%) I've never seen that holding percentage change (no cycling) while the laptop is turned on...and I leave it on all day and then turn it off at night.

Edited September 21, 2015 by Pib