Macbook Pro late 2013 goes black at 45% battery charge when using LR

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Selwin

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Is this a sign that the battery is going bad? This behaviour has started about a year ago when creating previews or exports, on battery power (no AC adapter connected). Screen gently fades to black and nothing happens until I plug into mains and even then I need to beg and hit the power button multiples times.

This is a daily used 5 year old machine. The battery section says operation normal.

I don’t see this behaviour with a fully charged battery, nor do I ever see it while on AC power / plugged into mains.

Today it happened after plugging in a USB powered external bracket containing an SSD drive.

. I can’t bring this machine to any serious job unless fully charged or near a mains socket. A shame really because speedwise it still performs adequately.

Sounds familiar? Then I’d like to hear about it.
 
Hi Hal, this machine has about 915 cycles. This seems low for a 5 year old machine.
But I must say I often use it while on AC power all day for editing sessions so the battery doesn’t cycle as much compared to field work.
 
So it's getting close to the 1000 cycles that Apple recommends replacing it at.

That said, it surely sounds like that battery has problems. I find that lithium ion batteries deliver full power right to the end of their charge and then simply quit. That isn't what you're seeing. Have you thought of taking the computer to an Apple store and having them run a diagnostic?
 
Well that seems like a good suggestion, if you think the engineers can in fact discover things using non invasive techniques. I’ll do just that as a next step. Thanks for thinking along and sharing your experience :)
 
Also I didn’t know about apples recommendation to replace batteries after a 1000 cycles.
 
Selwin said:
Also I didn’t know about apples recommendation to replace batteries after a 1000 cycles.
Click to expand...
Found it. But it’s not exactly what I thought it would be.

“MacBook Owners
Your battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 1000 complete charge cycles. The one-year warranty includes....”

So Apple says the battery should still have 8000 mAh capacity if for instance it started at 10000 mAh. I never checked the capacity before so I don’t know how it was when it was brand new.
The battery gets charged well to 100% but of course 100% now isn’t the same 100% as 5 years ago. I still get a days worth of using Mail, pages and browsing the internet. But it may well be 80% compared to then.
 
Yes, it's a little odd for Apple to be calling it a 1000-cycle "limit" when hitting 1000 isn't supposed to mean the battery dies, but should still have 80% of original capacity.

But battery performance isn't just about the cycle count. Two batteries at 1000 cycles may perform differently if one was subject to harsher cycling conditions, such as frequently being discharged all the way to empty, or frequently used at a high temperature while fully charged.

Your battery might be a little closer to replacement because of the unscheduled shutdown. When the system asks for a major power spike that the battery could handle in the past, and the battery reports that it can't handle that any more, the system may decide to shut down. The battery might have been able to handle it in terms of capacity, but the battery circuitry may have had doubts about the ability to deliver the wattage requested at that moment. What you reported fits the pattern: Old battery, a very power-intensive application (Lightroom) is launched, and then a bus-powered peripheral is connected. That combination causes a spike in power demand, but the battery circuitry declares itself unable to deliver that load and the system shuts down. If you had only been reading email or surfing the web, chances are the power demands would have been more even (not just lower, but lacking that big spike), so the laptop would have continued to run.

Compounding this is that an aging battery is less able to make a reliable estimate of available power. That's partly because it's literally a "battery" of cells and each one is aging at a different rate. Some cells may be closer to exhaustion than others, but the battery circuitry has no choice but to make a blanket guess for all of them as a group.

Remember the controversy about how Apple slowed down iPhones with old batteries? The media interpreted that negatively, as "planned obsolescence" that forced you to buy a new phone. But what Apple was actually trying to do was extend the run time of the phone. Limiting the processing speed of the iPhone with an old battery reduces the chance that the phone will ask for a power spike that the battery might refuse to deliver, theoretically helping to avoid the unplanned shutdown problem and keep going.

For more battery information than Apple's System Information provides, you can download Coconut Battery (free). It will tell you the design capacity of the battery vs the current full charge capacity in both mAh and percent, along with the number of cycles. It also tells you how much capacity your specific battery actually shipped with in the beginning, vs. the design capacity. And it has a history feature so you can take snapshots of the battery capacity over time. All of this helps you see what 100% means today vs when it was new.
 
Hi Conrad, first off I am sorry to have missed your post or otherwise I would have replied directly as I am known to respond to helpful posts :). So thank you for the write up! Very informative, I knew some of it but not all.
Meanwhile, fast forward 7 months, the battery is close to dead. I can't even browse some photos at 80%, the machine will go into sleep mode. All it can manage now without the charger is browsing the internet or writing emails and such.
Anyway I scheduled a repair at Apple next thursday so we'll see how it performs after that. It's a €300 repair but I feel it's worth every euro. I think I will happily use this macbook for another 3 years and my kids will still make some use out of it after that.
So thanks again!
Cheers,
 
If it's not still covered under Apple Care you might want to checkout https://www.ifixit.com/. They provide parts, instructions and tools for easy to do repairs for Macs, iPhones and more.

I have used them for years to upgrade hard drives and replace batteries to extent the lives of several Mac Books.

The battery replacement is likely to be very simple, The aluminum are much easier to work on than the early white plastic Mac Books.

-louie
 
Well I decided to let apple do it. At the Genius Bar I was told a quote of 209. So I went for that. I’m too nervous to remove sticky battery parts with fluids inside my machine. But thanks anyway, I know ifixit andi have used it in the past for easier repairs. I reckon all will be fine now with the new battery. Can’t wait to pick it up.
I also had a look at the new 16” MacBook reviews and it looks very promising. Hopefully in about two or three years apple will have re-added the SD slot again.
 
Apple took the entire machine apart and replaced the upper alu part of the body (the part with the keyboard and trackpad cutouts) along with the battery and built up the parts in the new case, then attached the original display and bottom lid. So far I'm not impressed with battery life but maybe it needs calibration as it's still at zero cycles.
 
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