Is Your MacBook Pro Battery Draining While Plugged In?
Does this mean you need to replace your MacBook battery?
In this article, I’m going to talk about one of the annoying issues I had with my MacBook Pro over the last couple of weeks. So this is my own experience and I’d like to share it with you and make you aware of this matter.
Usually, we all get scared when the MacBook Pro battery starts draining when it’s plugged. Also, we’ve seen some hardware issues related to Apple devices recently so that this could be a considerable issue for us when we encountered this for the first time. If you’re using a recently released MacBook, you might have already found this issue. Before everything, is this an issue? Let’s get started.
Generally, we keep the MacBook plugged throughout the day and only unplug it when we leave the home. When you click the battery icon in the menu bar, you will see Battery is Charged and Power Source is Power Adapter once it’s reached 100%. We usually expect the battery percentage to remain at 100% and we never expect it to be reduced while it’s plugged. But (unfortunately) this happens and gradually decreases the battery percentage. This is the point where we get confused and think something has happened to either the battery or the charging cable and adapter.
The most common solution for this sort of issue is resetting the SMC (System Management Controller) on your MacBook. Once you are done with the SMC resetting, everything will be fine and your battery percentage remains at 100% until you shut down your Mac. At this point, you may think your problem has been solved and you can continue working. Yes, you’re correct; but only for this moment and on the next day, you will understand your problem is still there.
The next day your battery starts draining again and you keep going resetting the SMC. But resetting the SMC is not the solution. What you should do is you don’t need to do anything; because this is not an issue on your MacBook. Are you happy now?
Actually, in my case, I was so pleased because I got to know this is a great step taken by Apple to protect your MacBook battery. This special feature is known as “Battery health Management”.
This new feature was especially introduced to improve the lifespan of the MacBook’s battery with the macOS Catalina 10.15.5 update. This is enabled by default on your MacBook and you can see this by going System Preferences > Energy Saver > select Battery Health and you will see it’s already ticked the battery health management box.
The noticeable behaviour of this feature is when you plug your MacBook even at its’ battery percentage is 100% it starts discharging the battery gradually and keep reducing the percentage somewhere around 88%–90% (this amount may vary according to the device you use) and then start charging again and make the battery percentage 100% within a short period and this process won’t be calculated as another battery cycle count. So, the cycle count remains the same.
[ you can see the cycle count by selecting the Apple logo at the top bar while holding the option key > System Information > Power ]
If you need to turn off the Battery health management, untick the checkbox in Battery Health. Also, make sure to check the below links to get more details about this feature.
If you found out more issues related to your favourite Apple devices, make sure to use the official Apple Support website to ask them from the community and also try to help others by replying to the questions that you already know the answer to.
Thanks for reading!
