notebook is a 10 year old macbook pro without macos I installed xubuntu 24.04 in. It comes with an embedded battery.
First notebook I bought, not from apple, had a removable battery. The vendor told me to maximize its life I shouldn’t plug the battery in, unless I need it (like for traveling). This way, I’ve managed to keep the original battery in good working condition for 8 years so far.
Back to the macbook: I cannot remove the battery and constantly loading it to up to 80% and discharge it up to 20% seems ridiculous. Furthermore, this would deplete the battery even faster, I believe.
What can I do to spare the battery as much as possible?
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For linux it depends. For example, you can modify the maximum charge on ASUS laptops. There’s also this wonderful tool called asusctl [https://asus-linux.org/] that modifies allows you to more effectively use your laptop. Here is the arch wiki page for it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ASUS_Linux . Do note that, unfortunately, the only officially supported distros are Arch and Fedora, but you can make it work with some effort.
TLP is my favourite tool for messing with the charge limit. And also far, far too many power/thermal management knobs.
The most important part with batteries is to check if they start swelling up.
do you mean physically swell up? like I’m going to see it bent/bigger?
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Yes, physically getting bigger.
Dell XPS had a batch laptops going crazy and pushing the touchpad up.
You will recognize it :-)
That highly depends on your model.
- Yes normally once the battery is fully charged, it should run from the charger. Probably runs from the charger directly but also charges the battery.
- The OS can limit the battery charging start and stop point. COSMIC desktop has such a feature. It may need interaction with the EC though.
- Yes, if the laptop is just running off the AC, charge it to 50% and keep it there. If not, then cycling between 20/80 is best. But that is unlikely, my 2012 thinkpad also runs direclty off the charging brick.
You could try to uninstall the battery and just put an AC cable in. My laptop works like that.
just to be clear, you mean removing the battery, or do you mean using a command?
Yeah just physically opening the case and unplugging the battery. Idk, I just read MacBook Pro, I never had a Mac because I hate the company partly because of their non-repairability, so maybe you can’t even take the battery out without dissolving some glue or some shit. For all the laptops I had so far, it was just unscrewing some screws and then you can unscrew/unplug/replace the components within.
One option is to leave it plugged in and hope the charge controller isn’t stupid. There might be a bios option for AC mode or similar, dunno how custom the firmware on these old macbooks is.
Try to cycle it once every two weeks or something. Unfortunately there isn’t much of a right answer to your question, there are advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. This is a good read on the subject: https://batterycare.net/en/guide.html
Just charge it and use it. Recharging and discharging the battery shortens the life of the battery. In an ideal world, you would charge the laptop battery to 50% and then never charge or use it again, but that’s makes your battery fucking useless.
So use your laptop. My advice is to keep it plugged in as much as possible. Most laptops (even 10 years ago) can run directly off the wall power, which stops the battery from degrading (as fast) as older laptops where they were constantly powered by the battery, and the charger just kept it topped off.
Most of the battery advice you hear is just voodoo bullshit, or it makes a very small difference in the overall life of the battery. Just use your computer like normal.
As long as it is still running you should be fine, but it’s better to keep your battery around 80%. There are tools that block the charge until you ask for a full charge when needed
My son has a gaming laptop that is plugged in constantly. I vaguely remember reading that all modern laptops protect the battery to some degree, though not sure how. I’m guessing it is by using the mains while charging. Not sure what the damage is to a battery that is constantly fully charged.
After reading this thread I hope this is true I have had 2 laptops plugged in one for like 5 years non stop (this one I deactivated the battery in BIOS it’s old) and the other for about a year…
The only thing that could potentially degrade the battery is not cycling it. There should be no direct effect on the battery due to using mains power
When MacBooks are plugged in, they get their power from the charger. They are not simultaneously draining and charging the battery in general, unless they need more power than the charger can provide (unlikely unless you are using a charger with lower wattage than the official charger that came with your laptop).
I was not able to find an official source on this from a quick search, but if I remember correctly, this should be true for any moderately recent MacBook. Maybe any MacBook at all, since they only started making “MacBooks” in 2006 and then tech hasn’t changed much since then.
Personally, I leave my MBP plugged in during use whenever possible, and I typically unplug it at the end of the day. You don’t need to unplug it, but hey, it’s a good idea to unplug anything that doesn’t need to be plugged in, just to save power.
When MacBooks are plugged in, they get their power from the charger. They are not simultaneously draining and charging the battery in general.
so when the battery is fully loaded a controller tells the mobo to stop loading the battery and to use power from the charger to simply power the notebook, is this so?
Correct.
Batteries will still lose charge very slowly, so at some point the battery controller will top itself back up. This is nothing to worry about, and I’m not sure macOS (or Linux) will every display the true charge level of a battery. I believe there is some wiggle room built in at the firmware level.
Just keep the battery at 80%
No it’s got a charge controller that keeps it from fucking up the battery.
Source: I’ve owned many macbooks and worked on many more. The documentation and best practices for both implementing charge controllers for lithium ion batteries and the specific best practices for computers and phones with lithium ion batteries.
Your battery ought to be replaceable once the bottom panel is off the case. Just unplug it and use alcohol to weaken the glue while you scrape it out. New ones are less than $100.
E: if you’re worried about the thing catching on fire, stay on the latest macos you can and trust what it tells you in the uhh battery health section.
If you’re gonna use Linux then go ahead and replace the battery so that you’re not worrying about it failing miserably to communicate with the charge controller or battery itself and tell you when telhe thing is fucked and need replacing.
If you’re gonna use Linux then go ahead and replace the battery so that you’re not worrying about it failing miserably to communicate with the charge controller or battery itself and tell you when telhe thing is fucked and need replacing.
I’m already using linux, macos was nuked.
I don’t understand this paragraph. Do you mean new batteries for this model (macbook pro from 2014) work better with linux?
no, i mean that linux doesn’t always interface correctly with batteries and charge controllers in devices and subsequently can’t always tell the user about battery health.
the idea i was hoping to convey was that it’s fine to rely on the macos battery health indicators to figure out if you should replace it, but if you can’t rely on that software and especially if it’s an old battery its a good idea to replace it.
this is what sudo tlp-stat -b prints:
— TLP 1.6.1 --------------------------------------------
+++ Battery Care
Plugin: generic
Supported features: none available
+++ Battery Status: BAT0
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/manufacturer = DP
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/model_name = bq20z451
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/cycle_count = 666
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full_design = 6330 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full = 5043 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_now = 4936 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/current_now = 0 [mA]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status = Full
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_start_threshold = (not available)
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_end_threshold = (not available)
Charge = 97.9 [%]
Capacity = 79.7 [%]
do you still recommend a new battery?
nah you got about 400 more cycles at least.
keep it plugged in whenever you can to make it last longer.
is a 10 year old macbook pro
10+ years old laptop batteries have a habit of dying eventually. And some of them (not many) cause a fire then - especially while charging up.
I have seen it - well, 3 hours later in the morning then.
I would not leave this device alone with the power cord plugged in. Charge it only while you are there, so you recognize it, if it decides to heat up someday. Then have a metal bucket ready to carry it outside.
Yeah you don’t want the battery to sit at 100% or 0%. I just bulged out my 10 yr old work macbook battery by leaving it plugged in, not the first one i’ve seen either. There are utils that can set charge limits in linux https://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity
TBH you MBP battery is probably nearing EOL but it may actually be replaceable.
It’s a miracle that the battery is still working at ten years. The most realistic thing is to just keep up with your backups, and be ready to dispose of that laptop the moment the battery starts swelling.
