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Battery Woes 2....The Empire Strikes Back
BATTERY WOES 2....THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK....I know you're all waiting on pins and needles to get the skinny on my trip to the Apple Genius Bar, so here's how it went. My appointment was scheduled for 3:20. At 3:20 they called my name. I told the tech my story, he nodded, plugged a doodad into my USB port and booted my MacBook. After a few seconds it came up with a special screen that said:
BATTERY STATUS: BAD
There was a bunch of other detail on the screen, but basically, it just confirmed that my battery was bad. And for what it's worth, the tech says we were all wrong: there's no harm in letting the battery discharge completely, and no harm in letting it sit around for a couple of months. It is a good idea to let it discharge to zero and then charge completely once a month or so, but that's just to keep the battery calibrated. And it's also a good idea to discharge it to 50% and turn the machine off if you think you're not going to use it for five or six months. But that wasn't my problem. I just had a bad battery. So he replaced it, and at about 3:30 I was on my way.
So: all whining about the battery aside, I have to say that this was just about the most painless tech support experience I've ever had. Kudos to Apple.
keep the battery "calibrated"? my oh my, these apple machines aren't like other machines, are they?
So at the genius bar, were they all wearing black tee shirts that said think different?
Did they do the silhouette dance for you?
No, they were all wearing black tee shirts that said "Not all heroes wear capes." Unfortunately, I'm not cool enough to know what that's a reference to.
Well, given the number of photons and electrons spilled in discussing this issue the last few days, I wouldn't be suprised if Steve Jobs was on the phone saying "make sure this Drum troublemaker gets good service - it'll be cheaper than getting him a pair of concrete galoshes".
OTOH, maybe Apple just has good service. Did you get a free latte during the service?
Unfortunately, I'm not cool enough to know what that's a reference to.
Could be The Incredibles.
keep the battery "calibrated"? my oh my, these apple machines aren't like other machines, are they?
no, it's just that nobody else bothers to tell you.
How did the hat taste?
Apple uses batteries which lose capacity by how old they are; regardless of other factors.
Which does mean that at six years old, my laptop's capacity is pretty low (a bit over an hour). Though they replaced it for free once...
One thing I'd point out is that as a general rule, dealing with the Genius bar is an extremely painless experience. Not all Apple Stores are created equal (so, for example, I would avoid the Grove, but Century City, Santa Monica and the Bev Center are all excellent--in your neck of the woods, I've had good experience at Fashion Island and South Coast Plaza.
Really, having access to the Genius Bar is one of the things that makes Mac ownership superior to PC ownership.
I let my MacBook battery drain down to zero and sit empty for at least five hours every *week,* and I'm not even a blogger. It's right there in the manual that came with the computer. Once a week is pushing it a bit, but after more than two years the battery is still running strong.
Wait, why should Kevin eat his hat? It wasn't he who was wrong, it was the legions of slavish Applephiles who claimed with supremely misguided confidence that draining a battery kills it, and that Kevin had shown painfully bad judgment in having the gall to set his computer aside for a while. Instead, it turns out, a shitty company made a shitty battery that didn't work, and now we're apparently meant to prostrate ourselves anew in cowed gratitude because said company's third-rate "tech team" was able to read the dang diagnostic software well enough to know what new part to stick in.
It's a wonderful @%!&ing life.
So you took your computer in for a battery of exams?
there's no harm in letting the battery discharge completely, and no harm in letting it sit around for a couple of months
The first is true because the energy management software doesn't really allow it get to a complete discharge where voltages drop to critical levels.
The second is true if you don't do it following a complete discharge and allow the battery to reach critical voltage levels.
There's advice you get from folks who sell hardware and batteries and there's another type of advice you get from grumpy tech folks in your comments.
Huh. The usual rule with lipos and li-ion batteries is to not drain them below 20%, if you want a good number of cycles out of em. That and check their manufacturing date before you buy them if possible, and keep them in the fridge.
I can't see it losing enough capacity to need a re-calibration cycle more than once every couple of months. The "don't burn the customer's house down" li-ion circuits, charge and level monitors, etc add so many layers to protect the consumer bodily and mentally from battery arcana and rundowns, that I think the machines sometimes outsmart themselves.
My bet is that "bad battery" means: the batteries drained below 3v per cell, so the protection circuit wouldn't allow it to recharge. The tech is then trained to replace it because altho you could technically just force-charge it for 5 minutes, it's not worth the liability risk. Kudos to apple then.
Bush : PC :: Obama : Apple
I don't think it's a reference to anything at all, just a one of the "clever" sayings apple wants its workforce to have on their shirts. See the list of such sayings at the applestore info stie
So I guess kevin is still just about as cool as he thought he was before he visited the genius bar.
I feed my MacBook, Zachary, only carbon-free vegan cosmic electricity that comes from off-the-grid organic bird-free sources.
The tech says we were all wrong: there's no harm in letting the battery discharge completely, and no harm in letting it sit around for a couple of months.
He's wrong. So says Apple's technical documentation and anyone who knows something about battery technology. It is simple scientific fact. Saying it isn't so doesn't make it any less true than saying global warming isn't so or evolution isn't so. There aren't two sides to facts. The Wikipedia article on Lithium-ion batteries has links to some great sources and BatteryUniversity.com also has some great info if you really want to know more. But here are the facts: lithium-ion batteries continuously discharge and when they discharge below a certain threshold, they suffer irreparable damage. It is chemistry. How do you think batteries go bad? Was it working fine before you locked it in a closet near empty? And then it stopped working months later when you dug it out again?
Sorry for taking this so seriously, but this is frustrating. It seems like you have been given everything you should need to have a rational understanding of the problem and you are ignoring it for an explanation that absolves you of personal responsibility. "The planet seemed cool enough when I got it. Now it's too hot. Turns out, I just had a bad planet."
The moral is, ignore user manuals and scientific fact at your own peril.
Actually, the secret ingredient in a Mac's battery is a microscopic drop of Dennis Kucinich's blood.
"One thing I'd point out is that as a general rule, dealing with the Genius bar is an extremely painless experience. Not all Apple Stores are created equal (so, for example, I would avoid the Grove, but Century City, Santa Monica and the Bev Center are all excellent--in your neck of the woods, I've had good experience at Fashion Island and South Coast Plaza."
Good lord. Am I the only one who has to drive two hours to the nearest Apple Store???
Does Kevin discount everything we say on all the other threads too?
Kevin, did you go to the Apple Store at Crystal Court?
I visited the genius bar at the Apple Store there last Saturday morning and had an equally painless healing experience for our MacBook in recovery from a needlessly debilitating wound that I inadvertently inflicted on the system folder earlier in the day.
Calling themselves Geniuses is perhaps a little far fetched, but the techs behind the counter are knowledgeable and very helpful. tks rich
[i]Does Kevin discount everything we say on all the other threads too? [/i]
Wouldn't you?
They *actually* call the tech support counter at an Apple Store the "Genius Bar"?!?
Geez, could you be just a little more pretentious?
So what do they call the men's room?
"So what do they call the men's room?"
The iCUP.
Once upon a time, it took a real genius to screw up a mac enough to need tech support. So they'd belly up to the counter and chat, waiting for server.
Hence, the Genius Bar.
Next I'll tell you how they came up with Ni-Hi sodapop...
wouldn't you
Well yeah, but I thought the illusion was an important element of successful blogging.
Geez, could you be just a little more pretentious?
It's a small price to pay to keep underpayed obsessive-compulsive geeks happy. If you're an employer you out to consider it yourself.
That really is genius, to design a little doodad that you plug into the USB slot, boot the computer, and it puts a message on the screen saying "BATTERY STATUS BAD."
Every computer repair place should have one. Just think how many batteries they could sell!
Apple is now "The Empire"? No longer the one with The Force?
Sounds like faint praise from Kevin. I imagine The Force is with the little one now -- the one next to Inkblot.
PC = internal combustion engine
Mac = internal combustion engine... with FINS!
oh, and BATTERY BAD = </genius>
Toldja so!
thank god, now i can sleep at nights.
snark aside, i still use pc's, i don't begrudge anybody their apples.
that being said, everyone should always read the manual.
You now understand one of the reasons Mac people like their computers so much. I can't say every Mac I've had has been perfect, but whenever I've gone to take care of a problem, the people at the Apple Store have been terrific. Unlike so many technical/customer support sites, their goal isn't to process as many people as possible, their goal is to fix your problem.
The Genius bar saved my entire music collection at one point, diagnosing my problem, offloading the relevant contents of my hard drive, replacing my hard drive for free, and loading my data back in again, What is more (and actually better), they did it all in 15 minutes, having called my name within one minute of the time I scheduled online. They didn't keep me on hold for an hour, they didn't roll their eyes and ask me if the computer was plugged in, they just grabbed the computer, listened to me for a minute, and then diagnosed and fixed the problem. They can call themselves the Apple Pigf**kers for all I care.
Oh, and Apple=Obama? Wow. Two successful marketing pitches meet in the center of lampwick's brain.
The shirts are a reference to DC vs Marvel superheroes. Batman, Superman - capes. Spiderman, Iron Man, Hulk - no capes.
Apple is clearly in league with Stan Lee.
"Mac = internal combustion engine... with FINS!"
Well, this is a pretty ridiculous statement.
Apple would be the anti-FINS.
Fins were an iconic element of the extravagant, painfully beautiful, classic American cars.
Apple's toys are exactly the opposite: strip away all the beautiful ornamentation until you have, in terms of design, almost nothing: just curvey, minimalist, mostly white things.
Adolphus -
Apple just opened its first store in Maine, only an hour away! On the other hand, their mall owner is rumored to be filing for bankruptcy.
Told-ja-so.
The battery was bad and they replaced it. Microsoft, on the other hand, charges for the fixes its crappy software requires. (This is why there's no genius bar for pc users. There might be a sucker bar, though.)
Phew. I am very glad that the Genius Bar worked as it should have, and it's obvious that the battery was, in fact, BAD. I see very little difference between Macs and PCs in feature set or -- ahem -- usability: each one seems to do some set of things in a completely unintuitive way. Apple, however, being a hardware company, has support for both os and machinery, and that IS a big advantage. In the PC world, the wide array of chips makes hardware problems vastly more probable and at the same time much more difficult to support. For Mac users, that's a big plus to have that store network.
Dell and HP offer at-home support. If they don't solve your problem on the phone, they will send someone to you. The guy may not be a genius, but if he can't fix it, and you are under warranty, he will replace it.
Wait, your brand-new Mac had a bad battery, so "kudos to Apple"?! Shouldn't it be kudos for lemons?
They will send someone to you? Why would you want a Dell or HP service dude/dudette to come to your house?
Maybe you didn't think of trying this, but any laptop worth its salt will boot up on wall power with no battery in the slot. That way a bad battery doesn't stop the whole show.
I hope this is true with Apple.
ASDF above is correct on the technical side. Lion batteries (used by all current laptops) are damaged if power goes too low, and charge drops even when they are just sitting around. In fact they get worse sitting around no matter what you do!
If you really want to hold them with the minimum deterioration freeze them at 50% charge, but don't use until they've warmed up.
Lion batteries aren't perfect.
"Why would you want a Dell or HP service dude/dudette to come to your house?"
To your house, maybe not.
To your place of business, where the PC with the problem is the 'cash register' at the end of the checkout aisle, that is something many, many people want.
Some people might feel funny waiting in line at a genius bar with their desktop tower under one arm and their all-in-one printer/scanner/fax under the other hoping to find out why their documents don't print. (And even funnier lugging this hardware to the store, especially if they don't happen to own a car -- which many city folk do not these days).
Try taking your washer / drier, oven, fridge, or plumbing to the store for service to avoid a technician coming to your house.
Steve Jobs offers no house calls -- so house calls must be bad.
JS - Which is why Macs don't have desktop towers; and why their shipping boxes are shaped flat and with handles like suitcases, so that you can easily tote the flat desktop screen (which contains everything inside it) anywhere you want.
Actually, it's just that the desktop towers and server stacks are so well built and the owners are so intelligent that they never have a problem that can't be easily resolved at home.
The quality of the user is lower for the macbook.
Ah -- no repairs needed for Apple desktops. Now why didn't I think of that.
No desktop towers? I'm posting this on my imaginary Mac desktop tower.