If you depend on your old MacBook, one of the most frustrating things you can run into is having a battery that doesn’t hold a charge. MacBook batteries are the lifeblood of the devices, so it’s fortunate that it is easy to determine whether a battery pack has life left in it or if it needs to be replaced. Today I’ll show you how to check the health of a MacBook battery and provide some ideas on how to replace a battery that is no longer working.
How long do MacBook batteries last?
Apple’s health guideline for a MacBook battery is that it will retain 80% of its original charge capacity after a specified number of complete charge cycles. What’s a “complete charge cycle”? It means using all of the battery’s capacity, but not necessarily all in one session. If I took my MacBook Pro from 100% charge down to 50% on both Monday and Tuesday and plugged it in on Monday night to “top it off”, I’ve experienced one charge cycle during those two days.
When a MacBook battery has reached Apple’s assigned “maximum cycle count”, it will still work, but it may not hold a complete charge or last as long when the MacBook is running on battery power. MacBooks that need to be plugged in pretty much all the time just to be able to operate usually need to have the battery replaced.
Each MacBook model has an assigned “maximum cycle count number” for the battery. Most new MacBook models have a maximum cycle count of 1,000, while older models can have a cycle count as low as 300. Yes, battery technology keeps getting better…
If you know the model name and year of your MacBook, you can determine the maximum cycle count for the laptop. From the Apple menu, select About this Mac…, and as you see in the screenshot below, this provides information about the version of macOS being run as well as other info about the Mac:
For this MacBook, I know that this is a 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro. Armed with that information, I can go to Apple’s MacBook battery life support page to see that this model has a maximum cycle count of 1,000.
Testing Battery Health
So, how do you go about finding the number of cycle counts your MacBook battery has experienced? On the About This Mac window (that’s the image seen above), click the System Report button. This launches the System Information utility, which can also be launched directly from the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder.
Once you’ve launched System Information, find and click on the word “Power” under Hardware in the left sidebar. Doing this displays a lot of information about the system powering your MacBook (see screenshot below):
For this MacBook Pro, the cycle count is very low — only 24 full charge cycles! This means that the MacBook battery should last for years. However, if the cycle count is greater than Apple’s recommended maximum cycle count — say 1,050 for this MacBook Pro — then it is probably a good time to think about either replacing the battery or the MacBook Pro.
Battery Replacements
Older MacBooks were designed to make replacing a battery pack an easy task. However, there are not a lot of places where you can buy those replacement battery packs. One of them is MacSales.com (disclosure: I write for the MacSales.com blog), a company that has batteries for MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models, with many of the replacements having up to 50% more capacity than the original batteries.
Let’s say that we looked at the hardware overview in System Information for a MacBook Air and found that the model identifier was “MacBookAir3,1” — an 11-inch MacBook Air from late 2010. Going to the MacSales.com battery page, I see that there’s a 38 Watt-Hour battery available for this model of MacBook Air for $69.88. That’s a lot less expensive than buying a new MacBook Air!
To install the battery, I can watch the installation videos on the battery page to find out how to do it myself. Old MacBooks and MacBook Pros had a battery door on the bottom, making battery replacement as easy as turning a small latch with a coin, popping out the old battery pack, installing the new battery pack and then locking the latch. Newer MacBooks aren’t as simple to upgrade — in fact, most recent models will need to have battery replacements done by Apple or authorized service centers because those batteries are actually glued in!
Like this article? Consider supporting Apple World Today with a $5 monthly Team AWT membership.
