Battery Fast Degradation - MacBook Pro 14 M1 (2021)

I don't think this is normal, it's a little shy of 300 charge cycle, and it's already around 82-85% capacity.

Any thoughts on this?

that does seem like a lot - but what does the apple one say? i.e. in the system report battery health condition?

Do you have AppleCare+? If so then once you get to 80 then they would replace. However i think it needs to be their diagnosis not coconut battery's.

The one in System Report (I assume this is only a snapshot and refresh at an interval.) On the Terminal:

You got optimized charging on right?

Spaceboi Scaphandre said:

You got optimized charging on right?

On since day one, I never messed with the battery settings. Only used Coconut to check the status.

Looks good to me! My MacBook Air M1 13” 16GB/1TB has 92% battery health on Coconut battery, and I have 89 cycles. I think you’re doing pretty good! This is my first MacBook ever, and I bought it new around launch of M1 Air.

Spaceboi Scaphandre said:

You got optimized charging on right?

How do you turn it on? It never worked for me 😩

shadyman said:

How do you turn it on? It never worked for me 😩

What Mac are you using and what version of macOS? Optimized battery charging is on by default for Apple Silicon Macs.

You can check the status of Optimized Battery Charging by going

1. Choose Apple menu > System Settings.
2. Click Battery in the sidebar.

3. Click the Show Detail button

   next to Battery Health.

The option for turning Optimized Battery Charging on or off should be there

Spaceboi Scaphandre said:

What Mac are you using and what version of macOS? Optimized battery charging is on by default for Apple Silicon Macs.

You can check the status of Optimized Battery Charging by going

1. Choose Apple menu > System Settings.
2. Click Battery in the sidebar.

3. Click the Show Detail button

   next to Battery Health.

The option for turning Optimized Battery Charging on or off should be there

Click to expand...

M1 Pro, 14

Thanks, I’ll try this!

shadyman said:

M1 Pro, 14

Thanks, I’ll try this!

You're using the same Mac as me so Optimized Charging should already be on.

TinyMito said:

I don't think this is normal, it's a little shy of 300 charge cycle, and it's already around 82-85% capacity.
Any thoughts on this?

It's a lot I reckon, but like another poster wrote, if you got the 3 year AppleCare you'll definitely get another battery within the 3 year limit. I think once it hits 81-80 via the Apple info (not Coconut) you can call them and tell them and they might be able to do a remote diagnostic to check your battery (they can with iPhone). They'll then replace the battery for you. Should get done within 48 hours or if you go into a store you just wait a few hours. All depends on your country of residence though as Apple differs across countries in terms of their customer service.

smoking monkey said:

It's a lot I reckon, but like another poster wrote, if you got the 3 year AppleCare you'll definitely get another battery within the 3 year limit. I think once it hits 81-80 via the Apple info (not Coconut) you can call them and tell them and they might be able to do a remote diagnostic to check your battery (they can with iPhone). They'll then replace the battery for you. Should get done within 48 hours or if you go into a store you just wait a few hours. All depends on your country of residence though as Apple differs across countries in terms of their customer service.

That's cool, I did not know they can do it remotely. That might save me some time running to store at another city.

You can get a 180€ battery replacement with Apple once it hits 80% from Apple System Information --> Power section. They told me that a couple of weeks ago, as it would replace completely the bottom case, so that means the keyboard as well.. Which is a good thing taking in consideration that the keyboard looks like crap after a year of heavy lifting work.

Thankfully I managed to find a different way of doing this, I talked to Amazon and they gonna refund me my launch model 14" M1 Pro, therefore I'm going to buy the M2 Pro base model outright.

That is strange to replace the entire bottom just for the battery.

wow that degradation is fast. Friend had a macbook with 1800+ cycles and still 90% health. Naturally, that is another anomaly on its own but these are designed to be at 80% at 1000 cycles.

Make sure it's not always kept at 100% (use al dente to get manual control) and the temps don't stay high for a long time

Lol mine went down to 83% after 300 cycles

Same here. MacBook Pro M1 Max -> 89% after 1 year. Kinda sad compared to my other macs, considering this is my 8th one, first time it goes so fast... I admit it's most usually plugged in, and smart charge has always been on... but still. A bit weak.

My 16-inch M1 Pro is stellar. Never seeen anything like this before.

I wonder if the specific battery manufacturer matters when talking about degradation quality?? I'm talking about Sunwoda, Desay etc to name a few.
They should be within Apple's specs required for standard battery batch but who knows what quality lithium polymer/ion raw materials are used at factory.

To somewhat mitigate battery health decline there's an app called Aldente which user can set maximum battery charge limit & a few other features that reduce battery health declination.

Battery health will naturally decline whether you use it or not. No point babying it too excessively. Just use it your own style & replace it at Apple or 3rd party operator. Or if you have the skills, go for diy and save some coin.

Lower grade battery batch, most likely probably with mine. I don't know the manufacturer for mine.

Yeah seeing similar, and that's even with my limiting max charge to 50% which theoretically should have helped a lot. Either the estimated Qmax is off since I haven't done a "full cycle" in a long time (what people refer to as "calibrating" the gas gauge) which throws off the health estimate, or there really is a batch of bad batteries. Oh well, at least they didn't decide to glue them in like the older retina models.

Mine has never been particularly great:

2 days old:
2022-04-22 07:03:35 100.14815 6084 6075 12 MacBookPro18,3 -- -- 0C51

6 days old:
2022-04-27 00:39:59 96.23045 5846 6075 15 MacBookPro18,3 -- -- 0C51

1 Year old:
2023-04-20 00:36:38 94.23868 5725 6075 167 MacBookPro18,3 -- -- 0C51

Today (405 days):
2023-05-30 00:53:43 90.91358 5523 6075 190 MacBookPro18,3 -- -- 0C51


Optimized charging, 190 cycles and lost around 10%.

☕️


(My previous MBP took 20 months to dip down to a mere 101% of maximum capacity)