15 dying MacBooks?

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Hi there,

I'm having quite a big problem with a few of the MacBooks at the school in which I work. I was hoping someone on here might be able to shed some light.

We have a batch of 15 13" MacBooks, purchased sometime between 2004 and 2005, so they are quite old. Recently, the batteries have started doing odd things. To put it simply, they just die! And I don't mean discharge quickly or show limited life...I mean completely cut out...without warning.

To give an example, a MacBook will have been charging overnight. It is switched on in the morning and will show good battery life. After about 20 minutes of use, and when the battery is showing maybe 60% or so remaining, the power will just cut out completely, as if the battery had been pulled out. Given a few seconds, the laptop can then be powered back on (without a charger!) and will boot up fine. It will then very likely repeat the problem after a few minutes. This is all with the battery life still showing as adequate.

This incident is not isolated. It has begun occurring on about 7 of our 15 MacBooks within the last couple of weeks. Very odd!

Can anyone shed some light on the issue? I've tried resetting the SMC on all of the MacBooks by holding the power button with battery removed. This doesn't seem to have made a difference. Am I looking at 15 new batteries sometime soon?

Many Thanks

 

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The system profiler does not appear to have a 'Condition' option on the power tab. Is this a good thing?

 

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Here are the fields under the 'battery' section. I don't see a 'condition' field

How do the rest of the figures look? The 'Full Charge Capacity' looks a bit low. On some of the other MacBooks, this is about 3000mAh.

 

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Yes, the MacBooks are stored in a security trolley where they are more or less constantly plugged in.

 

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The laptops aren't constantly run off mains AC, they are simply stored in a secure trolley, which has the secondary purpose of charging them.

EDIT: Upon taking a look at the Apple discussion forums, I see that literally hundreds of people are experiencing these exact same symptoms. yet no one seems to have come up with a solution...

 

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Sorry mate, I wasn't ignoring you. But I only get to work on the laptops when I'm at work, and there are 15 of them! I'm calibrating one as we speak, and I'll just have to see what happens.

I agree, the batteries most definately need replacing. However, I don't see why this would be causing the laptops to go into what appears to be 'emergency sleep' with a good 60% life remaining.

Battery health is showing as 40% by the way.

 

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tim80bwi, why not just call Apple?

Never know you might just be able to blag 15 replacement batteries

For a grand's worth of batteries, it might be worth a shot!

Will be giving it a go this week.

My Macbook is almost 2 years ld, 222 cycles and 99% battery health. It feels as good as new today, regularly get 3+ hours out of it.

Congrats

 

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Just a bit of an update...

All batteries were replaced free of charge by Apple, no questions asked, under an existing recall. Very happy with that outcome.