You might have been scared when the MacBook Pro battery started draining when it was plugged in. This is an issue being discovered in new models of the Apple Macbook pro. However, this has nothing to do with your battery going bad. It’s just a safety feature to protect your MacBook’s battery health and extend its life. How? Let’s see further.
Generally our MacBook is typically left plugged in all day, and we only unplug it when we leave the house. When we click on battery icon in the menu bar, we can see Battery is Charged and Power Source is Power Adapter once it reach 100%. Normally, we expect that the battery percentage will stay at 100% and never expect that it will decrease while plugged in. But, sadly, this does occur and steadily reduces the battery %. Now at this point we get totally confused and think that the battery or the charging cord and adapter have been damaged.
Resetting your MacBook’s SMC (System Management Controller) is the most common fix for this kind of problem. Everything will be fine after you do the SMC reset, and your battery percentage will stay at 100% until you shut down your Mac. You could believe your issue has been resolved at this point, allowing you to get on with your task. Yes, you are correct—but only for the now. The following day, you will realise that your problem hasn’t gone away.
The next day you find that your battery starts draining againg and you keep on resetting the SMC. However, restarting the SMC is not the answer. Because your MacBook is not having this problem, you shouldn’t take any action.
Are you happy now?
Actually this is happening because Apple took a great step to save our MacBook battery. With the release of the macOS Catalina 10.15.5 update, this new feature was specifically developed to extend the life of the MacBook battery.
This is enabled by default on your MacBook and you can see this by going System Preferences > Energy Saver > select Battery Health and you will see it’s already ticked the battery health management box.
This behavior of your MacBook can be noticed when you plug in your MacBook, even when the battery is at 100%, the battery gradually starts to discharge and the percentage steadily drops to between 88 and 90% (this amount could change depending on the device you use) and then restart charging in order to quickly bring the battery percentage to 100 percent; this process won’t be counted as another battery cycle. The number of cycles therefore stays the same.
You can check the cycle count by clicking on Apple logo at the top bar while holding the option key > System Information > Power. Do not panic if your MacBook’s battery gets drained even when plugged in. Check with these settings listed above and you should be able to know if you’re MacBook is working fine or not. Rest assured, your MacBook is completely fine. These are just self protective features by Apple to increase the life span your MacBook battery.
