David J Rice

So I was at the Oxegen music festival at the weekend past, and it was absolutely brilliant (more to come on that later…) anyway on the monday after, waking up (some time in the afternon) I turned on my MacBook, everything seemed as normal until I went to lift it into the living room and removed the power adapter, the screen went black and left a very tired me in a very confused state.

What happened?

Well, looking in the menu bar at my battery icon it has a nice big X through it instead of the percentage charge (or a plug), clicking on the icon i’m treated to the lovely text saying No batteries available… in disbelief I lift my MacBook pro and oh yes the battery is indeed still there, confused? so am I.

No batteries available… attempting a soltion

With any hardware failure on a mac there are a number of steps to take to try and fix things.

1. Remove any unecessary external peripherals
2. Restart
3. Shutdown and remove power cables and battery
4. Reconnect the ac cable and battery and turn on
5. Reset PRAM and NVRAM
6. Reset PMU

When none of this worked I knew it was time to phone for help!

Apple & Mac-sys to the rescue

After a quick phone call to apple to register this fault and told him all of the steps I’d already taken (it was great to get someone smart on the other end, as he didn’t waste my time asking me to repeat them… that’s happened before) anyway, he suggested to try another battery to see if that should be the problem before they send me out a futile replacement battery.

So i took a quick jaunt to my nearest (read only) apple certified service provider in Northern Ireland. The guys at Mac-Sys are always really helpful and all too happy to help… even went that extra mile by using one of their personal machines batteries to check if mine was a dud, now that’s great service! My battery wouldn’t charge in their machine, and inserting the definitely working battery in mine everything was dandy.

Not alone

After a bit of googling, I came across a thread on the apple discussion forum where a lot of others seem to have had this same problem.

The Why?!

It appears that the battery in the MacBook pro has a Minimum charge level which if one were to go on holiday for a couple of days, would drop below. Once it reaches below this point the MacBook does not recognize it has a battery inserted, and thus can not be charged!

Hopefully this is something as simple as a firmware / software problem that can be fixed by Apple sometime soon. Well Apple, this is your second strike (major problem) one more with this MacBook and I believe you owe me a new one :)