MacBook Performance Plunges When Battery Removed
Before you say "why would anyone remove their battery from their laptop when plugged in?," there are some who do so in the hopes of extending their battery lifespan. And before you scoff at a performance hit of this sort, we're not talking a small amount: it's a 37% degradation.
Gearlog found this strange behavior running tests with a new MacBook Pro on third-party RAM. They saw a huge drop with one set of RAM, and after scratching their heads over it, made the connection that the battery had been removed in one test (my guess is after multiple swaps they grew tired of removing the battery).
Why would a laptop manufacture do this, you might ask? Actually, that's a good question. But Apple does have an answer, hidden in a KB article. It says:
If the battery is removed from a MacBook or MacBook Pro, the computer will automatically reduce the processor speed. This prevents the computer from shutting down if it demands more power than the A/C adaptor alone can provide.That's interesting. The AC adapter can't provide (BTW, nice spelling error Apple) enough power for the system under all conditions? Slowing down when on battery power is one thing, but the other way?
The only answer I can come up with is to keep the size of the adapter down (anyone take a look at the AC adapter on a Dell Inspiron XPS M1730?) Apple decided to require the battery as an additional power source.
This brings up some questions:
- Does the system slow if the battery cannot hold a charge for some reason, but is still in place? It would if the above theory holds.
- Third-party battery? Does the system detect that and slow down?
We benchmarked our 2.53-Ghz MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM using Cinebench R10's multiprocessor test, and achieved a score of 5,549 with the battery present and 3,504 with the battery removed.One thing's for sure: if the second of the two questions above is answered with a "Yes," that's sure to hurt third-party battery manufacturers.
Obviously, the answer to this is to keep your battery in your system, but it's still the first instance I can recall of such behavior in a laptop.
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1 comments:
i noticed this trying to play sims 3 when my macbook battery died a few months ago and i was stuck running off AC alone. it always ran fine beforehand but suddenly it would only start initialising the start screen before the whole notebook would power off, almost as if the magsafe had fallen out when running on power alone (it hadn't). tried a few times cause thought it was somewhat curious too! got a new battery and it hasn't crashed since.
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