Chosen Solution
Hello! I bought an used macbook a1342 with an 128gb ssd (samsung pro) and 16gb mushkin ddr3. The notebook looks in mint condition, but I have a battery problem. It’s a replacement by Lavolta brand. Coconut battery shows 100% health and 60 cycles (i bought it 2 weeks ago with 54 cycles) and 6006 mAh. Manufacture date 15.06.2015 (4 years old…). On microsoft office, itunes music or stuff that doesn’t eat cpu or gpu it lasts ~3 hours, but on youtube it’s less than an hour. The biggest problem is that the cycle count is stuck at 60 for a full week now (coconut battery, battery health and system info), and i charged and discharged the notebook at least 5 times in this time. I tried SMC reset and PRAM, downgraded to El Capitan, nothing worked. Can the battery smart chip be faulty? I used genuine 65 watts charger and 85 watts. For a week it worked fine, i made 6 cycles. And the last question, there is any risk? Thanks, Dan
Most 3rd party batteries use a low quality BMS (management board). It sounds like you have one of these low grade clone packs with this issue. If you must have accurate logging, discard this one and buy a good one. There isn’t much you can do to correct this. If you want to use it until it shows signs of failure, keep tracking the charges manually as well as you can, and keep a log of how many cycles the battery actually has if you can remember to do this. Once it’s on the high end with calibration issues, the battery is worn out. You cannot use the capacity as a metric for wear on packs like this. And seriously pray someone didn’t fry the machine with a 3rd party charger. They’re at that age point :-(. Depending on how long (or how nasty) the charger is/was, they can damage these machines to the point they’re BER, especially as they age. If you are using one of these, throw it away and buy a real one BEFORE it fries the computer - it’s a matter of WHEN.
