Mavericks 10.9 Macbook Battery Abnormalities

My Late 08 MacBook after a 256GB Samsung SSD Upgrade 

When apple announced that their latest OS update Marvericks 10.9 would improve battery life when it was installed, I got all hot and bothered thinking about the real time CPU coalescing technology and ram footprint compression and core os optimizations  that enables this energy saving operating system technology. It turns out that there is a flaw in the update that actually caused widespread damaged to peoples macbook batteries. 

Thousands of people are reporting on the Apple forums that installing 10.9 cut their battery life in half; people with the latest Macbook airs seeing a decreased runtime for 10+ hours with Mountain Lion 10.8 to less than 6 hours with Mavericks 10.9



The Good 

After I started posting online about my battery abnormality experience with 10.9, the problem was solved for me through a processes I will talk about in the Ugly section later in this posting. Now, after someone at Apple modified my Macbooks firmware through my internet connection, I am seeing longer battery life with 10.9 than I was with 10.8. I am still testing this and am working on my Macbook to post this entry, but in general so far it seems to reduce battery drain my 40% or better. That is awesome :) Thank you Apple. The OS improvements and energy saving optimizations are great. 

The Bad 

When I first installed 10.9 on my late 2008 unibody aluminum Macbook, a system error popped up warning me that my battery was critically damaged. This made no sense, in 10.8 my system indicated 84% battery health with 356 cycles, most of which I shallowed cycled between 30 and 80 percent state of charge to avoid overcharging damage or deep discharging damage. This shallow cycling allows my battery to continue giving me 3+ hours of life after 5 years of use. 

Now with 10.9 freshly installed the battery monitoring software was indicating %32 health, and it spontaneously ran the battery in my macbook down to 1% state of charge. In reading through the apple forums I discovered that Spotlight and Chrome were applications suspected of causing background battery drain that is not indicated because of a glitch in the information readout processes that otherwise use statistical analysis and charge voltage detection to estimate state of charge, remaining run time and estimated battery health as a percentage.  I uninstalled Chrome, and disabled Spotlight. Now I am using the new Safari, and everything seems to be good now. While I fared well overall others did not. 

It turns out that there is a flaw in the update that actually caused widespread damaged to peoples macbook batteries. Many thousands of macbook owners are reporting on the Apple forums that installing 10.9 cut their battery life in half; people with the latest Macbook Airs seeing a decreased runtime from 10+ hours with Mountain Lion 10.8 to less than 6 hours with Mavericks 10.9. 

The Ugly 

I immediately started posting about this problem to social networks, the Apple forum, and other online place, tipping off tech news publishers of the problem. My home internet connection is secured with layered network security, the hardwire part with 256bit AES. Someone from Apple appears to have broken through my network security using an backdoor network transfer and remote protocol built into 10.9 to modify the power control firmware on my macbook. 

This spooks me out. It tells me a few things. 1. When I became a squeaky public vocal wheel crying foul about batter woes with 10.9, someone oiled my wheel and solved my problem to placate me into silence. Now my machine is fine but thousands of other MacBooks are having battery fubar issues that remain unresolved. 

Also suspect was an OS update for Camera RAW support, as code contained in this update did far more than just add more camera RAW support. Core power control firmware edits are evident on my system, and I did not modify any of this personally. I do not have the knowledge or skills to write power control firmware for my macbook, but I did manage to catch an unauthorized access to my network, a defeating my of software and hardware firewalls, and a logged system changed to the power control firmware on my ancient MacBook. 

This kind of security violation and unauthorized network access makes me very concerned. That being said, if Apple is being a benevolent Dictator and updating the power control firmware in MacBooks to address battery life problems with 10.9 in a way that is not obvious, sneaky and outright strange, at least they are using their skills and resources to solve problems; it is the way in which they appear to be going about it that I find concerning or ugly. That being said, 10.9 with the corrections seems to greatly extend battery life ^^ in my vintage MacBook :)