Service battery appears

Hello, i bought my aluminum macbook in april/may of 2009. Over the past couple of days, i have been experiencing much shorter battery life, along with the message under the battery menu, "service battery".
As of right now, the istat widget reports that the battery has went through 335 charge cycles, and battery health has been fluctuating, right now it is at 54%, but last night was 71%.
Could the battery problems be purely a software problem, or is the problem with the battery itself? Should I buy a new battery?

Try resetting the SMC:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
Which is about the only software thing you can do.
My guess is that you've killed the battery--that's a lot of cycles for just about a year. I bought mine at the same time you did and I have 79 cycles. More reading:
http://www.apple.com/batteries/
http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

Similar Messages

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    Hi there Sproox,
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    OS X Mavericks: Battery conditions
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14197
    Service Battery: The battery isn’t functioning normally, and you may or may not notice a change in its behavior or the amount of charge it holds. Take your computer in for service. You can continue to use your battery before it’s checked without harming your computer.
    -Griff W. 

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    not sure if this will help, but i will post my experience as well. i purchased the macbook 13" about 1 year ago. the battery had less than 100 cycles, and health was above 90%. within the last week, i noticed that my macbook shutdown without warning when the battery life reached about 25-30%. so before the computer reached that level, i plugged the power cord, but that caused the computer to shut down. i then noticed after turning the computer back on that "Service Battery" showed up on the menu bar. after reading the forums, i decided to take the macbook to an apple store. the genius took the computer and opened the casing. apparently, the problem was major dust inside the computer causing a malfunction. after cleaning it, the macbook worked perfectly.
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  • After upgrading to OSX 10.7.4 it says "Service Battery"

    Just upgraded to 10.7.4 and my MacBook Pro (mid 2010) now says "Service Battery". I have
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    completely discharged then recharget the battery, no results
    Repaired disk permissions, no results
    Verified the disk, appears to be OK so won't repair it.
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    vrlink wrote:
    Hi,
    It all is a lot confusing because in that article and others it says the battery of my MBP (builtin battery) doesn't need to be calibrated.
    I actually followed the directions in
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490
    reference from your post above " pre-calibrated "  at time of purchase.
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    more info on battery health: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1764220?threadID=1764220
    MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 2.4GHz IntelCore i5 320 HD 8GB RAM ParallelsDesktop6.0

  • Service Battery Warning

    Hello,I have a 2011 MacBook Pro, it currently has 504 charge cycles and is giving me the service battery condition warning. However, I have not noticed any significant difference in battery life as the apple website said should occur as I reach the Service Battery warning. Do I really need to have my battery serviced right now, or is the computer just programmed to give me a service battery warning after a certain number of cycles?

    Batteries will die when they want to.  Some just stop working even though they appear OK.  Others gradually lose duration.
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  • Service Battery on 1 1/2 year old MacBook Pro

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  • Service battery after upgrading software - not under warranty

    Hey guys,
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    Yes, that's correct, prepare to pay.  For instance, let's say you bought some new Pirellis (those are tires) for your Lamborghini, and the guy at the tire store told you that you would get 15,000 miles on them (these are for your Lamborghini, so they won't last 30,000 miles like some tires do).  So you head on out with your Lamborghini, and within 10,000 miles all four tires have lost their tread, three of them having blown at various times on the freeway.  But hey, it's your fault, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the tires.  Just like with your battery.  I don't think you should be thinking your Mac is giving you bad information or charging your battery incorrectly, based solely on the fact that about TEN THOUSAND other Mac users have noticed the same issue.  It's undoubtedly that your battery wore out, even though Apple says those batteries last (at a minimum) 300 cycles.  Or the fact that users have done a battery reset with PRAM and SMC reset, and had their batteries start to fully recharge again.  I wouldn't rely on that.  I would instead rely on people who reply with an absolutely worthless comment, as if they actually worked at the Apple Store. But hey, that's just my opinion - I'm sure a lot of people think Snow Leopard has been FLAWLESS, with no issues whatsoever.  In fact, I would say that for a BETA release, Snow Leopard hasn't been bad at all (wait, it's not a beta release, you say?  Hmmm....). 
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  • "Service Battery" Help

    I noticed that the service battery indicator has appeared on my Macbook Pro. I downloaded an app called battery health that gave me this information:
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    You should bring your MacBook Pro into an Apple store and have them run diagnostics on it.  It may be that the battery is bad, but I have seen where an issue with the logic board can show that the battery needs service.
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  • Re: 'Service Battery'? on MBP

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    You don't say what variant of the MacBook Pro you have nor its Mac OSX version, but you can post some hard data numbers that might help us diagnose the problem:
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