Apple MacBook Air Charging Flaws: Is Excessive Heat The Root Cause?

Yesterday, I told you I’d recently been experiencing erratic results when attempting to recharge the embedded battery within my first-generation Apple MacBook Air. Whenever I encountered a situation in which the system reported a ‘battery is not charging’ status when AC-tethered, I’d need to completely drain the battery in order to stimulate a successful recharge cycle.

My extreme workaround may not be strictly necessary, as it turns out. After yesterday’s latest battery conditioning session, I put the system to sleep last night and awoke this morning to find it still fully charged. Two consecutive attempts earlier this morning to briefly drain the battery to the ~90%-full level then reconnect AC power both resulted in successful full recharges. But just now, after siphoning off charge to the 20%-full threshold, I again found myself unable to persuade the charging circuitry to kick into gear…

…until, on a hunch, I disconnected AC power, put the MacBook Air to sleep (which, you’ll note, also occurs when the battery completely drains), let it sit for five minutes, then reconnected the power adapter. The red ‘charging’ light embedded in the MagSafe connector went on this time, and when I re-awoke the system I saw that it was indeed charging again.

Thoughts:

• Running down the battery to the 20%-full level obviously took longer than running it down to the 90%-full threshold. And the region around the MagSafe connector was warmer to the touch when recharge failed than with my earlier two successful recharge attempts.
• It’s also been on average quite a bit warmer outside the past few days than in prior times. And of course, it’s warmer now than it was earlier this morning.
• So perhaps I’m directly dealing with an ambient-therefore-system temperature-related marginality of the battery, its companion charging circuitry, or both, which putting the system to sleep (therefore cooling it down) circumvents
• Or maybe heat-related current draw is the crux of the issue. A hotter system spins its fan(s) faster, for example, thereby sinking more juice from its power subsystem. In recent warm days, my AC/DC adapters may only be capable of sourcing enough current to run the system in active mode, not to recharge the battery in parallel. Putting the system to sleep, therefore dramatically reducing operating power requirements, frees up enough current to enable recharging.

Regardless of whether temperature or current (or some combination of the two) is the crux of my predicament, I’ve got a (perhaps already obvious to readers) problem. The Apple Store in Reno is a 45-minute drive distance from me. Even if the system is exhibiting the issue when I leave my house, it’ll ‘fix itself’ by the time I get to my destination. And even if I’m armed with screenshot evidence, I doubt I’ll be able to convince the Genius Bar staff to accept my MacBook Air for repair if it seems to be operating properly to them at the time. So I guess I’ll cancel my appointment and limp along with my sleep-mode kludge, in the hopes that the situation doesn’t appreciably (and rapidly) worsen.