MBP 33 percent battery bug

Three or four times my MBP has completely shut down (without warning) once the battery got depleted to between 28 and 33 percent of its capacity. Last night I was recording the next PowerPage podcast when my MBP ungracefully shut down the moment the battery got to 33 percent. When I flipped it over and pressed the small button to check the battery capacity zero LEDs lit up, not even a single blinking LED. After connecting the AC adapter and rebooting the battery icon in the menu bar showed 28 percent remaining. Ample capacity to keep it running for 20-30 more minutes under normal circumstances.

On 3 May 2006 I wrote about a silent recall of some early MacBook Pro batteries after Christopher Price from PCSIntel.com had uncovered a potential issue with the first batch of MacBook Pro batteries in his blog entry "Now The MacBook Pro Batteries…"

I'm not ready to call this a pandemic and I'm not sure if it's part of any sort of a recall but my MBP is from the first batch (Week 7, SN W8607...) and the battery (SN 6N606...) is the original that it came with so the possibility exists that there is a problem with some of the early batteries.

The support representative that I spoke to was very helpful and was prompt in offering to send me a new battery via an advance exchange. When I asked if this was a known issue, he politely said only he hadn't heard anything about this particular problem, but checked to make sure that the battery he was sending was from a new build that might have fixed some of the minor flaws with initial units.

Have you experienced that 33 percent battery bug in a MBP? Sound off in the TalkBack.