81% battery health on a 6 year old MacBook Air

coconutBattery report

Early 2020 MacBook Air, I think the max spec vis-a-vis RAM¹ (16GB) and CPU² , and a 512GB SSD³ (it could have been upgraded to 2TB at the time of purchase). Apple claimed up to 11 hours of web browsing, but Google’s AI reports “many users find that active, mixed-use workloads (especially video calls) drain the battery within 4–6 hours.”

I’m not getting 6 hours. With 81% battery health (after 280 cycles, but also 72 months), I should be getting about 3:14 from 100% to dead battery. I think I’m actually seeing ~2 hours, but I’ll measure eventually.

Anyway. The question I’m pondering: Do I swap the battery ($110 for the kit from iFixIt), and it’s described as a “moderately difficult” replacement. Could probably also have Asurion do it; they did a good job with the MacBook Pro. I know Intel is a dead end, but this is probably the most capable Intel Mac I own, and there will likely be edge cases that I still need x86 support for, for a long while at least, and Apple has a history of killing off tech like Rosetta after a handful of major versions⁴, so ... Yeah.

Meanwhile, I have an upgraded 2015 MacBook Air 11" (dual core i7-5650U @ 2.20GHz, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM, 1TB Crucial P3 SSD), the battery in it is still reporting 84.7% battery health after almost a decade (2017-06-12) and 661 cycles. (Three years ago it was 91% health.)

¹ 16 GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4X
² Intel® Core™ i7-1060NG7 CPU @ 1.20GHz (quad core)
³ APPLE SSD AP0512N
⁴ E.g., Rosetta was introduced with Mac OS X 10.4.4 Tiger in early 2006 and was dropped in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, released in July 2011. 68K emulation stayed in PowerPC Macs for a longer period, 1994 to Mac OS 9.2.2 in 2001, but that was a different time. Actually, so was 2006-2011.