Sometimes it’s helpful to know how many times a battery has been fully cycled on a MacBook Pro. For Instance, if a user is requesting a replacement because their current battery isn’t holding a full charge. I want to check and see how many times it’s been fully cycled and compare that to what Apple has listed as the maximum cycle count. If the number of times the battery has been cycled is extremely low … maybe it doesn’t need replaced. You might just need to do a SMC reset first.

Here’s an example of my script. There are bash, python, and ruby version on my github. I tested them on only a couple of OS X 10.9 & 10.10 machines, so as always … results may vary.

The output is formatted and looks something like this, for easy reading:

  Current Battery Cycles: 231
  Maximum Battery Cycles: 1000
  Battery Status: Good
  Cycles Left: 769