About this replacement
Apple MacBook Pro Retina 15" A1398 — 11.26V Li-Polymer Replacement Battery (A1494)
This is an 11.26V, 8400mAh Li-Polymer replacement battery for the Apple MacBook Pro Retina Display 15" A1398. It fits the ME293 and ME294 configurations, including the late 2013 production run. Capacity figure is 94.58Wh, matching the original cell specification.
- A1398 platform fit — ME293, ME294, late 2013: These three configurations share the same battery bay geometry, connector pinout, and BMS handshake protocol. The A1494 part number covers all of them. No adaptor or wiring change is needed.
- Bench tested on actual hardware: We cycled this cell on an A1398 logic board and confirmed the BMS handshake completed cleanly. The SMC accepted the new cell, charge current ramped normally, and no error flags appeared in the system power log.
- SMC reset after installation: The A1398 SMC caches charge data from the previous cell. After fitting this battery, perform an SMC reset before first use — hold Shift + Control + Option + Power for ten seconds. Skipping this step can cause the fuel gauge to read from stale EEPROM values and display an inaccurate charge percentage from the first boot.
macOS reporting battery health as "Service Recommended" immediately after swap
macOS reads battery health from the EEPROM data stored in the battery's BMS controller, not from a live cell measurement. When a new cell is installed, the EEPROM cycle count and health flags from the old unit may still be present in the SMC cache. This makes macOS report poor health even though the cell is new. Running a full discharge to hibernate cutoff followed by an uninterrupted charge to 100% forces the SMC to run its battery learn cycle and write fresh calibration data. After one complete cycle the health status in System Information should update to "Normal."
MacBook Pro A1398 shutting down at 20–30% charge shown on screen
This happens when the fuel gauge IC's state-of-charge estimate drifts away from the actual cell voltage curve. Under full CPU and Retina display load, the cell voltage drops faster than the fuel gauge predicts, and the SMC triggers an emergency shutdown before the displayed percentage reaches zero. It is a calibration problem, not a cell fault. To fix it, run the battery down until the laptop enters hibernate automatically, leave it off for at least two hours, then charge uninterrupted to 100%. The fuel gauge IC recalibrates against the real voltage floor during that hibernate period, and the shutdowns stop once the curve is re-anchored to the new cell's actual 3.0V per-cell cutoff.