Energy saver: do the battery settings apply during charging?

Question

I have my Macbook pro 17 (early 2011, OSX 10.6.8) set to turn off the display at 30 minutes on AC, and 10 minutes on battery.

I've noticed recently that if the battery is charging (the little battery icon shows a lightning bolt and has a countdown timer to full charge) then the display goes to sleep at 10 minutes, even though it's plugged in.

Is this normal behavior? Is it configurable, aside from changing the battery settings to match the plugged in settings?

Answer 1

This sounds like a bug in the power management software and I cannot reproduce the issue with my current MacBook Air.

Have you been watching the power settings with the pmset command?

The -g log command might show you something to help debug why this is happening. Worst case, you can have a few tabs open in terminal and watch -g pslog and -g assertionslog to see if some program is somehow overriding the defaults that you have set.

These logs and the timings would also make for a good bug report if you determined that it was simply an error in programming on Apple's part.