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Apple Battery Charger

J

jdalbert

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 30, 2011
24
0
I am planning on buying my first iMac in a few weeks. I was looking at buying the Apple Battery Charger so that I could have rechargeable batteries for my keyboard/mouse. My questions are:

1) What is the quality of the Apple charger/batteries? Are they my best option for use in these Apple products? If not, what would you recommend for a similar (or cheaper) price?

2) I believe the charger comes 6 batteries. I am thinking of getting both the Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse. Combines with the wireless keyboard, this would require 6 batteries in use at all times (with no spares waiting in the charger). For others with all three wireless devices, do you use a different brand of charger/batteries that allow for 8+ batteries? Is there a way to buy extra batteries from Apple that anyone knows of?
 
I believe someone opened them up and found out they were Sanyo Enloops. Anyhow, I got one as a gift and it isn't too bad. My magic mouse lasts a month or two before I have to switch out the batteries. I do like it more than my Sanyo charger because it is so compact, but if you don't care about that then just get the Enloops.

As far as extra batteries are concerned, Apple doesn't sell them. So you can buy another Apple Battery Charger and sell the charger itself on ebay or to a friend and keep the extra batteries (If you are OCD and want the batteries to match). Or you can use pretty much any other rechargeable battery in it.
 
The Apple batteries are Eneloops (which are all kinds of awesome). Skip the Apple charger and get this:

Eneloop Rechargeable Battery Super Power Pack Kit

For $49.99 you get 12 AA rechargeable batteries, 4 AAA rechargeable batteries, 2 "C" spacers, 2 "D" spacers, and one 4 position charger.
 
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Flashing Amber?

Just bought a set of the Apple ones.
Plugged it in and left it over night.
All I get is the flashing amber even after 20hours of charge?
reading the manual states it might be damaged.
damn all six?
 
Take the batteries out and put them back in and see if you still get a flashing light. I had this problem right away. Oh, and it takes like 3 hours to get the batteries fully charged, so 20 hours is overkill :)
 
I too bought the Apple Charger/Batteries when they came out and have a Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Trackpad. So I use all 6. Never an issue having all 6 in use. The machine warns you onscreen when a set of batteries is low. You can still go a few more days at that point, so I just pull out that pair and before bed and they are ready to go in the morning. On the couple occasions when I ignored the low battery warning until my mouse or trackpad completely died, I had the other for the remainder of the evening and the batteries were ready to go in the morning.

They say 4-5 hours till charged, but if you leave them overnight you get 100% instead of 80% charge. You can always check the remaining percentage in the menubar bluetooth menu for each peripheral. And I like having the compact charger.

But I would consider getting that linked charger for kids toys, etc. Right now we just buy 36 & 48 packs of Costco Kirkland AA & AAA batteries for kids toys and remotes.
 
Apple rebrands Sanyo Eneloop batteries.

The main benefit of Eneloops (at least the 2nd generation) is they will maintain 75% of their charge (i.e. not being used in a device) for 3 years. Normal NiMH cells are usually completely discharged (or otherwise unusable) after just sitting around for 6 months.

When it comes to NiMH batteries, Sanyo and Panasonic > everyone else. If you know someone who races electric remote control cars, you'll find very quickly that almost every single one of them uses Sanyo batteries.

I bought an Eneloop bundle pack from Costco that included a 4-cell charger, eight AA cells and four AAA cells. If I remember right it was $35. You can apparently get it here on Amazon.
 
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Sorry to resurrect an older thread, but I thought it would be better to post here.

My Apple battery charger only charges up to 80%. Never goes higher, no matter how long I leave them in. And it's not just one certain battery, but all 6 that came with it.

Malfunctioning charger or something else?
 
xraydoc said:
My Apple battery charger only charges up to 80%.
Click to expand...
According to what? Rechargeable batteries usually have slightly lower voltage than equivalent new non-rechargeables (at least initially, although this gap often drops under load, and rechargeables remain more stable over time as the voltage of non-rechargeables continues to drop--or, at least, that's my understanding), which can trick some types of measurements into thinking that they're not fully charged because they're expecting higher voltage.

Not an expert, but that's what I've heard, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what's happening.
 
According to my Mac.

Charge batteries - even overnight - put in to trackpad or keyboard and Apple's BT utility shows only ever up to 80% charge on the device.
 
xraydoc said:
According to my Mac.

Charge batteries - even overnight - put in to trackpad or keyboard and Apple's BT utility shows only ever up to 80% charge on the device.
Click to expand...

RMo is correct, the readings are wrong as they are expecting alkaline batteries not hybrid-NiMH ones. This also means that the percentage will not drop as expected due to the voltage curve being quite flat for those cells, which means that the charge percentage will start at around 80% and go down very slowly until the batteries are nearly empty, at which point the percentage will rapidly decrease.

This is not a problem with the batteries but with the way the % is calculated.
 
Interesting. I suppose as long as that's the readings everyone else is getting, then I'll trust the charger is working correctly.
 
xraydoc said:
Charge batteries - even overnight - put in to trackpad or keyboard and Apple's BT utility shows only ever up to 80% charge on the device.
Click to expand...
Other posters have already addressed this, I'd just like to add that battery capacity indications are far, FAR from an exact science. In fact it's almost anything but that, it's more like more or less educated guesswork.

In a laptop, the battery will have integrated charging monitoring and control microcontroller and additional circuitry to more or less keep tabs of how much charge remains in the battery's cells. Even this system isn't foolproof, as you may need to calibrate it periodically.

Now, a simple AA cell has none of that stuff. Addo to the confusion, NiMH cells come in a wide range of capacities as well, Apple's standard cells are like, 1800MAh or somesuch. There's NiMH cells up to at least 2400MAh available. So the battery level monitor is basically just guessing how much is left in the battery, based on some simple parameters.

My own Magic Mouse has reported zero percent battery remaining for at least half a week now and it still works just fine. I was totally fooled by this initially as I thought it consumed battery power far too quickly. Now I realize the indicator basically just lies, so I'm going to just use it now until it dies, and never again care what the indicator says.
 
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