Macbook Pro Battery Life...Pretty Sad...

[Strobe]

So you think that a battery going from 97% health to 2% health within a couple months after operating the laptop the same way for the last 2 years is a result of not exercising the battery on a daily basis? Sorry but I have to disagree...I could see it if the health were to decline over the course of the last year, but 95% in 2 months is a little ridiculous.

Anyways I do have Applecare, too bad I don't have a local apple store to just stop by and talk to them. Believe me, I wouldnt be here wasting my time nor yours asking about this if I did.

I thought regardless of warranty time the batteries were only covered for a year...

I have an early 2008 Pro that gets ~4 hours on 220 cycles with 84% health. Since installing snow leopard though I get a service battery warning all the time and says health like "30%" but a full drain still takes 4 hours if I keep rebooting it after it "dies" until it lasts as long as it should, just reads it wrong.

Good news, called Apple care and said my battery was taken a dump and they said "only covered for 1 year", but I said it wasn't because it was "consume" it was "defective" because OSX is giving me error messages, battery life is fine. So they replaced my 2.5 year old battery under notion it was defective, not consumed. Now I get 5 hours like new again.

 

[slider78]

Well my problem with this is, like I said earlier, just 2 months ago the battery health was at 97% which is about the time which I pulled the laptop from my desk config and started using it more like a laptop. Since then the battery has been used daily until yesterday when it dumped. So I do not think that it is an issue of exercising the battery. Why would it be when it was showing better health when it wasn't being used as intended...anyways thanks for the discussion.

 

[sydenham]

"AppleCare support recommends that if you leave your Mac plugged in most of the time, unplug it every 2 or 3 days and run on battery down to somewhere around 50%, then plug it back in. That keeps the electrons moving."

That is the dumbest thing I have ever read...(well maybe not the dumbest) Lithium Polymer batteries are not supposed to suffer from what they are suggesting as becoming stale. NiCad perhaps but not LiPo...

I will try the calibration, and let the comp remain dead overnight. Thanks.

Clearly not too dumb. If you would have followed instructions, you probably wouldn't be here whining about your two year old battery.

"Anyways I do have Applecare, too bad I don't have a local apple store to just stop by and talk to them. Believe me, I wouldnt be here wasting my time nor yours asking about this if I did."

No comment about the wasting time business.


In your original post you say the 55 cycle count was the result of monthly excercising of the battery, now you are saying you have been running it on battery daily for the last two months. Which one is it???

Its obvious you didn't take care of your battery as per the instructions, and yet you still want to challenge Apple like you know better. I also find it a bit odd to have to unplug the computer from time to time, but if thats what it takes to keep the battery working well then...

 

[acidfast7]

That's exactly what I said.

No, you stated that they "only last" 300 and 1000 cycles. Which is incorrect! The batteries should still have roughly 64% of capacity after 600 and 2000 cycles, respectively.

Less throughput and more accuracy would be nice.

 

[GGJstudios]

No, you stated that they "only last" 300 and 1000 cycles. Which is incorrect! The batteries should still have roughly 64% of capacity after 600 and 2000 cycles, respectively.

Less throughput and more accuracy would be nice.

You need to read posts more carefully. I never said "only last". ZebOfMac said that, but I understood what he meant, that the battery should retain at least 80% of it's capacity up to the number of cycles. I was only correcting his statement of 1000 cycles, since it's only 300 cycles for removable batteries.

Do yourself a favor and take the time to read the Apple Notebook Battery FAQ I posted. You'll learn that I'm not confused or misinformed at all on this topic.