![]() ![]() ![]() Monitoring my battery's performance was easy, and figuring out that something was wrong with it was almost as easy. I performed a battery calibration to make sure that iStat Pro and OS X's built-in monitoring weren't throwing up erroneous readings, but iStat Pro's reported battery health still hovered below 80%, and Snow Leopard still gave me a "Check Battery" alert in the menu bar. ![]() In my case, starting at around 240 charge cycles, my battery capacity started falling off from about 86% health - right about where it should have been - to 77% within a couple of days. The MacBook Air's batteries are supposed to retain 80% charge capacity after 750 cycles, while MacBooks and MacBook Pros with integrated batteries should retain 80% charge after a staggering 1000 charge cycles.Īs you can see in the above comparisons between my old/busted battery and the brand-new replacement, it's easy to tell when your battery has fallen far outside this guideline. "For Apple notebooks with removable batteries - such as previous generation MacBook and MacBook Pro computers - a properly maintained battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 300 full charge and discharge cycles." Pretty straightforward, but newer Macs' batteries vastly outperform the older ones. How can you tell if your battery has a "defect in materials or workmanship?" It's relatively easy, because Apple provides guidelines for battery life. Technically, the AppleCare Protection Plan doesn't cover "consumable parts, such as batteries unless failure has occurred due to a defect in materials and workmanship," and the same is true of Apple's limited one-year warranty. This will show you the same "condition" stat as Option-clicking the menu bar, and it will also display the charge remaining versus the full charge capacity in milliAmp-hours. The second built-in OS X battery monitoring method is located in the "Power" tab of the System Profiler application. The final condition, and the one I saw which kickstarted my back-and-forth with AppleCare, is "Service Battery." This is the one condition which translates to, "Your battery is well and truly broken. If you see "Replace Now," it still means the battery isn't "broken" as such, but the charge capacity has significantly diminished. "Replace Soon" means there's nothing technically wrong with the battery, but its maximum charge is somewhat diminished. "Normal" is just that - move along, nothing to see here. Here you'll see any one of a number of conditions. First, you can get a snapshot of your battery's condition by holding down Option and clicking the battery icon in your menu bar. If you don't want to deal with iStat Pro or the Dashboard, OS X has two built-in methods for monitoring battery life. In other words, if you're seeing 66% health, that means your battery now holds only 2/3 as much charge as it did when it was new. While numerous third-party utilities exist for this purpose, I'll focus on just one: the iStat Pro Dashboard widget, which gives you at-a-glance info on multiple details concerning your Mac's hardware, including battery "health." The percentage of battery "health" that iStat Pro shows you is a rough indicator of how your Mac's battery's current maximum charge capacity compares with the maximum capacity of a brand-new battery. How can you tell if your battery is close to failing? More important than that, if it is close to failing, how can you get it replaced? Click "Read More" to find out.įirst, let's examine how to monitor your battery life. though especially in the case of the newest integrated batteries, it may take as long as a decade to die out completely, depending on your usage habits. The battery is the one component of your portable Mac that is all but guaranteed to fail eventually. The old saying about cars depreciating the moment you drive them off the lot goes double for notebook batteries, which lose a bit of their maximum capacity with every charge cycle. ![]()
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