ScottMyles.com

People grumble about the battery life of their laptops and various makes and models offer considerable difference in the mileage you’ll get. Living in a Mac only world, I’ve always thought that Apple has done a pretty good job of getting the most out of the battery on their laptop range.

I have two MacBook Pros. One for work, and one at home. They are pretty much identical in spec. On long flights, such as my regular trips to Seattle or Houston, I’d get 4+ hours out of the MacBook Pro by turning off Wi Fi and dimming the screen right down during the flight. Makes for a very productive journey.

Last October I upgraded to Leopard at home. Shortly afterwards I started to notice the battery draining in just over an hour. I just assumed it was a bad battery, but didn’t rush to do much about it.

A few weeks ago I got approval to upgrade my work MacBook Pro to Leopard - finally ! The next day I’m sitting in an all morning meeting and my battery dies after about an hour. Huh? 2 weeks prior I’d sat on 4 different flights and got hours at time out of the battery.

Starting to put two and two together I hit Google to see what was going on. To my surprise I found a lot of people were having the exact same problem. The situation was pretty much the same:

1. MacBook Pro on Tiger = good battery life
2. Upgrade to Leopard on MacBook Pro = bad battery life

And it wasn’t that Leopard was running that much more and sucking up more battery capacity. What was really the case was that the actual battery capacity had halved. Open up System Profiler, select Power under Hardware and compare the full charge capacity (mAh) to the charge remaining capacity. They should be pretty close, though not exactly the same. On both my MacBook Pros, the charge remaining was less than half the full charge capacity. Not good!

My searches pulled up the following 4 steps which some people report having success with to reset the battery capacity, but on my models of MacBook Pro I didn’t have much luck. I’ll post the steps below for your reference:

1. Reset the SMC (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303319)
2. Restart the computer, login, shutdown the computer
3. Reset PRAM (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=2238)
4. Restart the computer, login
5. Recalibrating the battery (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86284)

In the end I called Apple Care. They simply asked for my serial number, capacity remaining (mAh) and the number of cycle counts. Next morning I had a brand spanking new battery in my hands and 4 hours of battery life. I informed my IT guy at work and he ordered a replacement immediately.

If in doubt, call Apple Care. Worst case, a new battery is $129. Pricey, but half way through a 6hr flight, you’ll be thankful your battery was fully charged before coming onboard.

Incidentally, my wife’s white MacBook didn’t suffer any battery degradation, so I’m thinking it’s limited to a range of MacBook Pro’s, or batch(es) of batteries.