After a particularly short battery-run on my MacBook monday morning, I decided that there was nothing left but a call to AppleCare. Surely they’d replace my faulty battery.
I couldn’t decide if I should once again try the Genius Bar or just phone AppleCare and hope they’d send me a battery.
I checked out their support forums and was surprised to learn that other people were actually claiming 3 to 4 hours of battery life from their MacBooks. Never having gotten that much life, I felt like perhaps my battery had been a lemon all along.
Wednesday at lunchtime, for grins, I checked the availability of the local Genius Bar and was surprised they had an opening within the hour. I quickly reserved it and rushed to the Apple Store.
In my reservation, I had indicated it was a problem with a MacBook battery. When I arrived, the genius already knew the problem. “You turn it on and it dies immediately.â€
“Well, no, it’s not quite that bad, yet.â€
And so, they had to go through the whole diagnostic. I left my computer there running the battery down, with the assurance that, if the battery died in a short while, they’d replace it the same day, but if they decided it was the charging circuitry on the MacBook, they had mainboards downstairs and they’d replace it by the next day.
A couple hours later they called and it was indeed the battery and it had been replaced.
The first thing I did was to re-calibrate the battery. After charging it up, I really put the drain on it. I set the energy saving mode to none, I launched Xgrid and VisualHub, encoding 12 videos (2 running simultaneously, 1 on each processor, each eating 94%), was listening to iTunes, and touching up 100 or so photos each in Photoshop CS2.
The computer was absolutely taxed to its limit and it still ran for 1 hour 30 minutes, which was phenomenal considering the load and its track record.
I removed the battery to let it sit, depleted, for 5 hours. In the meantime, I plugged the laptop back in and saw something I’d never seen before… After the battery died, the MacBook had managed to save the memory state to the hard drive and restarted right where it left off. Even when new, the old battery never did that. Now I’m positive it was defective from day one.
Using the computer this evening on battery has yielded results that look promising. On a full charge I’m getting a 4+ hours estimated run time and the battery seems to deplete consistent with the time remaining. (That is, I’ve used it 2 hours and the time remaining has gone down 2 hours.)
Maybe I’ll have to stop saying bad things about the MacBook’s battery life.
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