gdgt

Thanks! Coconut is showing my battery at 90% of its original capacity. I added some of the Apple recommended reminders. I do tend to leave it plugged in, but I do let it go down on its charge probably weekly.

I'm curious - how many cycles are you showing?

Hmmm, interesting. Apple claims 1000-cycle usable range, but many users online seem to be reporting rapidly deteriorating charge holding capability around the ~>500 cycle range. With a machine with as mediocre a runtime as the Air, this is obviously a major issue.

I'm only in touch with one of the users who took my Rev.A Air's off my hands, but according to her she barely uses it unplugged so don't have any useful personal input on this. She has however had the hinge issue that you described in the other thread. Given my use, which was as a tertiary machine on the Mac side *and* I was rotating multiple spares at the latter part of the Rev.A's lifespan in my possession due to cycling them in and out of Applecare, you could say that real use of the machines started only when I sold / gave them away - so that's, well, the usual Apple product engineering "quality". I find it pretty incredible they get the free pass they do given their abysmal build consistency and serious engineering compromises in favour of pretty.

My sole reason for using the Air is that I need to use OSX on a fairly frequent basis and I don't want to be lugging a boat anchor. I alternated between this and the 13-inch Alu Macbook + spare batteries / 13-inch MBP but both machines represented a significant compromise - the MB could go for 8 hours with a spare cell but effectively weighed almost as much as a 15-inch, and the '7-hour' 13-inch MBP only goes for about 5 and a half in reality. So these days I'm compromising capability for all-up weight by using the 60wh Hypermac external battery on the Rev.C Air's, and given my use it's fairly typical that in the course of a light day I'm down to about 70-50% charge on the unit having depleted the Hypermac. This way I'm not only getting usable runtime out of the machines, but I'm hitting fully depleted on the Air less.

I'd definitely hit up Applecare for new battery, but I'd also consider the Hypermac if I were you.