I do have a 3 year warranty because I spoke with someone at Apple and they verified my Applecare lasts until next November, but they ran tests and showed that I exceeded my battery's lifetime already. I'm not surprised, I use the hell out of that thing. I already went and bought a replacement for the battery at the Apple Store, so I'm assuming this one will last me another 2-3 years.
I didn't see that, I still have the battery with me, I just put it in the case that I got the new battery with. It would be awesome to get that one replaced and have two new batteries though. Is there any way to run a test yourself and see how many cycles it registered?
The iStat Pro widget has a lot of other useful information so that is what I normally use, but if you are just interested in the battery Coconut Battery has a lot of info on your battery's health.
img96.imageshack.us/img96/958/screenshot20110505at... Hm, so it appears to be at 781 cycles, so I guess the guy at the Genius bar was showing me cycles. For some reason I thought the number was supposed to be much higher. He said on average they should last 300 cycles.
img96.imageshack.us/img96/958/screenshot20110505at... Hm, so it appears to be at 781 cycles, so I guess the guy at the Genius bar was showing me cycles. For some reason I thought the number was supposed to be much higher. He said on average they should last 300 cycles.
I thought you'd have checked already, which is why I was a bit confused by your reply.
You can check by going into System Profiler and checking Power.
Apple should replace these batteries if you have less than 300 cycles without any questions asked. If it has more, then what you can argue would depend on how much charge it can hold.
Unfortunately I've no direct experience of such haggling - I don't tend to hang onto any Mac long enough to rack up such cycles. My far more frequent battery related visits have been due to e.g. the cells expanding while the machines have lain unused for a while - often causing the notebook to warp as well - or just failed cells. A surprising amount of it compared to other vendors, I'll say.
Yeah it only holds a charge for 20 minutes once it's "fully charged". I'm just surprised I never got the "replace soon" notification in the menu bar, it seemed like it went straight to "replace now" without giving me any forewarning, but at least I know for sure that I more or less got almost three times as much battery life as expected.
At worst, the battery should be able to hold an 80% charge at 300 cycles, not 'last 300 cycles'.
For this type of battery, that's the only actual claim they make at the moment - I think they may have, as usual for Apple, quoted some other hyperbole at launch which the drooling fanbois of engadget et al would undoubtedly have seized upon, but long-term that's the only thing they actually specifically mention. i.e. beyond a (pretty short) 80% @ 300 cycles, they're saying you're on your own.
Well since I'm still covered under Applecare I suppose I could try to call again and see if I could get a replacement. Apple is generally pretty helpful with replacing things even if it's not entirely covered in the warranty. I'll see what I can do and just use this new battery I purchased for now.
Yeah that's what I thought. I mean the guy at the genius bar said I could try and call Apple care since I'm still under warranty because if they are able to do it over the phone and write a note, I can just walk into the Apple store and they'll have it in their system and they can just replace the battery.
The batteries in the latest unibody MBPs claim to last up to 1000 charges but depending on usage 1 charge does not necessarily equal 1 cycle unless you let your battery run down to almost nothing and then do a full charge.
The user replaceable batteries are not that robust. On my MBP 15" pre-unibody, my replacement battery (Apple branded) died after ~170 cycles just after the 1 year warranty so your 781 cycles is quite impressive.
Oh, the pre-unibodies were abysmal. I had at least five occurrences I can remember just for the machines I directly used of the 'puff-up' and prematurely dead batteries in my (I guess, from an individual's standpoint, considerable) huddle of 15" and 17" Macbooks between early 2006 and early 2009.
One thing that becoming so dominant has enabled them to do is, post-unibody, for their build quality to make some way towards approaching their farcial myth.
and still running! well... if you consider 20min. battery life as running..lol. I'm just gonna run it into the ground and then use the new one i bought.
