Coconut Battery results (good enough for Apple?)

[Nuks]

I have a four month old macbook, and I downloaded Coconut Battery on Decemebr 19th of 2006. The battery was at 84% then, and it has since gone down to 81%. With only 50 loadcycles, this number seems awfully low. I'm almost 1000 mAh off the original capacity. My friend has the exact same macbook setup, and he uses the battery power more often than me. He also had his macbook for a few months longer, and has gone through more loadcycles. His capacity is at 95%. I really don't think mine is functioning properly or something, and my question is, if I was to call Apple about it, would Coconut Battery results be something they would consider valid (ie if I told them my Coconut Battery indicated I had 81% original capacity, would they judge my battery based on that)?


Thanks.

 

[bousozoku]

You can verify them in System Profiler. In the Apple menu, choose About This Mac and click on the More Info... button. Go to the Power section and you'll see the same information.

 

[Nuks]

Alright, thanks.

I guess my next question is, does anyone else have a battery like this? Depleting at this rate?

If not, I'll give Apple a call soon.

 

[mkrishnan]

First, in terms of validity, you should know that both System Profiler and Coconut are reading the exact same system resources to understand how the battery performs. You can even get the battery stats from the terminal command line (e.g. with ioreg -l | grep -i iobatt). It's all the same numbers. None of the programs are really doing their own measurements.

In terms of your numbers, though, that's slightly low in terms of being 1000 mAh below original spec. What's your usage profile? Have you tried letting it do a full cycle (charge it up to 100%, and then unplug it and run it on battery until it you get the "low battery" warning, and then keep running it until it gets fully empty and automatically goes to sleep). Doing this every once in a while tends to sometimes help with the battery performance. Also there tends to be some fluctuation of capacity so that it doesn't decrease over time perfectly smoothly.

However, there's also some variability from battery to battery. I don't think yours is clearly "defective" at this point, however.

 

[grum]

My battery has done 50 load cycles, and is now at 5368 mAh, higher than the original capacity of 5200!

 

[Nuks]

mkrishnan, I'm not a power user, though I do use often. The vast majority of the time, I'm running off of AC power. I did a calibration about 2 weeks ago, but that didn't change anything.

Should I stick it out for a little longer to see what happens?

 

[mkrishnan]

Should I stick it out for a little longer to see what happens?

Sure, why not? You have warranty for quite a while longer, right? And as long as there's nothing "dangerous" about your battery (there's no evidence that there is), then the later you get a replacement, the longer ultimately you'll have good battery functioning, as you do now (even if it's lower than you expect).

 

[brando06]

Sure, why not? You have warranty for quite a while longer, right? And as long as there's nothing "dangerous" about your battery (there's no evidence that there is), then the later you get a replacement, the longer ultimately you'll have good battery functioning, as you do now (even if it's lower than you expect).

cYea i think you should take it in or call it in!!