Quite a lot of customers, who are going to switch to Mac, complains to me that the batteries for their PC laptops don’t hold the power that well; the fully-charged battery was consumed totally within an hour or so.  Well, I can’t say much about it in my part-time work place, but to be honest, the battery between the one inside a Macbook and a PC is not that much difference except Apple is now compromise the switch-ability of the battery for more battery cells inside in order to obtain more hours of use.

If you bring your laptop to a technician for battery repair, honestly speaking, there is nothing they can really do for you except giving you a couple of suggestions:

• Don’t run too many applications simultaneously;
• Turn Airport and Bluetooth off when they are not in use because they consume lots of energy even when they are not linked to a network;
• Lower the brightness when you are in a dark environment;
• Don’t plug the AC adapter all the time while battery is in use;
• Do battery optimization.

What is Battery Optimization?

If you have read your laptop manual carefully for the old laptops, you should know the batteries were using Ni-Cd (Nickel Cadmium) rechargeable batteries. One bad effect with this kind of batteries is that, if you repeatedly recharge the batteries while they are only partially discharged, the batteries will “memorize” the smaller capacity after the discharges. For example, if you keep using the battery down to power level of 80% and you recharge it, then eventually the battery will “think” the 80% is the full capacity of the battery even though it’s not.

If this is the case, you will lose 20% of the battery. What we say “battery optimization” is that, try to (at least once per two weeks) drain all the power of the battery and don’t use it until the battery is back to fully-charged condition. By doing this, the “memory effect” (as known as “Lazy Battery Effect” or “Battery Memory”) will be minimized.

The new Lithium-ion polymer batteries of Apple laptops.

The new Apple laptops are using Lithium-ion polymer batteries inside. First of all, I would like you to read the official introduction from Apple: Apple Notebooks.

In this article, it states a couple of the points I mentioned when I started this post. Just in case you might miss it, I need to point out one of the important notes in the Apple article:

For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally.

What does it mean? Well, think of your battery as having some sort of sticky liquid inside.  You have to move them around by charging them so that those ions won’t be stuck together. Once they are stuck together by not being activated for too long, they become inactive and part of the battery is claimed to be dead.

I often saw some people who try to sell their laptop on either eBay or Criaigslist that “even the laptop were over a year, but the battery is still good because I take them out most of the time, so the battery is like new.” Really? Having the batter not being active for so long, do you really think the battery is like new?

Also, if you really want to take out the battery and store it as a new battery, here is how you should do:

If you don’t plan on using your notebook for more than six months, Apple recommends that you store the battery with a 50% charge.

Post Note:

I hope you all enjoy this post. With different type of batteries, there are different ways of taking care of them; it’s always good to read the manual again.  Sometimes even a technician could be wrong and misdirect you and actually shorten the battery life by mistake.