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The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

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Re: The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

#91

Post by gambiting »

untothebreach wrote: post #32
aeturnum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had my first macbook's battery replaced. I took it into the apple store for an unrelated problem, the tech noted the awful battery life and asked me how old the laptop was, said, "that's not right...," and grabbed another battery. Nice and easy.

If I remember correctly, with the Macbook Air it will have to be '"that's not right...", and grabbed another Macbook Air, and started migrating my data, etc, etc...'

Nope. Had a battery replaced in my 2012 Air recently(only because a clip separating the battery from the case broke,not because of the battery life) and it took 30 minutes to get it done at an Apple Store.

Re: The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

#92

Post by D9u »

Not an Apple consumer here, but my netbook battery only lasted about one year, and I attribute this rapid failure to my use of a cheap, (I live off-grid) modified sine wave, voltage inverter, but I have no valid proof of my assumption. As likely a cause for the battery failing to take a charge is the fact that I often ran the netbook until the battery charge depleted to the point of shutting the PC down.

When I bought my current, pure sine, inverter I noticed that my new battery lasted nearly twice as long, but since switching to FreeBSD last year my second battery quickly bit the dust...

I'm expecting the present battery to last somewhere between one and two years, but I'm not taking that expectation to the bank.

Re: The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

#93

Post by wtallis »

jordanb wrote: post #90
JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #64

WHOA!! Huge mistake here - he says he cycles his battery! DO NOT DO THIS TO LITHIUM ION BATTERIES! Lithium Ion will last longer by NOT allowing the cells to be fully discharged! This is the opposite of Nickel Metal Hydride and Nickel Cadmium - these types of batteries DO require a full discharge and full recharge in order to provide a longer life. In addition, the number of discharges, the temperature, etc all come i…

> opposite of Nickel Metal Hydride Fully discharging any battery isn't good for it. NiCd had the particular problem of "memory" developing though, so going through a full discharge cycle was necessary to prevent the memory forming. It wasn't good for the battery, but it was better than letting the memory develop. I'm not aware of NiMH developing a memory, so that wouldn't be a good thing to do with NiMH either. I alw…

There is occasionally a need to do a full or nearly full discharge on Li-Ion batteries in order to recalibrate the state-of-charge indicator if the embedded controller gets confused, or if the battery is nearing the end of its usable life and has significantly diminished capacity.

But in general, deep discharges are bad for any electrochemical cell, and should only be done to prevent or forestall something worse.

NiMH cells shouldn't be "topped off" when they're nearly full, but that doesn't mean they should be fully drained before charging.

Re: The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

#94

Post by potatolicious »

jaggederest wrote: post #87
untothebreach wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, with the Macbook Air it will have to be '"that's not right...", and grabbed another Macbook Air, and started migrating my data, etc, etc...'

They're just held in with torx screws, from what I could see of my old 'unibody' mac when I took it apart. Current gen may be different though.

Indeed, they're not meant to be user-serviceable, but they are very easily serviceable at the store.

Re: The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

#95

Post by sixothree »

acheron wrote: post #59
sixothree wrote: post #20

Is this guy really a developer? I can't imagine using a single 15" monitor to accomplish anything at a productive pace.

Indeed. It's a good thing there were no developers between 1970 and 2000, and all programs spontaneously arranged themselves via xkcd butterflies until monitors arrived that allowed for development.

I grew up developing on small monitors. It was painful.

Re: The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

#96

Post by sixothree »

driverdan wrote: post #42
sixothree wrote: post #20

Is this guy really a developer? I can't imagine using a single 15" monitor to accomplish anything at a productive pace.

I used 2+ monitors from 2000 to 2010ish. After switching to only laptops I gave up secondary displays and never went back. The only times I miss it is when I want to have docs open. I don't know why you'd need it otherwise.

That's the thing. I always have multiple docs open - tasks lists, TDS, specifications (I deal with a lot of specifications). As of this typing I have 22 open windows among 3 monitors. Virtual machines, specs, time clock, web browsers, visual studio, skype, SSMS, iTunes, etc.

Call me crazy but I cannot imagine having to do all of that on one machine and still be productive.

Re: The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

#97

Post by sixothree »

__david__ wrote: post #52
sixothree wrote: post #20

Is this guy really a developer? I can't imagine using a single 15" monitor to accomplish anything at a productive pace.

That's funny, I can't imagine being tethered to a single spot and accomplishing anything worthwhile! Snark aside, I love big monitors as much as the next guy, but I've seen very productive developers that never even maximized their code window, let alone used multiple screens. Getting in the flow is way more important than having a nice setup.

Portability is important to me too. Our business continuity plan accounts for disaster scenarios. My development machine is a laptop (17") with 24" monitor and another machine with 24" monitor all using one keyboard.

Maybe it's the type of work that I'm doing is very technical but there's no way I could actually do this much work on a small screen.

Re: The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

#98

Post by sixothree »

aerolite wrote: post #49
sixothree wrote: post #20

Is this guy really a developer? I can't imagine using a single 15" monitor to accomplish anything at a productive pace.

Look at your computer again and pay special note to the Command + Tab keys.

Sounds less productive than already having documentation on the screen when needed.

Re: The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

#99

Post by Sheepshow »

D9u wrote: post #92

Not an Apple consumer here, but my netbook battery only lasted about one year, and I attribute this rapid failure to my use of a cheap, (I live off-grid) modified sine wave, voltage inverter, but I have no valid proof of my assumption. As likely a cause for the battery failing to take a charge is the fact that I often ran the netbook until the battery charge depleted to the point of shutting the PC down. When I bough…

To confirm or disprove your idea, you could look at the output of the battery charger rather than the input to it.

In general, AC-DC converters are pretty insensitive to the harmonic content of the AC input because their role is to remove any harmonic content they do find. They do this with huge low-pass filters with corner frequencies well under 1Hz, whether the charger is either linear (unlikely) or switching (much more likely).

When AC becomes distorted, you start seeing harmonics (i.e. contributions at higher frequencies). Low pass filters are progressively more effective at higher frequencies. This is to say, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the efficiency of the charger itself suffered, but the output voltage was unaffected, meaning the laptop was unaffected.

Re: The De-evolution of My Laptop Battery

#100

Post by to3m »

cliveowen wrote: post #60
YooLi wrote: post #4

If your cycle count is 223 and you are nearing 80%, then your battery is defective, plain and simple. Apple will replace it. It's happened to me a couple times and Apple took care of it with no hassles.

I can attest to that: my Macbook white bought on October 2009 (that's 46 months folks) which I used every single day to this very day has 261 load cycles and 91% of original capacity.

That's pretty good going I would have thought? As well as charging cycles, I assume time is a factor. My Macbook Pro (bought July 2009) had reached 65% capacity by the time I replaced it, after something like 45 months and ~250 cycles. By then the computer had been begging me to replace it for about six months.

I actually thought this perfectly reasonable, with nearly 4 years being a fair lifespan for a battery, no matter how few cycles it might have been through. While it was obviously knackered, it still held enough charge to be perfectly useful, if not amazing - but perhaps I should have held it to a higher standard?

(Hopefully it's just this year's unusually hot UK summer but after a mere ten cycles its replacement is down to 93% already. So maybe there's just something up with the electricity supply to my flat.)

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