I’ve been thinking that my MacBook Pro’s battery has been especially lightweight lately. To be honest, none of Apple’s laptops do great with battery life but it’s been an especially poor contender lately. I fired up CoconutBattery to check out the state of affairs and it was shocking. I’m currently only getting 39% of original battery capacity. The battery is only sucking up a measly 2,187 mAh out of a rated 5,500 mAh.
I’m going to try a series of battery conditioning cycles and see if I can get this thing back. In January I was right around 90% of capacity and the battery has only gone through 237 cycles in its 20 month lifespan.
Make sure you have the Battery Update 1.2 software installed. That might help, but if it’s like my MacBook (and many of my co-workers), the battery itself is failing and it’ll need to be replaced.
Apple did extend the warranty on a bunch of MacBook Pro batteries. If the software update and conditioning cycles don’t help, you can probably get a new battery under warranty.
[...] Pro Battery Update September 30, 2008 Jamie wrote a piece today about his anemic battery life on his MacBook Pro. It’s been quite awhile since I tested mine, [...]
I did the same test and mine is faring a bit better — though I have other battery issues: http://3mew.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/macbook-pro-battery-update/