Gizmodo: macbook pro battery

New MacBook Pro Battery Has Less Battery Power Than Old One

matt buchanan — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:15:00 EDT

This confirms what I suspected—the new MacBook Pro battery has a lower capacity than the old one. About 16 percent less to be specific. The old battery was rated at 5600mAh/60Wh, but the new ones are rated at 4700mAh/50Wh. This perfectly explains why you now need to use the integrated Nvidia GeForce 9400M on the new Pro to get the same five-hour (rated, not real world) battery life as you did with the discrete 8600M GT on the previous-gen Pro, despite its use of more energy-efficient DDR3 memory (which would negate drops from the faster FSB) and the same processor clock speeds.

As Ryan points out, this possibly means that as your battery degrades, you'll probably have to a buy new one faster and more often, since the pool of energy is smaller to start with. It also gives fresh urgency to our hope for new TruePower batteries from FastMac, which cram more power into the same space and are some of our mission-critical CES gear.

So you might wanna think twice before going into the 9600M GT-powered turbo mode, though when you boot into Windows, you don't exactly have a choice, since that's the card it uses. [Ryan Block - Thanks Ryan!]

MacBook Pro Automatically Self-Destructs in Time for Next Version

John Herrman — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 06:45:00 EDT

Reader Mike Chung sent us these pictures of his MacBook Pro battery, which has almost failed for the second time? Why do I say almost? I mean, it's clear that the battery has ballooned into some sort of slimy, Alien-like monstrosity. Well, apparently this battery is still alive and working.

Mike says that this is his second battery failure on his two year-old MacBook, and it's nothing we haven't seen many times before, but the timing is suspicious, to say the least. My money's on an October(ish) detonation switch secreted away in every last MacBook, MacBook Pro and, for good measure, MacBook Air. -Thanks, Mike!

FastMac U-Charge is the First Universal External Apple Laptop Battery Charger

Jason Chen — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:50:00 EDT

We've reviewed MacBook and MacBook Pro battery chargers before, but the problem with that is that they aren't compatible between different laptop types. Not so with FastMac's U-Charge. Their external battery charger lets you juice up MacBook Pro (15 and 17-inch), MacBook, PowerBook G4, iBook and even PowerBook G3 batteries externally all from the same unit.

Why would we need this? Because we go through multiple batteries in a day of liveblogging, and this is the perfect thing to charge up more than one battery at night without having to wake up multiple times in the middle of the night to swap them out from your laptop. At $69, it's fantastic, and even better than the NewerTech chargers since it charges pretty much every recent Apple laptop. [Fastmac]