Studying the Slow Decay of a Laptop Battery For an Entire Year 363
First time accepted submitter jradavenport writes "I've been keeping a log of the health of my MacBook Air battery for the past year, taking samples every minute I use the computer (152,411 readings so far!). This has allowed me to study both my own computing/work habits, but also the fascinating rapid decay of battery capacity. Comparing it to my previous 2009 MacBook Pro, the battery in this 2012 Air is degrading much faster."
Re:Laugh (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Survey says... (Score:3, Interesting)
While hard data would be nice we can reason that his results are unsurprising.
The older laptop was a more conventional type and thus would almost certainly keep the batteries a bit cooler than the newer, ultrabook style one. Heat accelerates the decline of batteries. I'm not surprised by this result.
PROTIP: Remove your laptop battery if you are running from the mains most of the time and keep it in a cool drawer somewhere.
Re:Survey says... (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no such thing as a battery test. Had you referred to the fine code, you'd have noticed that the logger merely trivially logs the data already available and exposed through the iokit registry. About the only thing I can think of is that it'd be a bit more power efficient to code it up in a small ObjC utility so that the effort taken by 'ioreg -l' to enumerate all of the data and format it as text is avoided. I may do that, in fact.
On Apple you don't need to remove the battery!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
It shows that you don't know the details of Apple's power delivery architecture. Magsafe-equipped Apple laptops are intentionally crippled in that the charger is artificially disabled if you use an unauthorized one. There's a chip in the magsafe plug that connects to the middle pin and is interrogated by the system management on the mainboard. If the interrogation fails, you can still use the power source, but the charger is disabled.
All it takes not to charge the battery is to cover the middle magsafe pin. I've done it by keeping in use one charger with a bad magsafe plug where the chip had died. Died how? Ah, exposure to the saliva of a 1 year old, he liked to lick those plugs, they admittedly taste "funny" since they are energized :)
That way you have the best of both worlds: you don't lose your work if the magsafe plug is kicked loose, and you don't charge the battery if you don't want to. Win-Win.