When buying portable products, I usually like to be (over) prepared for whatever situation may arrive.  When I bought my Panasonic HD camcorder, I also searched the web thoroughly and bought two extra batteries and a 16GB SD Card.  Plenty of power and plenty of space.

So I found myself looking at an extra battery for my recent MacBook Pro purchase so that I’m never caught dead.  As I do before buying anything electronic over $50 I started reading the reviews, which all seemed to be horrible, dating back to 2005 even.  I was a little confused since I went the entire weekend without having to charge my MacBook Pro, and even found myself on Sunday night waiting for the battery to die before I went to bed so I could give it a full cycle.

Obviously I didn’t use my notebook more than 5 hours (the rated time it can/should last).  I didn’t do any work this weekend (that’s a first really), so nothing more than looking up movie times, checking bank statements and researching some thing (ok, so maybe I did a little work)… but battery life was more than adequate. So I didn’t quite understand all these reviews; especially some claiming “my battery doesn’t last more than 10 minutes!”.

For any MacBook user, you’ll find a wonderfully cool program called CoconutBattery that tells you the actual and rated battery capacity at any time. (Just don’t leave the application open, I found that it locks up my entire system after prolonged use.) So armed with that, and with Apple’s battery notebook care, you’ll have everything you need to help get the most out of your battery.

As you can see from my battery history, as I started to completely drain my battery (2008-04-04), my battery’s maximum capacity increased. April 06 was when I completely drained and charged the battery for the first time.  I’m willing to bet that many (the “average”?) user doesn’t know or understand how batteries work. They understand (and I remember thinking in my teenage years) that batteries fill up and drain; there’s nothing else to them.

And who knew you could calibrate your battery to ensure an accurate reading?

This is also great advice for anyone using anything that has a battery.  Batteries need to be used to be kept healthy.  Windows users can use tools like BatteryMon (30-day trial, $24) to get battery capacity monitoring and recording.

iPhone users should take this advice to heart also, especially since replacing the iPhone battery is only free within your first year of purchase under the warranty; and that’s only if the battery is holding less than 50% of what it should. Otherwise you’re looking at almost $90 and a week or two without your phone.

In short, use your batteries!