As listeners to recent episodes of our Mac Geek Gab podcast know, we've been finding some very interesting things about battery usage versus battery life. Based on what we're finding, it seems that two things are holding true:
- Keeping your battery on charge most of the time seems to result in less than 50% of original capacity after about one year (even if you cycle it regularly)
- Beating the heck out of your battery (i.e. half-charging, killing, half-draining, charging, and simply being erratic with it) seems to result in maintaining or even increasing battery capacity over many years.
Our current sample size is small and informal, however, and we'd like to increase that with your help. Please take a quick moment to submit your results to our questionnaire. Your answers will not be linked to you in any way, and we'll publish the results and our interpretation thereof soon.
Thanks very much for your help!
To participate in the questionnaire, please first open System Profiler by going to the Apple menu, choose About This Mac, then click on More Info. We've put some screenshots below to show you just how to get there and which data you want.
Take Me To The Questionnaire! (note: it may take a few seconds to load from Google's servers)
Click on "More Info" to launch System Profiler
In the Hardware section you'll find your Model Identifier
In the Power section you'll see your cycle count and full charge capacity
Take Me To The Questionnaire! (note: it may take a few seconds to load from Google's servers)