My original MacBook Pro battery went from providing a reasonable 2 hours of use to less than 10 minutes practically overnight. Also, this happened only weeks after the one-year warranty on my battery expired. Attempts to finagle a replacement battery failed.

Once bitten, I wasn’t all that thrilled about forking over $129 to Apple to replace something that I felt was defective in the first place. But what choice did I have? My search for alternatives only turned up one. Fortunately, that option was a good one.

I’ve been running on a FastMac TruePower MacBook Pro Battery for a month now, and everything is happy so far. FastMac’s battery features:

• (allegedly) more capacity
• $30 less price
• same integrated charge indicators
• almost identical appearance to the original

There is one feature that they don’t mention, at least not explicitly. The FastMac battery is two ounces lighter than the stock Apple battery. Two ounces might not sound like much, but I noticed it almost immediately. Also, I challenge you to come up with another, non-destructive way to shave weight off a MacBook Pro. Actually, I will revise that. Destructive ways are fine as long as:

• its not my laptop
• you post pics

I waited a month before sharing my experiences, because if I didn’t my experiences would have been “Uh, it works”. To gather some actual quantitative data, I’ve been using coconutBattery (which is a cool, and free). Not bad, Battery. Keep up the good work.

posted by amrox at 11:49 am & filed under Blog | No Comments »