iBook Battery Life

UPDATE >> I found this article on resetting the power managagement on the iBook. Let’s see if this helps. HERE’S THE LINK> http://everythingmacintosh.com/technotes/go.em/General/71

Me too, I’ve had my ibook 14 months - its been in the shop twice, once for the logic board and once for a cable. After that the batter didn’t work. Apple tells me that I have use and recharge the battery frequently. Who forgot to tell me this? Let me guess… its in the manual, you know, the Missing Manual. Maybe this info ought to have come in a manual with the computer or at least from the salesman. I have the extended warranty but it isn’t covered. I think Apple is negligent on this.

Aargh same here, has my iBook just over a year and a half, and one day suddenly noticed my battery life went right down, lasted about 10 mins! i’m seriously doubting macs! i hate to say t but just after a year (you know when the warranty runs out) the cd-drive suddenly stopped working and trackpad went a month after and now the battery life…great ! i’m currently searching the net for any other info other than resetting the power management…cos thats not helped! if anyone has any info please help cheers

I’ve got an iBook 800. My battery life seemed a little shorter, then at some point it wouldn’t tell me how much time was left til I ran out of juice, it would just say “calculating” forever. Tried all the usual things. Reset power manager. Zapped PRAM. Trashed various prefs. Then I tried sticking my friend’s battery in my computer and it worked fine. So it was a hardware thing. The battery itself went bad. Sort of. I mean, it still runs the computer for a couple of hours, I just get no warning when it’s gonna run out.

De ja vous and all that. Though I’ve had my iBook for roughly 2 years now(600MHz combo drive). It must have been in the past month or two that my battery life completely halved to about 45 min w/o the wireless network going, and about 38 with it going. Now, someone had mentioned earlier that you need to use the iBook all the time, recharge the battery frequently. I actually do all that. At one point I even had over 100 days of uptime!!! Granted I put the thing to sleep all the time, but never the less, 100 days without powering down or rebooting, I have the pic to prove it. Not the point though, sorry. Point is, the battery has really lost it’s zing, and now I’m faced with either thrown down almost $120 for a new battery, or not having a proper laptop, which is to say, only going where there is a power outlet within 6 feet or so. Why? And, if I do decide to go outlet hopping, how long until the plug for the power adapter breaks on me? Cuz that thing is pretty flakey at the point where the chord meets the plug. Never really felt good about that. It’s not all bad, I must say that I really dig the UNIX functionality, the reason why I got the thing in the first place!!!

Batteries wear out. That’s just a fact of life. A lithium-ion battery has a certain number of charge/discharge cycles in it before it goes. That’s not something that happens just to Apple batteries either.

If Apple would smarten up and charge a 1/2 or 1/4 of the price for a new battery as it is today a steep $129.00 it would help relieve some of burden on the consumers. I myself as well as many other people would not mind spending $30 for a new battery every year or so (with Apple still making huge profits on sales)to have a new battery. Guess that will never happen!!!!!

i just bought my ibook from a place in my hometown, it is noticeably used and when i got home and charged it, the battery would only last 3 to 5 minutes, seeking answers i went back to the place i bought it, i told the manager and he gave me a fresh battery now the battery lasts up to 3 and a half hours after i charge it for an hour, i recommend buying a seperate battery if your looking into buying any model of the apple ibook.

My iBook (500MHz, Dual USB, Combo, 2.5 years old) had the same problem: within 2 weeks battery life dropped down from 1.5hours to 5min, charging would go on for about 10min, then it said “charged”. capacity in xbattery would read 68 mAh only (>4000mAh is normal!). tried resetting power manager unit, resetting nvram, nothing would help. even tried resetting battery’s internal power manager by shorting the two outermost contacts (not recommended, battery could explode!). didn’t work. so i ordered a replacement battery for 200 swiss francs (about 150$). after that i decided to open the old battery pack. it is made out of 6 batteries of the panasonic CGR18650A type (3.6V, 2000mAh) connected in a 2 parallel x 3 serial way (giving 10.8V, 4000mAh), plus the internal battery pack electronics. seemed that a resistor on the battery electronics broke off (don’t now whether this came from the dissembling…), maybe this was the actual cause for the battery pack breakdown? the batteries reminded me of the one used in my MiniDisc-player (Sharp MD-MS200) so i checked the MD-Players battery and it read 3.6V, 1400mAh. tried to use one unit of the iBooky batteries in the MD-player (they’re somewhat shorter than the sharp batteries, so i had to use some plied aluminum foil to ensure contact) and it worked! operated it for over 5hours, no heating of the battery nothing unusual, even recharged it once overnight, no problem. didn’t check the other battery units yet, but it seems that rather the battery pack’s internal electronics than the actual battery units were broken. so i have 6 functional Panasonic CGR18650A batteries now…anyone interested? disclaimer: use this information at your own risk!

Mike, do you still have those bateries? I might take them from you. How much? Terry

I had my ibook G4 for 6 months and the battery is completely dead….will not take a charge. Also had to have the power inverter replaced. Now can only use with power cord. I think I’m done with Apple!

I have a tangarine G3 iBook, and the battery suddenly stopped holding a charge. I tried resetting the power management unit, but that didn’t help. I also own a Compaq M700 Armada laptop for several years now, and I’ve never experienced battery problems. I’m a fan of Apple and Mac OS X, but expecting users to shell out $129 to replace an iBook battery (every year?) is deplorable.

Update in 2004: after using the replacement battery for about a year and a half, the same thing started to happen again. Short battery life, going to sleep without warning, never showing “time remaining” on the toolbar, etc. I got ANOTHER replacement battery from Apple, under AppleCare, and this appears to have solved the problem.

I have had my 1999 tangerine ibook since it came out. Two years ago the first battery began to wear out. Soooo — I swapped it with the other one, the one I was saving for just this event. No juice … There was a thing or two I did not know about Li-ion batteries, and my ignorance — Oh, the cost! :0

As the technology director for a school district ( I was a teacher classroom Teacher for 10 years and have seen how much abuse an iBook can really take). We have literally hundreds of iBook and Gateway laptops and battery life has been a concern of mine. We are currently replacing a couple of hundred Gateway laptop batteries and have yet to replace the iBook batteries but it will only be a matter of time. When I first got my iBook 600/firewire (August 2002)I bought two batteries. I went through the conditioning suggested by apple and have not had a problem with them for two years. I fully expected them to go down after 300-400 charges and I was not disappointed. I have now begun to experience the shortened life. I am just now trying all of the suggestions mention in Posts and links on the list. The post by EriK Madsen had seveal links to great Knowledge base articles. The one on storage of batteies could explain why Han’s second battery was dead. I have been interchanging my batteries for the past two years and routinely discharge my iBook daily with use. On costs- don’t change to PC for savings, the cost for new batteries on PCs is very comparable if not even more expensive depending on the model. The warranties all seem to be for that magic 1 year mark. I also experienced the forever charging in my battery life icon. I switched to % and at least I could get a reading. I am trying iBatt and will get back to you on what I find out. Again I can only encourage you to Love your Macs and search the web for online pricing which can save you $10 to $20 dollars, because I live the Windows world as well and Macs really do make computing fun…

Well, after my ibook’s battery lifetime went down to 10 minutes, and the blinking led on the back indicated that my battery is to be replaced, I’ve opened the battery pack and inserted new cells, exactly the same model as the originals. Imagine what happened? nothing. the led was still blinking, pretending that the battery is still bad. so I guess apple’s power manager in the battery deliberatly pretends a bad battery state to make customers buy new expensive battery packs, although the cells might be still quite ok.

Use the program “Battorox” to get info about the capacity of your battery! This tool is very simple and realy nice. I use it myself.

lol wow, i just recently bought an ibook as well, g4 about 4 months ago??? for school, today, im sitting around being lazy, my battery state is at 100% so i say hey ill go sit outside, and pull the power off… and i hear that sound beewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww and i see a black screen… wtf is that??? honestly, lol i tryed reseting the thingy i dont know what its called, but im pissed off and want my ibook to work! APPLE SUCKS, too expensive, not reliable, and dies the day after your warrenty, i also had a 15 gig ipod, what dided a year after use, harddrive and batter togeather, i give up on apple…

It is nott he apple computer at fault with the battery issue… rather it is the battery they are using. The actually batteries inside the apple battery pack is a panasonic battery, part number, CGR18650A, I have a P.C.(sorry) made by a random company called Excel, it has the same panasonic batteries running it and they too have crapped out after a short time, am currently trying to source some more to put new ones into my batery pack… will see if it works!

Everyone: Let’s face facts. Batteries have a finite lifetime. That’s true of car batteries, camcorder batteries, laptop batteries, and other batteries you can think of. Most of the posts listed here seem to fall into the category of normal wear-and-tear of batteries over time. When a laptop battery is about 18 months old under normal use, you can probably expect to see it dying sometime soon. Of course, the actual lifetime depends on your usage pattern. So don’t complain about Apple because of this. Other laptop makers use the same sort of Li-ion battery technology, and their batteries can be expected to exhibit the same behavior. Also, don’t complain about the battery replacement price. I just checked out a site for the prices of Dell laptop batteries, and they typically averaged about $140 so Apple’s battery prices are consistent with those of other computer makers. Just think of buying new batteries occasionally as part of the price you accept for owning a laptop.

Here’s an Apple web page with some information about laptop batteries and tips about how to get the most use out of them: http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

Hi guys, I’m having the same problem on a Dual USB 500mhz G3 iBook.. it seems though if you turn the screen brightness down considerably the battery indicator (set on time left) behaves a tad erratically. It goes down then back up. I had 2 hrs of charge left, rapidly declining 6 mins in the indcator every 1-2 min. But when the brightness is turned right down it slows. Strange, am looking into the logic board/PMS issue.

Brief post. Got a Toshiba Portege (Many of the same components as an iBook) and yup… Batts charge up to 100%, then slowly reduce to 80% over about 20 mins, then suddenly drop to 3% and it shuts down. Then charging takes the usual hour or so. This is NOT normal. I have a five year old Acer with li-ion batts that still does 2+ hours on a charge. Either the batts are badly made and sufferring chemical breakdown or the circuits are poorly designed. Peeps need to complain. BIG time. Li-ion doesn’t just DIE. It’s capacity reduces slowly over time. I’d be interested to hear from ANY other peeps with similar probs. In the meantime I’m going to try and do some serious research on this. We are being conned….