[P1] Battery life for 1yr old iBook

[david]

On 11/23/02 4:40 PM, "Tubadude" <jmcclernan2 at comcast.net> wrote:

> I will be reading this thread with great interest. Our school bought 60
> iBooks (700mhz) in May this year. Almost half of them have developed some of
> the battery problems that I see posted here. By the way, they all have
> Airport cards that are enabled all of the time, and all run OSX exclusively.

Given Airport and OS X, these iBooks will get about 3 hours on a fully
charged new battery - assuming no CD is in the computer. Just having a CD in
the drive - even if it isn't being accessed constantly - will bring down
battery life pretty dramatically.

> We do have AppleCare, but a "genius" told me that AppleCare won't even
> consider replacing a battery unless we are getting less than an hour on a
> full charge. 

This is something of an exaggeration but I can certainly believe some
AppleCare tech workers might stick to this. When my battery life dropped to
just under 2 hours (again using OS X) I called and had a new battery in
under a week. But at that same time I heard other iBook users complain they
were told that was normal.

> So much for Apple's claim that it would get "up to 6 hours".

The claim is completely true - for OS 9. OS X isn't optimized for notebooks
yet. It is more than a little disingenuous for Apple to be shipping OS X as
the default OS and claiming battery life for OS 9. I wonder what they will
do about these claims come January when OS 9 isn't a bootable OS for the new
computers?

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davidwb at spymac.com