Tech Talk with Terence

Intro:

I currently use a Macbook Pro Early 2008 Model.  When I bought it (December 2008), I chose to purchase from the Apple refurbished store to save myself some money.  I opted not to purchase the Apple Care Protection, because if my laptop did break, I’d have an excuse to buy the newer ones that were coming out.

After about 18 months of using my MBP, I noticed that my battery was depleting faster than normal and sure enough the battery menu showed “Service Battery”.  It wasn’t so bad at first, because the battery would return back to normal after a calibration.  But then whenever a task that required significant power draw (Adobe Flash) was running, the battery would just call it quits.  And that’s when I decided it was time to buy a new battery.

At first I contacted Apple Care directly, even though my warranty was expired, in my mind the battery was defective.  Of course my battery decided to act normally during the call.  When they asked me to send the System Profiler info, they saw that it was normal and I shouldn’t be worried about the decay of my battery cells.  Great… Next place to turn to was the Apple Store, but they were charging $159 for a battery that I wasn’t confident in.  The reviews on the site aren’t reassuring either.  My battery turned out to have Sony cells (you can check this by going to System Profiler under the Power category).  Now whether or not that makes a huge difference I’m not sure, but the majority of users on the internet say the Sony cells are garbage (source: Google), the rare few have had luck with them.  The other manufacturer of cells is SMP and apparently they are better.  Either way it’s still $159 for a shot at something that may or may not work but not all that great.

In comes the third party.  There were two companies that users were talking about the most, FastMac and Other World Computing.  I didn’t even want to bother with eBay batteries, even though there could a diamond in the rough somewhere like a really good Chinese knockoff.  I’d rather not risk it.  In the end I chose to go with OWC for two reasons.  First, FastMac was charging $25 US for international shipping to Canada.  And second, this.  I also found bad reviews towards FastMac’s customer service, OWC just seems like a larger company in general.

My order was placed on June 14th, 2010 for a $99 US NewerTech battery and I found it on my desk at work the following Wednesday.  Not bad for shipping to Toronto, Canada.

Unboxing:

Not a whole lot to talk about here.  Battery was well packed inside a small box approximately the size of two tissue boxes.  Check out the first few pictures in the gallery.

Fit and finish:

From the first look the battery looked like an original Apple battery.  It even had the battery status light indicator.  Pressing it showed 4 of 5 lights on.  I was very impressed when I took it out of the packaging.  The aluminum covering felt well built and it didn’t look to me like there was any manufacturing defects.  After plugging the battery into the back I noticed that the colour wasn’t exactly the same.  Not a big deal since I wasn’t expecting it to be.  I’m sure it’s probably hard to match everyone’s aluminum MBP.   There was another thing though, when I ran my finger along the edges, I noticed the battery didn’t sit flush.  In the gallery you’ll see it is slightly raised only a millimeter.  Now for some people this might be an issue, and normally for me it would be (damn OCD), but I rationalized that it’s always on the underside of the laptop and I would never see it.  Terence 1, OCD 0.

Performance:

Software: Coconut Battery 2.6.6., System Profiler

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So the first two images are the old original Apple battery with Sony cells.  When I plugged the original battery back in it was operating like normal showing 79% capacity left with 237 load cycles.  (This is what Apple Care saw… damn)  I loaded up an HD Youtube video in 1080p which spiked my Firefox app to 160% CPU usage with an average of 136% (Apple seriously wtf…) and it started to drain my poor battery.  The next two images shows you what happens when the battery decides that it’s had enough.  51%!  The next two images shows the new battery made by NewerTech.  Now out of the box it was already at 94% capacity of the original 5800mAh, so I sent an email to OWC.  I’ll update this post with what they say.

Conclusion:

As far as I can tell, the NewerTech battery is solid.  Since I can’t comment on long term use just yet or whether it will react like the FastMac battery issue I linked to earlier, I will update this post or make a part 2 later on.  Besides the battery not sitting flush, the battery status light indicator doesn’t blink while the battery is charging.  Not sure if this is normal so I added it to the email I sent them.  The Apple brand battery does blink.  With only those two issues I think saving approx $60 CDN (taxes+shipping, used USPS so there was no duty) is fine by me.  The battery also comes with a 1 year warranty compared to Apple’s 90 day warranty on their replacement batteries, just don’t forget to register the battery on the NewerTech website.  I’m quite happy with my purchase, time will tell if I change my mind.

UPDATE: June 29th, 2010 @ 5:40pm

Received an email back from support@macsales.com and the tech support agent wrote that “94% is okay out of the box, and the number should increase over the next few weeks as I use it”… What?  Really?  I guess I’ll have to update this post in a few weeks.  He also wrote that it’s normal for the status lights to not flash during charging.  Stay tuned…

MORE UPDATES: here

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