A couple weeks ago my MacBook Pro developed a brand-new feature: Automatic Poweroff! When I would be doing something fairly processor intensive on battery power with around 30-40% charge remaining, it would suddenly and completely shut off. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to lose all your work. This happened about three times, none of which resulted in me losing anything important. Still, it was very annoying, especially for a computer that is just 10 months old.

Opening System Profiler and taking a look at the battery showed that it had around 160 cycles on it with a Health Indication of “Fair”. The dashboard widget iStat Pro showed that the health was “50%”.

After some research I found out that MacBook Pro batteries manufactured between February 2006 and May 2006 were being flat-out recalled. My battery didn’t fall into this group, but it did fall into the MacBook and MacBook Pro Battery Update 1.2 category. Apple had issued a battery firmware update a while back to fix “issues”, and I had installed this update. Unfortunately certain craptastic batteries would still exhibit the following signs after the update:

Battery is not recognized causing an “X” to appear in the battery icon in the Finder menu bar.

Battery will not charge when computer is plugged into AC power.

Battery exhibits low charge capacity/runtime when using a fully charged battery with a battery cycle count (as shown in System Profiler) of less than 300.

Battery pack is visibly deformed.

I definitely fell under problem #3. Instead of having to call into tech-support hell as I did with my Dell (“and now we press the power button…”), I just made an appointment at the closest Apple Store and took it right in. Despite the fact that the store was jam-packed with an odd combination of geeks and ultra-trendy SoCalites, I only had to wait about 10 minutes. The guy at the “Genius Bar” was nice without being overly friendly. He proceeded to run a whole bunch of programs at once to try to drain the battery quickly, and was able to reproduce the problem after another 15-20 minutes. Once that was done he printed up some paperwork, put in a brand new battery, and sent me on my way. Easy. No stupid questions, no waiting on hold, no pulling out hair trying to explain that I don’t need to defrag the hard-drive.

When I first had this problem my confidence in Apple’s quality took a big hit. Finding that the problem was acknowledged by Apple on their website was a good first step. The totally painless battery replacement experience was a great second step. Dealing with a real, intelligent human face-to-face sure beats the alternatives provided by other computer manufacturers. I’m still disappointed that this happened at all, but I’m glad it was easily resolved. Here’s hoping that the new battery works better than the old one.

I do know one thing for sure: I’m glad I sprung for the 3-year AppleCare plan when I bought this computer.