Adventures in Snow Leopard, elderly batteries, and AppleCare

Soon after upgrading my MacBook Pro (three year old 2.2 model) to Snow Leopard, I noticed the Battery menu item was giving me the “Check Battery” warning. Not a tremendous deal for me as 95%+ of the time I’m working on the grid and not on battery, but it was puzzling enough to get me to pursue it. Apparently, Snow Leopard has much improved battery monitoring but a lot of people out there are interpreting this as “Snow Leopard broke my battery” rather than “Leopard never told me anything about my battery.”

So I followed Apple’s instructions… reset the SMC a couple times and ran a full-discharge/recharge of the battery – to no effect at all. It’s a three-year old laptop and admittedly the battery wasn’t really holding a charge anyway, but I still have a couple months of extended AppleCare warranty left. Made an appointment with the AppleStore at The Grove and after a short wait, the Genius ran a detailed diagnostic on the battery from some sort of iPod-based app. The battery was indeed “bad” and not merely “depleted.” An important difference that determines whether your battery is dysfunctional (and covered under warranty) or just worn out from regular wear-and-tear that’s not covered.

The resolution? Apple replaced the battery free and now I’m happily computing again with 100% battery power for the < 5% of the time when I actually need it. Conclusions:

  1. Always get AppleCare on any Apple laptop. Between this new battery and a hard drive replacement a year and a half ago the outlay for AppleCare has paid for itself. To repeat again: always get AppleCare on a laptop.
  2. There must be some sort of fallacy/madness-of-crowds definition for the phenomenon of when providing more information causes less reasoning. Strangest recommendation was the advice to downgrade back to 10.5 strikes me as getting annoyed at a dashboard warning and putting a piece of tape over it.