coconutBattery

CoconutBattery is a must have app for any mobile Mac users out there. It provides a comprehensive look at the overall health of your mac laptops, be it MacBook, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. In addition to telling the amount of juice you have left, it also tells you the temperature, number of charge cycles the battery’s been through and overall condition of the battery. The app doesn’t just tell you the stats, it can also record the battery health on a regular basis, providing a longitudinal snapshot of the battery’s condition over time.

Personally, the neatest part of the app is that it also tells you the age of your laptop and the battery separately. From the moment the laptop was assembled and left the factory floor, coconutBattery is able to tell you the age of your device. For my MacBook Pro that I recently purchase a few days ago, as of today, it is telling me that my MacBook Pro is 27 days old. Meaning that the MacBook Pro was assembled 2 to 3 weeks before being shipped out and sold to me. The battery on the other hand is 38 days old, a little older than the MacBook Pro. It sounds logical, considering that the battery is just one of many components that makes the laptop and parts have to be ordered, produced and shipped to the factory (somewhere in China no doubt) only to be assembled into the final product. The battery that I have comes from a battery maker, Simplo. A simple Google search tells me that it is a taiwanese company specialising in battery manufacturing for small and large devices.

I used the same app for my MacBook Air many years ago. I tracked the battery condition over time. I noticed it deterioated after a year due to my extensive use over time back during my undergraduate days. I used it the whole day, every day without bringing the power adapter with me, often draining the battery from 100% all the way down to 10%-15%. Naturally, that kind of torture wears out the battery really fast. And because of coconutBattery, I was able to replace the battery before it does further harm to my laptop. All in all, I logged more than 1100 days with the laptop. I used that laptop for more than 3 years, before passing it on to my dad to use. Today, it is still very much in use, all thanks to the SSDs, that helped in keeping the laptop fast enough for normal use despite its age.