10.6 falsely reports 'service battery?' ... I think not

I had the same problem and went to the apple store in Dedham,MA. They ran a program from usb drive and told me that I need to buy new battery as my current one is used up. I did not buy it at that time. Then when I bought Belkin N wireless router and tried to connect my macbook to it I found that it was not able to. This seemed to be case with Belkin routers post Snow Leopard!! So I was forced to downgrade to 'regular' leopard and it worked. Both of my issues were resolved. I mean it no longer shows replace soon messages and connects wirelessly to internet.

Please make this Article frontpage again - Apple needs to wake up and smell the Snow Leopard in the ass; or at least give us 10.6.2 with updated "battery-properties".
After going from Leopard to Snow Leopard on my MBP (summer 2007), my battery went from 2 hours to 5 minutes, and the shutdown happens without warning!

My early '08 macbook pro is mostly used when plugged in. As such, it only had 16 cycles after 14 months of use. Still it got about 4 hours from the battery when unplugged (one week before installing SL). Installed SL and the first time I tried to use it unplugged afterwards it died in 25 minutes without any warning. Thinking it was some kind of OS bug, I tried to boot it again and 10 seconds into the boot sequence it went black again. The battery LEDs indicated 80% charge remaining. Visited the 'genius' at the Apple store who started to give me some line about 'cycling' the battery (hey, these are Li-ion batteries right?) and I told him I would not be happy about having to pay for a new battery. He ended up giving me a new battery and all seems fine now, but this has to be more than a coincidence with all of the other reports I'm seeing on the web. Add this to the fact that SL killed the printer/scanner configuration on ALL the macs in our house (we have a Canon all in one on the network) and I have to say that Apple may be having some quality control problems. It's definitely shaking my confidence that Apple's QC is better than Microsoft's.

Ah. I remember a time when pretty much all Mac journalism was like this. Some group of users would be complaining about some service issue and the whole rest of the Mac faithful would immediately pounce upon them and spend only the energy it takes to find a reason to make the issue disappear, but never any more than that. That was back when everyone thought the Mac was doomed and there was somebody saying that several times a week.

That this article seems so out of place in its approach and people are largely reacting to it as condescending rather than cheering the writer on is a measure of how far the Mac community has come and more importantly, how much more skeptical the userbase has become of official stories from Apple.

I think Apple has its worst dictatorial excesses to thank for this cultural sea change in the Mac-using culture. We are no longer totally, utterly willing disciples. We have already had to hold our noses over a fair number of Apple's decisions. We are no longer prepared to just accept Apple's PR-laden cynically hypocritical stance, and we no longer have very much respect for writers who toe that line in an unexamined way.

Sorry, but..
You shouldn't need a Marco followup or battery engineer consultation to find reasonably accurate info on Lithium-ion technology. Battery-speak can be technical if you get into the nitty-gritty, but to repeat such basic misinformation (multi-week deep cycling) without a cursory technical search is reprehensible IMHO.

"Lithium-ion" batteries, eh?

I bet you use incandescent-photon light bulbs too. :)

I have removed the TUAW RSS Bookmark from Safari. Apart from checking the comments I have on this one article, I no longer wish to frequent this site after this diabolical article.
There are plenty more (more professional) fish in the sea.

Now this is how you cover this issue....these are the types of posts I've seen TUAW do in the past.....(such as with the iPhone App Approval Process' lack of transparency)....let's hope they return to this style of writing.

http://www.szilveszter.ca/blog/archives/447

It also seems to me that Mr. Carr's is a new writer to TUAW. He has only posted 14 articles....and from my search it seems like he started mid-September.

After a poorly researched article, a tone that is as uninviting as I've ever seen on an AOL weblog and his poor excuse for an "update" to his original post, I hope we can see a change shortly.

It would be disappointing if one poor blogger took away from the overall experience that I tend to have, making this one of the first sites I visit day in and day out.

PS....My battery continues to fluctuate. After my latest calibration, the overall charge has improved. Still no where near where it was just a few weeks ago under Leopard. Even more confusing...the maximum charge the battery could contain has bounced around so much (up & down) that it even hit -1 mAh...huh?

My experience - the week after installing SL, my 1 yr old battery seemed to need service, according to the icon. For the last few days, condition is normal again. I have done nothing but ignore the problem, and voila! It went away.