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General discussion

can the MBP polymer battery be damaged through overcharged ?

Dec 14, 2010 8:45AM PST

hi all,
i know that its generally recommended to not overcharge batteries. i have e.g. seen several cellphone batteries going kaput within a few months since people leave their phones on 'overnight' charge.
so i am wondering if the same applies for the polymer batteries in my MBP ?
however, if i am not mistaken apple uses some kind of sophisticated electronic monitoring to keep a tab on the state of charge or discharge of the battery.
does this mean that there is no chance of the battery getting damaged through overcharging ?
basically, what good practises can i use to ensure that the polymer battery lasts me a long time ?
thanks !

Discussion is locked

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Tell how you would overchage it?
Dec 14, 2010 8:48AM PST

To overcharge it, one would have to charge it outside of an Apple laptop.

Why would you do that?

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It's not possible
Dec 14, 2010 10:19AM PST

It's not possible. What does tend to kill rechargeable batteries quickly is rapid chargers. Those tend to stress the elements inside the battery a lot more.

And while Apple may have been one of the first, almost everyone today has intelligent charging circuitry that stops the battery from charging until some threshold has been reached, like about 95% charge.

Also, to expand a bit on what Bob said, any Apple laptop made from about 2009 onward will not have a removable battery. You will need some pretty hard to find tools to get the battery out, and this is very much by design. The underside of the batteries is soft, and easily punctured if one isn't careful. This allows Apple to devote more space to actual battery instead of casing, but there's obviously a safety hazard if someone who doesn't know what they're doing tries to extract the battery.

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Calibrate
Dec 18, 2010 12:37AM PST

Of course, you will want to calibrate your battery about once every 30 days in order to maximize battery performance. You can read about it at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490 .

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This is not the same battery.
Dec 18, 2010 7:50AM PST

The one referred to in your linked article is a Lithium-Ion battery but the ones in the new MacBook Pro are Lithium-Polymer.

I don't think the calibrate procedure is for this new type of battery.

More details can be found here http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/battery/

P

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And even then
Dec 18, 2010 11:34AM PST

And even then, if it were the same, the article the person linked to clearly said that it should only be done every few months.

But as we both know, there are a lot of crazy ideas people have about laptop batteries.

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LINK
Dec 19, 2010 4:09PM PST

Thanks for sharing the Link, well I was introduced to a wrong belief once that overcharging can damage the laptop's system good thing Jimmy Greystone shared his knowledge about it.