MacBooks generally get decent battery life, however, sometimes Apple accidentally produces laptops with a faulty batteries. While the “About This Mac” menu on your Mac can provide some information on your Mac’s battery, the Condition status can often be skewed, and the cycle count doesn’t do much good if you have nothing to compare your cycle count to. This is where MacBookBatteryDatabase comes in: a widget that tracks your MacBook’s battery life, and allows you to compare it to other MacBooks.
Installing the widget is simple: just head over to the developer’s website, download the free widget, run it, and add it to your Mac’s dashboard. Once you have it placed on your Mac’s dashboard, click the “Submit Now” button to manually send your first battery statistic to the service. After this, your battery stats will be sent to the service once daily. If you’d rather have it sent once weekly or monthly, you can choose to do so via the information button that is located towards the bottom righthand corner of the widget.
Now that you’ve set up the widget, your Mac will send its battery information into the service daily. You can view your battery statistics chronologically by clicking on the “Show my stats” button that is located on the righthand side of the widget. When you click on this button, your web browser will open and bring you to your personal MacBookBatteryDatabase page. From this page, you can track your previous charge cycles through the graph at the bottom of the window. If you’d like, you can overlay the average and maximum battery life over your Mac’s battery graph. Towards the top of the page, you can view your Mac’s battery cycle count and its health.
Overall, I think that MacBookBatteryDatabase is a good service for those who are paranoid about their MacBook’s battery life. The fact that you can see the progression of your Mac’s battery life over time and compare it with other Macs is a great tool to have in your troubleshooting arsenal.
Photo Credit: Mario Hernández
