A few months back, I started wondering about the battery life of my MacBook. The machine was almost three years old and I was experiencing a proportionate drop in battery performance. I’d taken pretty good care of the battery and was curious to know exactly how healthy it was. CoconutBattery turned out to be a neat and tidy little app that did just that, and is this week’s Saturday Night Freeware.
You don’t get much bells and whistles with CoconutBattery (for a more exhaustive overview of system performance, including CPU, battery, HDs, etc., take a look at Dashboard widget iStatPro). As you can see in the screenshot, the interface is basic. It shows an overview of your Mac, including model, age, battery load cycles, battery temperature and power usage. It also lets you know at a single glance the capacity of your battery and the charge it holds at the present time. Preferences include support for a custom battery capacity and the option to view temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit.
CoconutBattery correctly identified the age and health of my battery (it picks up the age from the information coded into the serial number). I like it for its simplicity and small footprint (about 1.5 MB). It lets you save the current maximum capacity of your battery so you can compare how it changes over time.
CoconutBattery is a free app, but feel free to show your love with a donation to the developer.
~PD
Wow such fancy stats…I doubt my battery knows temperature or load cycles :/
You should find a clever little Linux appy for that!