[tincansandtwine]

Specifically in reply to the battery: I work in an enterprise environment where Macs make up about 50-60% of the installed machines. Of these, about 30-40% are laptops. In my experience, Mac laptop batteries have a high rate of failure, higher than our significantly more dated PC hardware. With the most recent revs, replacing the battery has become a huge problem, since relatively new hardware (1-2 years old) is now completely shot, unless we buy a proprietary screwdriver (not a big deal, but every time they change the screw, we have to find a shop that sells it), or send it to a Mac repair shop. Now, if we upgrade to the Retina Macbook Pro, we will not have the considerably cheaper and faster option of replacing it ourselves. Unfortunately, our userbase is such that they "require" Mac hardware, so it puts IT in a rough position (having to explain why we're essentially outsourcing our work, and spending money to do so).

Now, this isn't necessarily a typical case, but if you were a regular consumer and your battery died, it isn't that hard to buy a replacement battery for the majority of laptops, though this kind of thing is becoming more prevalent. I would also like to mention that it's not just Apple (I'm looking at you, Ultrabooks), though I would say that they are the trendsetter.

[esonderegger]

Why did you put quotes around "require" when describing your userbase and Mac hardware?

I'm genuinely curious - do their stated reasons for using Macs differ from how you think they are actually using their machines?

[socialist_coder]

You should tell your users to unplug their Macbooks more often. If you leave them plugged in 99% of the time the battery will fail a lot faster. It should drain and recharge every once a while.

[pasbesoin]

At this point, this should be a configurable option in the hardware and system software. Configurable, so that if you want to use it, you can tell it when. (E.g. I work from home on Sundays, so run from battery down to n percent charge before switching on recharging. And/or alert me when I exceed the recommended runtime between charging cycles. Etc.)

I suspect, however, that the cost/benefit -- from the manufacturers' perspective -- for implementing this is not favorable.

[speleding]

I can't find any reference anywhere that what you say is true, can you point me in the right direction please? As far as I know, the complete opposite is true for the Li-ion batteries that Apple uses, each discharge reduces its life.

Cadmium batteries have a memory effect and need to be drained every once in a while but Apple doesn't use those.

[semanticist]

While each full charge cycle reduces the overall life, Apple recommend going through at least one charge cycle a month: http://www.apple.com/batteries/

This isn't the same as 'run it down to 0% and then fully charge', though, it could be 'run it down to 75% and then fully charge, four times'.

[Xylakant]

This certainly applies to the pre-2008 models but I thought that was not true for the recent models any more.