Birk's dashboard

Supposedly after 450 charges your battery will be around the 60-70% mark(Specs supplied by Apple). I have charged my battery 689 times so far in less than 14 months and my battery is at 69%.

If you need something to check or keep an eye on your battery, you can use "Coconut Battery" it's free ^_^

http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconu...

Hope this helps a little.

For the new macbookpros it's more complicated:

1) Plug in the power adapter and fully charge your PowerBook's battery until the light ring or LED on the power adapter plug changes to green and the onscreen meter in the menu bar indicates that the battery is fully charged.
2) Allow the battery to rest in the fully charged state for at least two hours. You may use your computer during this time as long as the adapter is plugged in.
3) Disconnect the power adapter with the computer still on and start running the computer off battery power. You may use your computer during this time. When your battery gets low, you will see the low battery warning dialog on the screen.
4) Continue to keep your computer on until it goes to sleep. Save all your work and close all applications when the battery gets very low, before the computer goes to sleep.
5) Turn off the computer or allow it to sleep for five hours or more.
6) Connect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged again.

Don't know why it's so much more complicated

If Wuala thinks it's offline even though you are online and the connection check succeeds, there is most likely a problem with one or more of our servers (as there was yesterday). Now as we are back from holiday, we'll be able to address such problems better and faster, so you hopefully won't encounter it again.

You can at least ajust the measurement by recalibrating. Recalibration of battery worked (for my old Powerbook) like this.

1) recharge it until it does not charge any more
2) decharge it until it turns off on its own (ignore battery warning)
3) Charge it again without interruption.

In result you should get correct % again.

Doing an SMC reset can help. My Macbook is 18months old and I also got some strange behaviour with the battery, did the SMC reset and now everything is oke.
My battery is at 97% of his original capacity and has 234 load cycles

I was having a similar problem, though nothing drastic. My MacBook Pro is less than a year old. My battery suddenly started topping out at 98%, never fully charging. Then a battery update popped up on my screen one day so I ran it and since then my battery has been fully charging again.

I was having the same issue -- my MacBook battery was showing 57% capacity after a year. I did the reset and the recalibration that Apple recommends, and I'm now up to 77% capacity.

My battery is about 19 months old and i'm at 75% health. Which is pretty great if you ask me, considering i'm somewhere near 200 load cycles on this thing.

Apple batteries and their charge strategies are great. IBM is the only other manufacture that i know of that also has smart charging strategies.

you could try this reset if you still feel like its a big issue
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.ht...

remember, your battery's stored energy is based on a chemical reaction, as the battery ages w/ use and time, the chemical bonds brake down and reduce your battery health/life/capacity.

check out coconut battery if you want to lean more about your battery status.

Numerous people I work with have had a problem or two with Apple batteries, because the same manufacturers make the batteries for Dells, Hps, and Sony's. Best bet is to return the battery, and you can do that with a call to Apple care. Not too hard to do, and if you have already recalibarated then you have done all you can.

Also you might want to try and reset your Power management Unit.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.ht...

Help that helps.

Could be a bad battery. I'm not sure if this is covered in the AppleCare program. Batteries will stop holding their charge, but one year seems on the short side to be experiencing this phenomenon. One thing that helps preserve battery life is turn off your computer at night rather than leave it on sleep. Not that I take my own advice...