I’m getting 2:50 of battery use on my MacBook. The MacBook (and thus battery) was a new refurb in September, 2006. I don’t have problems with it, save for the expected, normal, gradual decay of battery session life. This is a fact of life with laptop batteries. From what I’ve read and people I’ve spoken to, if you’re getting an hour or more of session life after two years of use, you’re doing very well.

Anyway, during this gradual decline in performance, the battery’s estimates of its session life can drift. After battery calibration however, the predictive time-remaining estimate at the beginning of my current session was within 10 minutes, a margin I consider very accurate.

For this 2:50 mark, my CPU setting is on Performance, and my screen brightness is 3 ticks down from max. I’m using a MS wired optical mouse, which in my extremely non-empirical testing comes at a cost of roughly 10% battery life.

Activities include playing music w/ headphones, Web browsing, light Photoshop work and heavy file downloading.

Does your Mac portable shut down with 10% battery remaining? Are your time remaining estimates always off? If so, you should calibrate your Mac’s battery. I followed the instructions below and found that my predictive readings were once again accurate.

From Apple.com:

PowerBook G4 (15-inch Double-Layer SD), MacBook (all), MacBook Pro (all)
All other models

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.

The StopDashboard  widget kills the Dock process, and in doing so frees the memory Dashboard widgets use. The Dock restarts itself, but Dashboard doesn’t. When you need it, Dashboard starts normally (F12).

Very useful for when you need all the memory you can muster, but don’t want to disable Dashboard via command line.

Watch Apple Inc. stock to jump today on a raft of recent good news, the most recent of which seems small but really is a major event, if true.

…McCartney tells Billboard in an exclusive interview to be published tomorrow (May 11) that a deal to finally make the Beatles catalog available for sale online is “virtually settled.” [Billboard]

Also very substantial:

According to NPD Group Apple’s MacBook and MacBook Pro made up 9.9 percent of all notebook sales at U.S.-based retail stores during March. MacBooks combined with strong iMac sales pushed Apple into the top five desktop manufacturers for the first time this year, according to the NPD report. [my bold] [zdnet]

Before market, May 14:
$108.74

Could be tomorrow. Ars Technica reports on a report (that probably, yes, reports on a rumor of a report) that an announcement is coming up soon. According to AT, the 6th gen iPod would ship when/after iPhones ship.

According to the “unproven source,” the announcement of widescreen, touchscreen iPods is coming tomorrow, but the new iPods wouldn’t ship until after the iPhone launches in June/July. It’s a cool, and very titillating rumor, but I suspect that this particular source is about as reliable as the guy who sold me a Ziploc bag full of what turned out to be flour cut with Comet and mothballs. In particular, three things stick out about this latest rumor:

First, there’s the claim itself: the launch is coming tomorrow because the touchscreen technology “has been finalized” for the iPhone, but they won’t ship until after the iPhone so as not to lure buyers away. It’s just different enough from what’s been said to already be working, but I don’t think it’s very plausible. First of all, if users are already waiting for the iPhone in order to get their hands on widescreen/touchscreen technologies, so what’s going to stop them from waiting another month to get the 6G iPod that they might really want?