Day: September 16, 2015

Saw this message this morning on my beloved Macbook Air. I’m hoping it’s a lie and that cycling the battery completely will make it go away.

This usually means the battery is getting to the end of it’s useful life and is due for replacement. Sometimes it means you’ve got a glitch in the power management system that can be corrected. 

Fingers crossed that it’s correctable.

If it’s not, well it looks like batteries are about 100.00 so it won’t be too expensive to repair.  This got me thinking though, “How old is this computer?” I pulled up the receipt and DANG! this little puppy was purchased 6/2012. Not too shabby if the battery is just now saying it’s getting tired. 

So now comes the question. Do I replace the battery or the computer? A quick search tells me that another Macbook Air similarly equipped would cost $1749.00. The specs on the newest machines aren’t substantially different from what I’ve got. The new machine would give me Thunderbolt 2, 802.11ac, and a longer battery life, 12 hours instead of 7.

On the other hand for about $600.00 I could put a lower power, faster, bigger(1TB) SSD (Solid State Drive) in this machine and replace its battery with a larger capacity version and probably achieve some system wide improvements that would be on par with the brand new machine. This would extend the life of my current computer easily another three years.

It would be nice to have Thunderbolt 2 and it would be nice to have faster wifi. But those items don’t justify the additional cost. The display on the new Macbook Air isn’t substantially different and in all other respects the new machine would be a duplication of the old.

So if I’m going to have to replace the battery in this machine, the question is do I spring for the new hard drive at the same time? Since I’m going to have the machine open in the first place maybe it makes more sense to do all the surgery at once.

We also have a new operating system release coming up. Humm…

In for a penny, in for a pound.  or more modern… Go big or Go home.

I’ll wait for the results of the battery drain and recharge and then decide but I think I’m going to have some interesting computer stuff going on in the near future.

Pray to the computer gods for me.