Anker Battery Macbook Pro A1175 Review
Anker Battery Installed.
I was in desperate need for a replacement battery, as the battery for my MacBook Pro was over 5 years old. Not only was it really old and couldn't hold a charge for longer than 5 seconds (seriously), it was exploding out of the bottom of my mac. So while my mac slid around on my desk on a slight angle everytime I touched it, I decided to buy a new battery. I ended up going with the Anker as it was the only one I saw that was brushed aluminum like the (discontinued) factory mac battery. Not only that, but it got amazing reviews on Amazon by people praising it despite the $70 price tag. Upon opening the package once delivered, I immediately noticed the nice packaging it came in. There were two thick styrofoam pieces to cushion it and the whole thing came in a "frustration free" style cardboard box. Inside was an instruction manual which recommended, like most batteries, to drain the battery and then fully charge it.
Old Exploding Battery
After the power cycling, I went ahead and tried out some tests. My first test was just to see how much juice I could actually squeeze out of it. The only application I had open was Evernote and nothing else. Everything was turned off except wifi and nothing was running in the background. I was surprised that I got a whole 3 hours out of it as Anker stated that you'd only get about 2 hours. Now of course this isn't your typical use case scenario, so the next test was more of my everyday usage. I had open iTunes, Evernote and multiple tabs in Chrome while I worked in Photoshop. I actually got around 2.5 hours which is pretty good for how old this laptop is and even better than Anker's estimates. Then I tried out a third stress test with all of the apps from the previous test open along with aperture and final cut rendering in the background. This time around I got less than 2 hours which didn't really surprise me. All of these tests were done running OSX Mavericks 10.9.4. So all in all, I'd say I'm pretty happy with the battery. It even comes with a 18 month / 500 recharge cycle warranty. Do you have any experience with Anker batteries? I'd like to know what your experiences are with them. I know Anker makes all sorts of external batteries and such. Let me know down below ^_^.