It is 3:45am. I am sitting here in my hotel room at the Radisson SAS Kuwait (which, incidentally has the best breakfast buffet I have ever had at a hotel... it is really something) looking at my laptop and three depleted batteries. After the 4 1/2 hour flight from San Diego to DC, and the 12 hour flight from DC to Kuwait, I have emptied all three batteries I brought with me.One of my first orders of business is to recharge all my batteries. I travel with one of the new unibody aluminum MacBooks because it is a lot smaller than my 17" MacBook Pro and it is small enough that I can actually use it comfortably in the airplane... even if the person in front of me reclines their seat all the way.
So now I am at the hotel for an overnight stay and have to try to get some sleep and recharge all my batteries. Recharging this many batteries is always a hassle when you are trying to do it overnight, because you end up having to wake up every few hours to switch batteries.
I really dislike doing this, especially here, because Kuwait is 11 hours ahead of California time. That means that when my alarm goes off and wakes me up at 1am to switch batteries, to me, it feels like 2pm (I got here about 10 hours ago) and I just can't get back to sleep (I have that groggy I just woke up from a nap feel). So now I get to sit here watching my battery charge on the laptop... groggy but not going back to sleep.
With the unibody MacBook and 15" MacBook Pro, there is a battery cover that comes off under the machine to replace the battery. Initially I thought this was a pretty good idea. It saves weight on the batteries and on previous laptop models, I always seemed to end up with one Apple battery that didn't match the tone of my laptop. It was a few shades too light or dark. Not that this matters, since few other people peer at the underside of my laptop... but I knew... and it always bothered me.
Oh yeah... back to the MacBook battery cover... after a few times of sitting on the plane, with the laptop upside down on my lap and juggling the old dead battery and trying to avoid knocking my cranapple juice off the tray in front of me while trying to line up the little slots to get the batter cover to close back up, it makes me miss the simplicity of the older-style battery. All you did was use a coin to turn the switch under the laptop, the battery pops out, click the new one in, and you are back in business. It was a one handed process. There is no way to get the battery cover seated correctly on the laptop without two hands.
Hmmm. My mind wanders a bit when I am sleepy....
Something cool that I found at MacWorld this year was the U-Charge by FastMac. It allows you to charge your spare laptop batteries without the laptop. You plug in their brick (about the same size as a MacBook charging brick) and then attach the cable right to the battery terminals themselves.
Currently it will charge the older style MacBooks and MacBook Pros as well as Powerbooks and iBooks. FastMac said that their charging cable for the newest MacBook and 15" MacBook Pro is in production and will be available very soon. The cable is going to be about $20 if you already have a U-Charge unit and will be priced about the same as the existing unit if you wait and buy it when the cable is available.
It won't solve my battery door issue (minor as it may be) but at least I can be charging multiple batteries at one time... and hopefully getting more sleep when traveling.
