Over the life of your MacBook, your battery is going to get gradually weaker. Eventually they will fail, either from age or just from being a bad battery. Mac has a built in battery monitor in the System Utility, that can say if the battery is healthy, how many cycles it’s been through, etc. But this doesn’t help if you want to see how weak or strong your battery is, nor if you want to know what might really be wrong with your battery. If you want some more info about your battery, try Coconut Battery.

I ran into Coconut Battery after my own battery seemed to be showing that something was amiss. Usually when this pops up, something is going wrong with the battery, and I was concerned. However, I had had this problem happen to me before, so I wanted to double check. Coconut Battery was able to tell me how much juice my battery left in it, and whether or not the Mac was being charged. In the box below it, it told me the carrying capacity of my battery compared to when the battery was brand new, which is a very nifty feature. It’s so much easier to read than judging it based off of the cycle count that Mac’s System Utility gives me. It also told me that battery is still in good condition. It also tells you your Mac model, based on the identification number, as well as the approximate age of the Mac. Lastly, you can save the stats of your battery for the current period, and compare that to later or earlier saved statistics. Outside of that, the app doesn’t provide much else in terms of functionality, but that’s ok. The app does what it says it will do, and it does it well. So if you want an easy way to check the health and the life of your battery, Coconut Battery is the way to go.

Coconut Battery is a free app for Mac OS 10.5 and higher (Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion). You can download it from http://www.coconut-flavour.com/. If you have any questions, comments, or anything else you would like to share, leave a comment below or email me at easyosx@live.com. Also be sure to check out Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube through the links at the top of the screen, as well as on Google+.. Thanks!