Low End Mac is one of my favorite Macintosh websites.
When I first started collecting compact Macs in the late 1990s, Low End Mac was where I could get pretty accurate specs, desirability and unique characteristics of these machines.
Over the past year of so, I have graduated to buying new Macs. And I still use Low End Mac’s Best Deals index to find out the market values of these machines.
Unfortunately, Dan Knight’s recent article on notebook batteries left a lot to be desired from a technical point of view.
The original article referred to all notebook batteries as NiMH ones. The fact of the matter is that notebooks have been using LiIon batteries for a number of years. Perhaps the original 68000-based Powerbooks had NiMH batteries but a quick check on Low End Mac itself showed that the infamous Powerbook 5300 had a LiIon battery that was prone to self-destruction.
Dan Knight then changed the article, replacing all instances of NiMH with Li-Ion. Which still left the article pretty inaccurate.
The reason for that is the assumption of the original article : that high capacity NiMH cells in AA form factor are common and cheap and could therefore be easily used in NiMH notebook batteries thus reducing the total cost of such batteries.
Replacing “NiMH” by “Li-Ion” made the second part of that assumption factually correct, but also made the first part of the assumption incorrect. Li-Ion batteries in AA form factor are rare and the 18650 form factor of the Li-Ion cells used in the iBook battery remain pretty expensive. You are definitely not talking about $30 of cells.
This is pretty sad because the last thing us Mac users would like others to think of us is technologically ignorant.