It was my own fault. I put down the power adapter for my PowerBook in the cafeteria, and when I returned a little while later it had gone. I blame Apple’s sexy styling: it’s simply irresistible. Whatever: I was chargeless. I kept working on battery power until the system went to sleep to save me from myself. That was yesterday evening.
This afternoon, I was driving back from Sun’s Santa Clara campus to Menlo Park, and I decided that I had just enough time to stop in at Micro Center to pick up a new charger. They didn’t have the model I needed (scratch that store in future) but they did have a third-party “universal” charger. Reluctantly, I bought it.
Now I’ve always thought that electricity is electricity, right? The charger supplies juice, the battery charges, that’s it. Simple. Well, maybe not. Take a look at the X-Charge graph above. It shows my PowerBook charging up from zero to full over the course of 5 hours. There’s a 2 hour gap (leaving work, getting food, doing a conference call), and then after a weird curve (sure looks like it’s approaching an an asymptote to me!) the system decides that it’s not 85% charged, it’s 100%. Finished. Complete. Instantanteously. Weird. And iBatt confirms that it’s fully charged, at 4.151 Ah.
I never got that kind of curve with a standard Apple charger. And besides, this “universal” thing is running awfully hot. I think I may have to stop by the Apple company store tomorrow and pick up a kosher unit. I wonder if I’ll bump into Steve Jobs, as I did on Monday….