17-inch MacBook Pro Takes a Different Approach.

At Apple, we are always looking for ways to advance the performance of our portable products. Battery technology and design was one of those areas that we saw the opportunity for some really key advancement. With the new 17-inch MacBook Pro, we have designed a battery that will last up to eight hours on a single charge and can be fully recharged up to a thousand times and we have done it all without adding to the size, weight or even the price of the Notebook. In the process, we have built a more environmentally friendly computer.

The key to building a lost-lasting battery is making it better; the bigger battery with more capacity means longer battery life. When we design a portable product, every tenth to the millimeter is precious. The challenge in designing a bigger battery is we define the space to put it. We found that when you design for removable battery, there is a lot of waste to space. A lot of that space and volume used for mechanisms, structure, battery compartment, even removable doors by embedding the battery removing all the infrastructure associated with the removable battery, we were able to create a Notebook with a 40% larger battery that last up to eight hours on a single charge at the same size and weight.

In the case of Apple, we have scientists, chemists, engineers that are dedicated to battery development so we are able to build batteries that are custom designed for the computers that they are going to go into. The battery life is really is the simple matter of how much energy you can store in the computer. When you open up a Notebook computer from a lot of our competition, you will see cylindrical cells for the like AA batteries that you can buy. There is a lot of empty space in there, that space that you could use for storing energy. And so by creating custom shape cells that we have in our batteries, you can fill all of the space much more effectively that you can with cylindrical shapes. You can also customize it to the all kinds of different sizes and that is what we do.

To make our batteries extremely thin, we used lithium polymer technology. We start with these very large sheets of tissue-like foil and you coat those with the active material that stores the energy for the battery. In our case, it is an advance chemistry that extends the lifespan of the cell to three times the industry standard. Then they go together into an electrode roll and then this roll is compressed into the correct shape just to offer size dimensions. We go very deep into the design of a battery and cell engineering. You will find that anywhere else in the computer industry.

In addition to advance chemistry, one of the breakthroughs of our battery design is the concept to the depth of charger. This actually reduces the wear and tear on the battery as we charge it. With these new technologies, we are able to achieve up to a thousand recharges and that is more than three times the recharges of a typical Notebook battery.

Well, the industry charge is taking these lithium ion cells, put them into a system, charging at a constant voltage until they are fold and then they stop. That can wear out a battery prematurely. What we did was we have a chip within a battery that talks to each one of the individual cells and reports back on its state to the system and the system goes back and adjust the current accordingly. The new 17-inch MacBook Pro will have greater than three times the number of recharges and greater than three times the battery lifespan compared to the industry standard.

We are always looking for ways to make our products greener. From an environmental perspective, the new 17-inch MacBook Pro is a real breakthrough. It is free of many of the harmful toxins found in other computers. It runs on less than 50% the energy of a single light bulb and it is made of highly recyclable aluminum glass.

But we also take it one step further. Because this battery can recharge up to a thousand times, its lifespan is extended up to five years that means a lot less batteries will end up in lentos.

At Apple, we constantly strive to create the finest and lightest 17-inch products we can design and often this has led us to the very forefront of battery technology. We thought about how do you accomplish this really far out goal of being able to get a useful days worth of work done on a single battery charge and how do you create a design where the battery can last for years and years and we think we finally come up with convergence of technologies that makes that dream that we have been pursuing for a long time when it is possible.

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