According to <a href="http://www.hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/macbook-battery-not-recognized-after-being-fully-drained" source="HiveLogic" author="Dan Benjamin">MacBook Battery Is Toast After Being Fully Drained</a>, Apple brings a whole new meaning to the term "dead battery". According to the article, OS X can sometimes drain a battery so irrevocably that it can never be charged again. It's a hardware problem that affects a small percentage of users. What's interesting is the reaction to the problem by Benjamin, one of the Apple faithful. Instead of tearing Apple a new one for not addressing this clear software/BIOS/whatever issue, he lamely recommends that the problem <iq>can be easily avoided by shutting your Macbook down if you won’t be using it for more than a day.</iq> Really? That's great! Thanks! Shutting down and restarting all the time is fun and now Apple users can enjoy all the benefits of being Windows users, but with cooler, whiter hardware. So, it seems that Safe Sleep mode has a bit of trouble, which is kind of understandable, since it's a relatively new feature with OS X. Windows, on the other hand, has had Hibernate for a long time and it works so well there that it's turned off by default and can only be enabled by digging through three or four dialog boxes. With the advent of Vista, Sleep mode is enabled by default and fails much of the time, whereas Hibernate is still relegated to the "off by default" feature set, but seems to work better than it did in XP. Apple, whose OS X system bests Microsoft's assortment of products in many ways, seems to be having similar problems with their Sleep/Safe Sleep features. As with Hibernate in Windows, Safe Sleep is not enabled by default for most machines and cannot be triggered manually<fn>. In fact, Apple's official documention, <a href="http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302477">Progress bar appears after waking from sleep</a>, describes the feature thusly: <bq>ensures that data stored in main memory will not be lost should the system shut down due to a loss of power during sleep mode.</bq> If you're a laptop user, it sounds like you have no choice about your Mac draining the battery while in sleep mode---you can't force Safe Sleep in order to preserve battery life, all you can do is shut down, which means you lose your painstakingly put-together set of open applications and documents. Not cool. Benjamin, however, gushes about how cool it is that he doesn't lose his work completely, failing to see that Apple is only just barely implementing a very useful feature---and about five years after Windows starting doing so. When Apple's broken implementation depleted his battery into oblivion, he blithely---and without complaining---made an appointment to bring his laptop to an Apple Store to get it fixed. What a pain in the ass; Apple should fix this broken feature as soon as possible---it's hard to imagine the Apple laptop experience being much fun when you're constantly worrying about your battery draining out and having to hook the bloody thing up to the power supply because it was sitting around all day doing nothing and was too stupid to go into Safe Sleep by itself. Instead of noting this, Benjamin trumpets that his replacement battery---destroyed by negligent software---was free, but only because it was under warranty. If you're out of the one-year warranty period, you're stuck buying a rather expensive laptop battery if you forget to <iq>shut your Macbook down completely if you don’t plan to use it for more than a few hours.</iq> This blindness to Apple's difficulties is exactly why the Apple Faithful have a bad reputation. A well-known pillar of the Apple development community doesn't make a peep as his laptop melts down and forces him to take off precious time getting it fixed. Instead, he calmly accepts the fate of shutting down his laptop anytime he isn't going to need it for a few hours---as if it was 1997 again. A problem that would be a deal-killer for Windows-related hardware is shrugged off as no big deal, simply because it comes from Apple instead of Microsoft. That's hardly any way to pressure Apple into solving this rather serious problem. <hr> <ft>See <a href="http://andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/how-to-safe-sleep-your-mac/t" author="Andrew Escobar">How to Safe Sleep (Hibernate) Your Mac</a> for more information about playing with Safe Sleep on your Mac. It's all very hacky right now, but there's also more information available here, <a href="http://matt.ucc.asn.au/apple/machibernate.html">Hibernate on your non-brandnew Mac</a></ft>