what is best battery maintenance?

Hello!

We actually just recently wrote full coverage on this very topic on our iFixit blog! Check it out. I believe you will find all the information you need there (better than I could explain here, at least)!

I know this doesn't help, or really answer the question, but my attitude towards batteries and computers in general is that they exist for our purposes and for our convenience, so to take up our own time in order to make a battery happy and meet its needs is fairly self-defeating. Besides, it's very difficult if not impossible to ever know whether or not how you've cared for or not cared for a battery led to it living an extra 90 days, or dying 90 days earlier. I say, just forget about the battery! :-) Anyway, just my two cents.

In the 80s/90s when we had inferior NIMH and other battery types which had a "memory" and absolutely needed to be fully charged/discharged, behavior toward a battery was much more relevant. But now that we have lithium ions which are far less temperamental, again, it's near impossible to tell if your behavior is affecting battery life, yet opinions on how to treat batteries still persist.

Pretty much the thing to do is calibrating it.

I own a MacBook Pro and the battery life just wasn't good enough for me. I got only a few hours per charge and that is if I was lucky. My eventual solution was to get an external laptop battery from Novuscell Batteries. So far, no regrets because I'm now getting an extra 12+ hours of battery runtime per charge on my MBP.

Looks like the blog link is dead. Too bad, it was probably nice.

Lithium batteries have four enemies:

1. Cycles. You have to use them, of course, it’s why you bought a laptop.
2. Time. Nothing to do about this.
3. Heat. Stay away from it. Leaving it in your car in July is a bad idea.
4. High voltage. I use my pro as a desktop, with the charger always connected. This keeps it fully charged. The high voltage condition causes significant degradation over time. Fortunately, some manufacturers allow you to configure charge termination to some lower percentage to extend battery lifetime. You can charge to full if you’re getting on a plane. Apple does something similar. It is adaptive. It learns your habits, and backs off on charging accordingly. I don’t know what their algorithm is. There’s not much you can do except not to charge to full when you know your machine will be off for a few days.