iPod Battery Level Is "approximate"

From the iPod support pages.

Note: The iPod battery indicator shows approximately how much charge is left in the battery. In some iPods, you may find that the battery indicator shows some charge left, but your iPod stops playing because the battery is, in fact, empty. In other cases, the battery indicator may show less than a full charge even though you've fully charged it.

I always suspected this.

And find it really irritating.

Comments

[simon]

bah ipods .. grrrrr

so many flaws
so little support
so many supporters

go figure!

[Page]

I took the tube into central London over the weekend with the charge on my iPOD below safe commuting levels.

On the way home, the indicator informed me that there was zero juice left..yet some fine british pop rocked on. I decided to see how long the iPod could run on fumes...I went for another 40 minutes as I sputtered into my flat.

This is like driving with an empy tank to see how far past the E you can get before running out of gas.

My iPod keeps on going.

[jess]

apple hardware just seems shoddy.
files on my ipod are constatly disappearing, and everyone of the people i know who has a powerbook has had to send theirs in at least once for repair. and a friend who works at an apple store says they have to replace about 30% of their ipods due to hardware failure.

here is a reliability survey done on apple laptops: http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/laptops.html
no idea if these failure numbers are an industry standard or not.

i want to like apple products, but all their annoyances don't seem to justify the price.

[Ken]

It annoys me when the meter indicates I have about 1/4 of battery life left, yet it shuts off due to no battery power.

[Jeff]

Apple is a cult and all users are in denial that most of their software sucks. I find Quicktime and iTunes intrusive and clunky. The Ipod battery issue is rediculous as well.

[Tom]

Wow, very interesting - though not surprising. I flew home from Chicago to Newark this past weekend, and the meter was just about empty. After about an hour on the tarmac at O'Hare and the 2:11 flight, I still had plenty of battery left. Go figure.

Makes me long for those batteries with the meter you can read by putting your fingers on the ends.

[james]

get over it?

[Farid]

Mine drops to 3/4 immediately after a full charge! what gives?

[Craig]

I've noticed the give and take on the battery life related to whether the back light is on. I can have 1/8 of battery left with BL on, then when it turns off have 1/3 left... Conversley, with BL off - have 1/4 left, turn it on and have the unit shut off... Seems they have it display approximate life given the draw it is currently experiencing...

[anonymous]

Do you know how to tell from an arbitrary battery how much charge it has left? There are a couple of ways to do it; you can do a chemistry experiement and measure the concentrations of ions, you can try to measure relative voltages and try to interpolate it, there are other ways too. It's not exactly just a few lines of code though. Apple measures subtle changes in the battery output and they try to guess based on some simple usage patterns how much energy it has left and they try to do this on a $200-$400 device, it might have been better just to take the battery indicator out all together.

Your laptop is pretty accurate but there are actual semiconductors in the battery and those batteries aren't terribly inexpensive.

Maybe you VC guys should make a battery charger and energy indicator play, I bet that has like a whole 3% return if you can actually even get someone to solve the problem.