Perhaps because of some the negative publicity with regards to some magsafe adaptors exploding on unibody MacBook and Macbook Pros or just because they care, users of the new OS X operating system Snow Leopard will now have access to a utility which monitors battery life on the portable devices within the Apple family.
News on Appleinsider reports that when logging into Snow Leopard users can now click on the battery icon, located in the menu bar on the desktop and access some more information about their battery"s physical condition.
The update to this utility now shows a new "battery condition" summary as well as the current amount of charge, along with the current energy source. Appleinsider states that once the battery has been deemed to be in poor condition and a significant loss of its original capacity has been discovered by the system, an exclamation icon will appear and the condition will be changed to "poor" -- this exclamation results in the need for the battery to be changed or replaced and comes as more of a warning to end users on the go who are not around their chargers the majority of the time.
Little is known about the varying degrees of battery state which Snow Leopard will highlight, but suffice to say, users will have a great deal more warning now with the use of this utility. This comes as a replacement to some third party applications which can also monitor battery life. Appleinsider states that there is no official reason behind this change and that simply to give users an early warning as to the condition of their battery is reason enough. However, I think it is also just to make clear that battery problems are something which is on Apple"s mind right now, given some of the previous failings of their batterys in the past. This upgrade comes concurrent with an update to the iPhone battery life indicator.