MacBook Pro, non-removable battery, 1000 cycles: Believable?

Do you believe Apple's claim about their non-removable lithium-polymer battery that should last 1000 cycles/5 years?

In short, yes.

Check out this page: Learn all about the breakthrough battery. There's a pretty interesting video on there. Sure it's a lot of marketing talk, but it's also quite down key. Apple is also the only brand-name computer manufacturer I know that publishes realistic runtimes.

And re. the 'non-removable' part: Go over to MacFixIt and look how the MacBook Pro's are made up -- it's not a big deal to open the bottom half, and exchange the battery, hard drive and RAM. Essentially, just a few screws, and you're done. The only thing you can't do is slap in a second battery to extend runtime. Then again, I don't know of ANY ONE who actually does this, since it means powering down and re-booting the machine. An external battery pack to extend runtime WITHOUT a power-down-re-boot makes much more sense (but even those are quite rare). And, frankly, with 7 to 8 hrs runtime, who needs to do that? (As I said, Apple's runtimes are realistic. My MacBook was advertised with 3.5 to 4 hrs. It gets 4 hrs routinely, with a two year old battery, and no special settings on my part, except reducing the screen brightness a bit -- really just a bit. I can survive a full work day without the power supply if need be, as I do not need to run it round-the-clock. One of the students on my team bought a recent Dell, and he gets about the same runtime -- albeit with screen brightness turned down A LOT, much more than me, plus tinkering with the power settings before he was able to get to this state.)

I know the battery can be easily replaced by unscrewing the bottom cover. The question is more about the 1000 cycles/5 years claim. Is it possible with the current Li-Polymer technology? I just got a 13" MacBook Pro and I find the runtime amazing. I'm looking forward to seeing if this claim is really true!

Yes. Definitely possible. Li-ion batteries have always had really great cycle-life. However, the 5 year shelf-life thing applies even if you only put 1 cycle a month on the battery. So that can be an issue. Although, keep in mind that these ratings don't mean that after cycle 1000 or after 5 years, your battery is dead. IIRC, the ratings are to 85 percent of starting capacity.

I have a Macbook Pro, but one of the pre-Oct 2008 ones, with the removable battery. It gets pretty decent runtime, but I would love to have an 8 hour runtime--no question.

i bet my mp3 player has that many cycles or more i love this thing but they dont make em no more its a creative labs vision m 30 gig.i keep expecting it to not hold a charge but it hasnt even lost run time i use it every day

There's a nice discussion here:

http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=234299