Hypermac 60wh Apple Laptop External Battery Review

Hypermac 60wh Apple Laptop External Battery Review

9/4/09
By Notebookreview.com member: Vogelbung

One of the problems with the new fixed-battery ‘unibody’ Apple machines, especially if you strip away the usual Apple hype as well as the fanboitastic runtime reviews from Apple fanatics, born-again-Switchers and the 'I Left My Brain In San Francisco' tech press contingent alike, is that they are actually not that impressive in terms of real-life runtime in comparison to many of their removable-battery-sporting PC counterparts.

Take the new "7-hour" Macbook Pro 13-inch for example that the aforementioned reviews ascribe 8-hour runtimes to. Real-life ekeing runtime (and I'll get to the criteria for that later): ~5.5 hours. Early 2008-vintage (and lighter) Penryn Core 2 Duo Sony SZ7 running similar apps, real-life ekeing runtime: ~6 hours.

And the Macbook Air is of course the worst out of the lot: an average runtime of 3.5 real-life hours is typical, which makes it totally useless as an 'all-dayer' unless you remain tied to an AC socket for much of the day. So what to do if you need true all-day (6 hours or more) capability from a current Apple notebook? Lug around the ~6-real-life-hour 17-inch uMBP? Limit yourself to the overweight plastic Macbook with spare battery? Not for me thanks - and this is where the recently-released Hypermac external batteries come in.

I realise that the 'Macintosh über alles' posse would have paged away immediately at the mention of the words 'problems with', 'hype' and 'Apple' in the same sentence, but if you've got this far and feel the runtime of your pride and joy could do with a lift in practical terms - then read on, dear Apple user.




Specifications:
Dimensions: 123.5mmW x 96mmD x 21.3mmH
Weight: 450 grams including Macbook Air cable (claimed: 360 grams)
Connectors: DC In (Charge), DC Out (to computer), USB (power only)
Single switch: Charge check
Indicators: Power LED, battery charge indicator LED (x4)
Stated DC Output: 14.5 – 18.5V, 4.5A Max, 60wh
Battery -> Computer cable configuration: Right-angled DC plug (battery side) to Magsafe connector (Air or Macbook-type)
Battery -> Computer cable length: >170cm

AC Adapter
Stated Input voltage: 100 – 230V 50/60hz, Stated Output: 12.6V @ 2.3A
AC connector: Standard IEC ‘figure of 8’
LED indicator: Glows green when not charging or charging complete, red when charging.

Options
Car charger


Overview:
The Hypermac series are external batteries which plug into the power connector of the Macs, in effect acting as mobile chargers. Various versions are available: 60, 100, 150 and 222wh versions with corresponding increases in weight and size up the range. The review item, the smallest 60wh version comes in at a manageable 450 grams (almost exactly 1lb) for the battery plus required connection cable, which doesn’t cramp an ultraportable too much. However the figure is notably higher than the quoted weight of 360 grams on the Hypermac site.

The 60wh Hypermac battery arrives in a box with the unit, an AC charger (world voltage) and the Mac connection cable that you chose (Air or Macbook – or both) as well as the AC cord terminated for the country that you chose in the checkout options.

The casing is of extruded aluminium with plastic end caps, and follows a fairly typical formula of making enclosures like this. The case can be deemed to be of a sufficient robustness to withstand regular everyday use and the minor impacts in bags, etc that it might encounter. The manufacturing (which is expected) and the QC (which is a more contentious issue with a large Li-Ion battery) seems to be completely contracted to a Chinese company, the production label of ‘Be irresponsible for lable shred’ being something of a giveaway.

There are three sockets on the battery – one to charge, a ‘DC OUT’ to connect to the computer and a USB socket. Plugging in the computer cable into the socket starts power delivery, shown by the green ‘ON’ LED. At any time, the button beside the LED can be pressed to show the remaining charge on 4 other LED lights. The USB socket can be used to charge peripherals such as iPods, iPhones, etc concurrently or separately to the laptop.

The Hypermac AC adapter seems to be able to assist the Hypermac in powering the connected computer in addition to charging it: That is you can connect a Hypermac to the charger, plug the battery in to the Air and apparently top off the charge on the Hypermac while powering the Air. There are no warnings not to do so, but I remain sceptical as to the ultimate suitability of doing this for various reasons.


Testing:
I used a Macbook Air Rev.C (2.13, SSD) for this test, since it is my primary target machine for the Hypermac battery.



The test involved real-life ekeing use. This is in fact my normal mode of operation - I do not leave machines on idle for hours and call that anything other than a really stupid test, do you?

I used the most power-saving profile available from the standard settings on a machine, and the minimum display brightness that is (even slightly uncomfortably) viewable. In the Air's case that is two-notch brightness. Bluetooth was switched off throughout the testing, and wireless was on. Display sleep was set at 3 minutes, and system sleep at 10 minutes - typical of an balance between aggressive power-saving and usability - however the sleep did not kick in for the documented test, as the machine was in constant use.

The programs run are just what I do normally in the course of my work during the day, and is tested on days that I did not have to run industry specific tools. Because I tend to do essentially the same things in terms of the apps run when I am not operating industry-specific tools, the system impact is pretty consistent and I can reproduce very similar runtimes regardless of day, and very similar ratios between Apple-quoted runtimes and my figures from different model to model, indicative of a consistent methodology on both sides.

The programs run were:
- Office 2008. Light-duty but fairly constant use of Entourage, Word and Excel.
- Periodic light use of Omnigraffle Pro.
- Mozilla Firefox. All manner of browsing. A mix of regular sites, as well as 1/2 hour of CNET Live video at default window size.
- Client for my SSL gateway
- Remote Desktop client
- Dropbox as well as MobileMe configured to syc almost everything. No significant changes were made to trigger major synchronisations of either service during the test.

For around 30% of the time, the machine would have been connected either via an SSL VPN or a PPTP VPN. The machine was also turned off twice during the test to facilitate transportation and/or to do something else, the continued running time being recorded at the end of shutdown and at the start of boot. In each case, the shutdown period was no longer than 2 hours.

It should be noted that since it works in place of an AC adapter, the AC adapter power profile is active on the Mac when the Hypermac is plugged in. Therefore the power attributes for AC mode were set to be the same as battery mode on the test Air.

By around 4:40, the light on the Magsafe was noted to be off, whereupon the battery was disconnected and the Air was operating under its own power. The Air finally went into hibernation at the 8:15 mark. You can do the maths for the autonomous operation time of the Air.

Subsequent 'genuine wireless productivity' tests - all with two-notch screen brightness - ranging from much lighter use almost purely limited to text-heavy websites (and allowing the display sleep to kick in occasionally for a few minutes), to heavier use of the system including longer periods of web video yielded runtimes from ~9:00 to ~7:00.


Conclusion:
The result is that the Air + 60wh Hypermac combo affords the user a genuine > 8 hour runtime for true 'wireless productivity' with aggressive use of power saving, while the combo weighs in at 200 grams less than a Macbook Pro 13-inch. This is a definitely usable solution and it turns the Air into a true ‘all-dayer’. It will, of course, do the same throughout the Apple laptop line.



While the separate battery does add bulk and complexity, it does give the user some advantages, as in being able to charge the computer and the battery(ies) at the same time and the facility to charge a USB device directly off the battery without typing up a USB socket on the computer - something that is at a premium on the Air.

However, another reason that I mentioned the Sony SZ earlier is that the combined weight of the Air, cable and Hypermac 60wh hovers around 1.8Kg’s – almost the same weight as the 6-hour SZ, a considerably more packed machine than the Air. That the combo gets only a little more than 2 hours in excess of the standard-trim, obsolete Sony using a ‘full’ Core 2 Duo in similar power-ekeing use is undoubtedly disappointing.

But when everything is considered, the combination is likely the best - if the user needs to be Apple-based - compromise between working ability, runtime and all-up weight for a genuinely portable all-day setup.

Pros:

• Works pretty much as advertised – extends running time of any Mac equipped with Magsafe.
• Simple to own and use.
• Can be charged independently of the Mac.

Cons:

• Adds to all-up weight (obviously).
• Another thing to charge, carry and to connect + locate in use.
• Some may consider the $200 starting price for a small battery expensive, and $100 for an additional power cable (if you want the flexibility of Air or Macbook power couplings) a ripoff. On the other hand, an otherwise perfectly functional Apple PSU has to be gutted in order for Hyperdrive to obtain the Magsafe connectors, then the cable re-terminated - this is truly an 'Apple tax' in this case.

In closing, the Hypermac works fundamentally as advertised to extend the running time of any Mac equipped with Magsafe, but most pertinently the integrated-battery unibodies. The unit is easy to use, easy to live with and appears to have no major drawbacks apart from the obvious. Recommended for Apple users who are aware of the inadequacies of their shiny toys and need truly usable runtime out of them.


Pricing and Availability
The Hypermac battery range starts from $199.95 and is available from http://www.hyperdrive.com/

 

Great review, and great to see such real life results of an external battery.


The Macbook Air has a 40Wh battery integrated. With this battery you get 215 minutes runtime, this means the Macbook Air consumes 11.2 Watt (that's already a lot, compared to many PCs which consume only 8 or 9 Watt when not heavily used)
However, with the external battery you get an additional runtime of 280 mintues, this means in reality the external battery gives your notebook only 52Wh.
The remaining 8Wh capacity the external battery has is lost due to the voltage converter, that's an efficiency of 87% which is not bad for a Step-Up converter used in this external battery.
(probably too good, so don't know if the original battery really has 40Wh )

So what I want to tell you.
Generally the battery is well built, the battery does not use cheap components, so it's worth the money.
On the other hand the general problem with such external batteries is that a lot of the energy gets lost due to the voltage converters. The efficiency will be even worse if you stress the Macbook more.
So the real energy an external battery can send to your Macbook is often only 85% or even less.

That's why such an external battery is always a sub-optimal solution, sadly the only solution you have with the Macbook Air and its tiny not replaceable battery.


Everything gets even worse if your Macbook isn't fully charged and the external battery is used to both charge the internal battery and power the MacBook.