This doesn't seem right:

>Her recommendation was to cycle the battery constantly, running the machine on the battery almost exclusively.

I have a MBP that had to use starting summer half a day on battery exclusively and the other day plugged in. It has reduced my battery life a lot (currently running on a new battery actually, that's how much it got trashed). This on an 1.5 years laptop.

160 cycles. 14 months old. 5 (or less) percent of original full charge capacity. Replaced without any fuss (only a lengthy phonecall, but I didn't have any explaining or convincing to do - we had to wait until someone higher up the chain, who is allowed to authorize such exchanges, was no more busy).

They say the capacity goes down to 80 percent after 300 cycles. If the battery doesn't make it for that long and they don't replace it on warranty I full well would have made a fuss. What you got was normal service, this is what you should expect, not something to admire.

I don't see why they shouldn't replace the battery. To be quite honest, everytime my girlfriend or I had trouble with an apple computer it was fixed without any cost. I do call tech support myself, I ask the telephone number and take care of it. The way I see it, direct communication leaves out more space for errors.

I don't know if this has anything to do with the fact I live in Belgium and warranty is 2years, I've had issues with my battery a couple of times but batteries don't fall under the 2year warranty so they aren't forced to replace it.

I think my Macbook Pro is about 9 months old. Apple and others recommended that when you unplug, always let it drain down to the point of going to sleep/hibernate and never plug it in before.

So far so good, 277 cycles and I have not noticed a single difference in battery life. I drain it at least a few times per week. Sometimes twice per day.

I did not do this on my last Macbook Pro and Apple replaced the battery for me after about a year and a half because it couldn't even hold a 10 min charge and it had very few cycles, certainly not 277.

Similar experience happened to my friend. Apple is pretty good about replacing batteries when they fail. Although only 48 cycles after a year and a half means this person almost never lets their battery discharge which likely accelerated the failure.

What's so special about macbook pro batteries that other laptop batteries do not have ?

Found a useful link from the article on how to care for MacBook batteries: http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html