Personally, I did the "calibration" rather unintentionally after first getting my BlackBook 2.16GHz -- charged it all the way up, ran it all the way down, charged it all the way up again (ie a first "full cycle").
Since then, I do not calibrate it at all, I rarely take it off the power, it rarely gets below 50% battery on those few occasions where its on battery at all. It is still giving me exactly the same capacity and performance I got from it 2.5 years ago.
So despite what Apple says, my experience is that calibration does not have to be done religiously, though I'm sure it's a good idea to do it periodically. What's much more important, in my view, is the number of cycles. In my experience as a former tech, batteries that are cycled a lot tend to die sooner, suggesting that there is some kind of cycle limit to the LiOn batteries so many of us have in our slightly older notebooks.
Apple's own video on their new sealed batteries suggests they can be cycled up to 1000 times before losing serious capacity, and that this is up to 3x more than older (meaning most of ours) LiOn batteries. For the sake of argument, let's say that its really only 2x more -- that still means that someone who runs the battery mostly to empty each day and charges it up each night (say a student for example) should expect to be replacing batteries more often than I do.
Just my experience on this topic.
Cheers
chas_m
Evangelist, ACDSee Pro for Mac
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