According to various sources, running your MacBook or MacBookPro without its battery will cause a noticeable performance decrease. Those of you who adopt this practice in order to squeeze out an extra month or two of battery life will find your Apple laptops run 40 or even 50 percent less efficiently.

This is apparently by design: The company made it so processor speed is lowered when the unit detects that its relying solely on A/C to power itself. It begins to demand less power than usual in order to avoid unpleasant shutdowns. The end result is your programs will start running slowly.

Faulty line of reasoning or not, best keep that battery resting snugly where it belongs. If you think this has been happening to you, click here to run Cinebench to benchmark your Apple system.