Breaking in new battery

Calibrate the battery by following these instructions exactly:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490

Everything you need to know about managing and maintaining your battery is consolidated in this invaluable User Tip:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1764220

There are a lot of people who continue to distribute 10-15 year old battery advice to people, under the mistaken impression it's still relevant.

For the most part, laptop batteries are self-maintaining. They do not require you to take any special actions aside from charging them and replacing them when they are expended.

Companies like Apple put up pages like already linked simply because there are people in the tinfoil hat brigade that will think there's some kind of conspiracy if they don't. That Apple wants to sell more batteries, so they try and encourage people to do things that will wear out the battery faster.

Personally, I tend to work on the assumption that people have better things to do with their time than feed an obsessive compulsive disorder regarding their laptop battery. So I tell people to just use their laptop however they want. Odds are the battery will last longer than you have the laptop, or close to it.

10- to 15-year-old battery advice would concern lead-acid, nickel-cadmium, or nickel-metal-hydride batteries and would be completely different from the links I've posted above, because those battery types need very different treatment from the lithium-based batteries used in all modern notebooks and other portable electronics. I agree with Scott that obsessing endlessly over one's battery is a waste of time and energy, but calibrating it often enough so that its condition is reported correctly and avoiding practices that will dramatically shorten its lifespan are not. You don't spend time every day thinking about your car's next oil change, but if you're smart, you check the oil level occasionally and you have the oil changed every few thousand miles. Give your battery the same level of attention.