I’m sure you’ll be deluged with people reminding you to Always Regularly Backup your Drives😉. The wonderful consequence of Moore’s Law is that Inexpensive, Small and Reliable 2TB and 4TB backup drives with USB-C connections are available to pair with a macbook.

And I agree on the awesomeness of new Macbooks- I recently upgraded to 2Ghz Quad-Core Macbook with 16GB RAM. Been crunching lots of nlp work on it and lots of apps running concurrently, no problem.

Similar to your issue, I have noticed that below 50% remaining battery it’s unpredictable how fast remaining life drains out. I’ve had it suddenly warn me then go dark, but nothing more severe like you experienced🤞.