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MacBook Pro Batteries Swelling and Failing
JohnnyCakes writes "MacBook Pro batteries are apparently swelling, then failing. MacFixIt has some grotesque pictures of their own swollen MBP battery, which looks like it has suffered an internal explosion. Apple is replacing batteries on a case-by-case basis, but hasn't yet admitted any wide-scale issues."
How many times do we have to tell you? Don't buy first-gen Apple hardware!
I've read /., on and off for years. Never have I seen so many articles about the (alleged) shortcomings of a single product (aside from Windows, but that's a given.)
It seems like every other day an article gets posted about a Mac product failing. Whether it's overheating, poor battery life, dirty cases, and now swelling batteries.
Seriously, what percentage of *any* product fails? Yet it's blown all out of shape here.
I'm not a Mac owner, nor do I even like their OS, but hell guys, lighten up huh?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Maybe I'm just bitter, but they didn't make it possible for owners of first-gen G3 macintoshes to get a replacement logic board that didn't have a totally fucked IDE host adapter on it.
I've learned not to trust any companies, and that includes Apple. If you don't have them backed into a corner, you can't expect to even get what you paid for.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Bullshit. Whenever there is a *wide-scale* issue, Apple responds very quickly. You just go to their site, enter your serial number and they send you whatever you need. This battery issue is *not* a wide-scale problem. The problem with the internet is that one or two blogs can grab the attention of the world, but no one is taking into account the vast majority of the notebooks that aren't having an issue. Hardware defect rates are standard around 3%, Microsoft's XBox 360 release initially was as high as 5% on some runs, Apple's has consistently been around or below 1%, which is unheard of. Seriously, these issues that a blogger brings up now and then are nothing major. Go to an Apple store sometime in the evening and see how many laptops are having any trouble, then keep in mind that they have been on all day, and are on everyday for hours at a time.
Regards,
Steve
When it's half a dozen faults with a single product, it's hard to ignore.
I'd think if this is somewhat common that it is more likely to be an issue with the battery charging circuitry. Lithium batteries in general are pretty reliable, as long as they are properly charged. Overcharging them can cause all kinds of problems, including explosions.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Saying that iPod batteries (or anything else about the iPod) last "one year" is complete and total bullshit. Hell, the warranty is one year. And you can extend it to two years for $59 (or get a third party service plan), and yes, all of those cover the battery.
They're lithium ion batteries just like any other lithium ion battery, so why not recommend people not buy anything else with lithium ion batteries in it in the UK? There's nothing worse about, or wrong with, the lithium ion batteries Apple uses in the iPod. They come from the likes of Sony, Sanyo, and other leading lithium ion battery manufacturers. The original iPod batteries were stock, pre-existing Sony batteries and weren't even built to Apple specifications
And before anyone says the battery is "sealed inside", so what? Let's say you buy a Nokia phone, and the Nokia-branded battery replacement is $60. Well, Apple will replace your iPod battery with the Apple-branded battery replacement (actually, by giving you a new or factory-refurbished-in-a-brand-new-enclosure iPod with its own warranty) for $60. Or, you can get a replacement battery that's even higher capacity than Apple's for $25 from any of dozens of outfits selling iPod batteries and replace it yourself in about 5-10 minutes.
For the truth, see iPod Battery FAQ. Disclaimer: iPod Battery FAQ is my site. It does have Google Adsense on it, but I don't sell anything. So if you think this is some "trick" to get people to visit it, by all means, don't click an ad. I believe I have covered the iPod battery issue extensively, and extensively disproven the crap. I challenge anyone to find anything incorrect on the site.
If this happened to Dell, or Compaq, or random-nonname-clone, this wouldn't be news. Because its Apple, there's shock and dismay. Perhaps because people have a higher expectation of Apple, or a lower expectation of PC hardware?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Apple is supposed to represent a great user experience. It's bad enough that the laptops -- any laptop, really -- is hot enough to make you go temporary sterile. An exploding laptop would not make for a good user experience and the continuation of the species.
Actually, mine is not just an anecdote. I first became aware of the problem (I thought it was just me) when I plugged a new hard drive into a G3 and started getting data corruption all over the place. I did a little research and it turned out that the Rev 1 and 2 versions of the motherboard have different EIDE host adapters (different versions of the same CMD chip) and the Rev 1 boards have problems with most hard drives - you can run them fine in PIO mode, but they lose data in UDMA mode. This problem is so widespread that there's actually a couple different tools that will check for the data corruption problem. I found a description of the problem on the lowendmac website.
Want to hear something even more fucked up? There formerly was an article about this in the Apple KB, but when they moved to their new system, they mysteriously "lost" the article. KB articles with numbers on either side of that particular entry made it into the new support system, but that specific article did not. While I have no evidence that it was intentional, it seems very odd that a most-likely-automated process would lose a specific article that details an error in Apple hardware that they utterly failed to address.
The really telling part of that article (which was summarized in a couple of different locations I found while trying to deal with this) is that Apple's official recommendation for people affected by this problem was that they should either buy commercial software that puts the drive in PIO mode, or buy a PCI host adapter and plug your UDMA drives into that. I suspect that they deleted the article because telling your customers to go spend money to fix a problem that you really should have caught in testing, before selling the system, makes you look like a bunch of assholes.
Mind you, Apple isn't the only company that's done this to me. When I got my iPAQ I followed a link on the device to download HP Mobile Printing software. When I got there, I found that HP had discontinued this software; not just support on the software, but they actually had removed the download from the website. Their suggestion to people who needed PDA printing? Spend money on one of the two commercial printing offerings. Assholes.
In spite of that, I'm getting an HP laptop, but work is paying for it, and it was either the HP, or a Sony Vaio that could be counted on to fail rapidly (the one we already have here developed hardware problems in the first three months) and of course, Sony's driver support once a machine is no longer their latest and greatest is always craptacular. If the choice is between HP and Sony, it's an easy one.
Incidentally, if you want apple store+iPod anecdotes, someone I know bought a nano at the apple store because they were told that they would get a $50 rebate when they got home, it was allegedly on the apple website. They went home with the thing, checked the website; no rebate. The device went bad about a week later; they went into the store, and the device ended up being shipped back for repair, for which they had to wait. These people will never visit an apple store again, for obvious reasons. I'll probably never buy something from an apple store, either, but mostly that's because I don't want to pay for the overhead on an ostentatious retail outlet.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think its amazing you'd expect your neighbor to make the leap from a Mac to Linux.
Ever hear of another Mac or maybe even Windows?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
if he lose his hardware again, then he can switch to a linux box.
A who? Who is this hardware manufacturer "Linux" and why hasn't Linus sued them for trademark dilution?
Oh wait, that's right. A Linux box is any old PC box, reformatted to run Linux. That means the same bad capacitors that contaminated the entire computer industry are as likely to be found in a Linux box as in your friend's eMac.
Not to mention that there is no hardware difference between your regular Windows box and your regular Linux box. (Unless, of course, you're buying Linspire PCs.)
How about:
"Shoddy drivers make using various hardware painful to use. Wifi for example has only just recently seen improvement"
"The shell is not user friendly unless you know what you're doing, and chances are you'll be using the shell quite a bit"
"If a problem arises, chances are slim to nil they're going to know how to fix it, and while this can happen in any OS, Linux is one of the worst to fix if you don't know what you're doing, otherwise you'll wind up checking through forums desperately trying to find an answer"
There's a difference between liking Linux and knowing linux, and I wager a guess if he had it installed, he wouldn't know where to begin. So him going Mac > Linux seems like doomsday.
Problems shouldn't happen. This is what testing and quality control are supposed to prevent. Unfortunately, problems like this do happen and customers end up paying a premium to become beta testers for companies.
Why do you think that? Some things that are easy in Linux are even easier in a Mac, I'll grant you that, but if you had tried using any modern Linux you'd know that Linux is better for anyone who is a moderate to heavy computer user. If you do anything more than sending pictures of your cat to your mom or if you use applications other than Photoshop, Linux is more powerful than a Mac.
Gotta disagree here. I spend 14+ hours a day at a computer, a good chunk of which is spend developing software (in C++, Python, and Java, primarily), and I'd say that OS X and Linux are roughly equally "powerful" (although that's an incredibly vague term), but simple things take much less work to accomplish on a Mac. Admittedly, I don't care about compiling my entire GUI from source or testing out the latest alpha version of some KDE widget, I just want to get my work done.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
First, Lithium Polymer batteries are a new technology, so there's bound to be some teething pains. But you're right, no one should release anything until it's absolutely positively beyond-the-shadow-of-a-doubt 100% perfect.
Of course, since that's impossible, no one would release ever anything. In fact, I hear they're still having problems with the new-fangled round wheel thing...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Bullshit. Every notebook has a battery installed, this way we can show off the magsafe connector.