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MacBook's "Unremovable" Battery Easy To Remove
Slatterz writes "Going just a bit further than your average unboxing, someone has stripped a new 17-inch Apple Macbook Pro to its component parts revealing one or two little surprises. The biggest of which is that the built-in battery is easily accessible, requiring the tinkerer to remove just the 13 Philips screws which hold the bottom cover in place, and the three tri-wing security screws which hold the battery in place."
If you fly to Australia (presumably from the U.S. and not from NZ or something) and need your laptop the whole time, invest in an airline power adaptor and check to see if your airline has connectors here. Or you know... buy a different laptop.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Well, PC Authority is dead after just 15 minutes.
Why don't they link to the actual disassembly over at iFixit!?
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
How about a working link to the tear down instead of a slashdotted page that just links to it anyway.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
My guess is that Apple is banking on the fact that when it comes time to replace the battery, they can:
Either way, Profit.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
the ipods are a little different story. Apple would like you to occasionally buy a new product from them. They make very little on upgrades, if anything at all. iPods are meant to be replaced every 2-3 years, and computers every 3-5 years. We replace batteries for iPods here all the time. Or you can go to one of several web sites and buy replacement battery kits. FastMac and iFixIt are our two biggest suppliers for ipod batteries, screens, etc.
As previously mentioned several times, Apple is installing a battery with very long runtime and is adding a little capacity by not installing a latch. There's extra space savings by not having a hinged latch or cover too. Not a lot, but every bit helps.
If your battery does get used a lot and wears out (high cycle count) Apple will replace it for a reasonable cost. Or you will soon be able to get replacement battery kits same as the iPods.
My wristwatch requires a special tool to open up because it's a diving watch. I can't change the battery myself. I've been in twice since I bought it to get a replacement battery. At wal-mart of all places. I don't want to sacrifice what it takes to make my battery replaceable.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
So, why exactly should Apple go out of their way to make batteries more user removable?
Because MacBook batteries have a history of dying? An alarming number of the MacBook and MacBook Pros in our office needed replacing around the 1-year mark. Yes, we did the MacBookPro battery recall. Yes, we installed the OS update that fixed what was killing some batteries. Several needed replacing anyway, most of them just out of warranty.
I'm sure nothing will go wrong this time though. Good call!
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
1 - They want you to upgrade your laptop too.
2 - You can easily purchase the tool to open your watch. its designed to be water proof, not replacement proof. Nor is it designed to be 'obsolete' once the battery dies.
Sure, you can find replacement batteries for ipods and 'break the seal' to do it yourself, its all about intent.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
it appears that nobody, including the submitter, read the actual source article (I know: I must be new here).
In fact, there are 10 screws that hold the bottom plate on the machine, not 13 as indicated in the summary, then three screws that hold hold the battery in place.
Yes, the three screws that hold the battery in place are weird, tamper-resistant screws, but you can easily make a driver for them by filing down three points on a torx driver of the appropriate size (I did this about 15 years ago in order to open my first Gameboy, which used similar tamper resistant screws).
If you're not up for filing down a few points on a torx driver, you have no business fiddling around inside a laptop anyhow.
just a ghost in the machine.
Just 16 screws?
Hell yes. Ever removed the hard drive from an iBook?
I have, about a dozen times. It requires nearly complete dis-assembly. I had about sixteen PILES of different screws. When I took one apart that was for parts, the screws could have filled about a third of a shot glass. You need a large table, mostly to hold sheets of paper with areas marked out for keeping track of where the screws came from (not terribly hard to remember, but better safe than sorry.)
Total time to disassemble, swap drives, and re-assemble, after you've had practice? I think the fastest I ever did it was a little under an hour. Add extra if you refresh the loctite coatings on the screws that have it (recommended for machines which are young and will be kept for a while; the screws loosen up quite a bit with age.)
I don't know which was worse: the numerous (and continued, throughout the life of the series) major defects, or how badly it was designed WRT servicing. It's almost like they intentionally designed it to be a bitch to service to make up for thinner sales margins so they could nail people (mostly students and teachers) on labor after the glorious one-year warranty expires.
Please help metamoderate.
"... you can squeeze more cells in your laptop design if you don't put them in a neat, removable package."
Most manufacturers use sets of standard round AA-sized and shaped cells all wired together within the plastic case you think of as "the battery". This means that a good portion of the internal space is simply dead air. (Picture 4 AA's side-by-side.)
Apple, on the other hand, is having the cells custom sized and formed to fit the exact dimensions available to the battery, even to the extent of having the individual cells pressed into rectangular shapes in order to maximize the amount of the space actually dedicated to batteries.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
While there are a number of hints when dealing with any laptop tear down, however this is what I learned from more than one iBook (g3) teardown.
Each step, put all the screws in that set up a separate area (not unusual). However with the g3, many steps had a *lot* of multi sized screws. What I did was did a rough sketch of their relative positions and sizes; (xs,s,m,l, etc). You can find tear down instructions with screw sizes, but really, can you tell a 3mm from a 3.5mm?
Also, if you aren't going for immediate reassembly, you can lay out a strip of clear packing tape, and stick them down, separating them by step. Seal them over when disassembly is done, roll-up and store. You can slice them open one step at a time when putting it back together.