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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."
A total of sixteen screws. To change the battery. And that's "easy"?
My laptops require zero screws to remove. What does that make them?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
the mounting hardware for clip-in hardware uses up a fair amount of space that you could use for a larger battery. While Apple's decision is inconvenient for travelers that like to switch to spare batteries. It is probably a useful change for most customers who would rather have 10% more battery capacity, and to Apple who probably saves a little money on build costs. The third party battery market probably won't even hiccup at the difference, eventually providing users the ability to buy a battery (and throw in a couple of screw drivers as a "kit"). How often do you replace a weak/broken battery? Once every couple of years and hopefully not more often than that.
Given that Apple assumes you need to take it to a certified apple tech to replace the battery, they will either have to eat the cost of replacement or bundle the price in with the battery part cost. But overall it is probably a net savings for Apple.
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Now all you have to do is make your own replacement battery.
I don't have a screwdriver that will fit those, and I doubt many of you do either.
Once upon a time, Apple used all Torx screws, and it was good. What is with these insanely tiny, fine, and easily stripped phillips screws on the newer machines?
They are just awful, and you still need a Torx driver if you want to replace the disk anyway.
Yes, because those laptop power points on planes are 100% guaranteed to be working all the time, especially when a flight is full.
What lesson would that be? The one where they corner the portable music market and become a pop culture icon? Oh...
Well, obviously, but I think it's still a valid design criticism given that battery swapping was trivially easy before - all you needed was a coin or a strong fingernail - and now you need to do all this.
Is it still used as a diving watch after walmart changes the battery? I've done that before with my water proof watch, only to have it die in the shower, post change.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Now if only someone could design a laptop battery that is removable without opening the case. I know, I know, this is WAY too futuristic in this day and age, even for a company like Apple with the appropriate vision.
You mean, like the battery on the bottom of my macbook, that pops out with the turn of a coin? Apple is more than capab^w^w^w^w has already designed laptops with removable batteries. If they didn't on the new macbook pros, then they made that choice for a reason. You may not like that reason, but that's fine.
I, for one, am glad I didn't wait for the new macbooks to come out before I bought mine.
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While I have replaced the hard drive in a TiBook before (and I don't recommend that for anyone, anytime), I've got to say. Big difference between 10 phillips-head and 3 security screws and the little plastic sliding latch on my Dell.
Yes, the water-carved-from-a-single-block-of-unobtanium is cool, but usability is higher on my list.
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I would understand if there something to gain by not having a removable battery. But really, does it save any space at all? Usually the bottom of the battery is the exterior of the laptop, so it doesn't have to fit "inside."
That's been covered before, by making the battery completely internal they save enough space to increase the battery size by 40%, this is because of all the casings/latches/power connectors/etc required not only for the battery itself but also to separate the inside of the computer from the battery compartment. This allows them to provide a 17-inch powerhouse laptop with 8 hour battery life, something you only find in netbooks nowdays.
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Yah, I just wonder how you'd tell what the problem was before it trashed your laptop if it was a current 17" Macbook Pro... since the battery's completely internal with no way to relieve the pressure without removing 16 screws.
Best news ever...
Why? Because there are just 13 screws to remove and they're all on the outside! Sounds like a lot but it's dead simple compared to every model that came before!
All previous generations of MacBook Pros, PowerBooks and iBooks required major surgery internally and the removal of dozens of different screws from different areas just to do something simple like a hard drive upgrade. MacBooks and the newest 15" MacBook Pro models have FINALLY changed that and made the hard drive accessible just by removing the battery. I was afraid that this new unibody 17" model was the last holdout and would still be a major pain to upgrade, but this changes everything.
Now I'm going to go buy one, whereas before seeing this I would have bought the 15" model just for the ability to easily upgrade the hard drive. This is truly major news, but it should have been all about the hard drive, not the battery that almost nobody will ever need to replace. The hard drive is something that almost everyone will eventually want to upgrade on this machine.
Simply awesome news. This really makes my day. I can't believe it's so easy to get inside it and upgrade everything. It's amazing how few items are in the breakout photo at the top of the page. A child could put it back together.
"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."
True, and if you have a Dremel and a fine abrasive bit you can trim the torx even more easily.
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Well if the company ain't paying for you to fly business they can't expect you to do business on the plane. Or you could buy the 15" with the one latch removable battery if that is important to you, which is going to fit on that cattle class tray table so much better anyway.
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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.
Fuck the filing. If the battery were removable, you wouldn't be fiddling around inside a laptop to begin with. Something simple and routine has been made needlessly complex. People can argue "but road warriors are a niche!" and such all they want - 1.5 years out, ordinary people who like using laptop computers as laptop computers suddenly finding themselves having to go to the damned Genius Bar to change out a battery are going to be pissed.
If the thing is still in warranty, why the heck would you be replacing the battery?
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To those of you saying that an irremovable battery is OK, what do you do if the laptop freezes up and the power button doesn't work? On my laptop I just slide out the battery (assuming no AC). I once had my mom's Thinkpad do that, and I just had to wait for the battery to die, as I did not wish to break a seal (the battery is external).
I've never owned a laptop without buying spare batteries for it sooner or later. With a battery in the docking bay, you can swap the main battery without shutting down. (Too bad they don't build in a capacitor to run the laptop for 30 seconds while swapping batteries).
They don't need to do that anymore. They've implemented something called "Safe Sleep", i.e. hibernation. When the laptop goes to sleep it writes out the contents of RAM to the hard drive. If it loses power completely while it's asleep, like during a battery replacement, it will boot up just fine and reload the RAM contents from disk. And it actually works reliably.
You can download a preference pane called Hibernate to choose whether the system will just do sleep, sleep + safe sleep (hibernate), or just hibernate.
Plus, the batteries go bad after a couple years.
There will certainly be replacements available from third parties before that time arrives. Although these are supposed to last longer. Or is it just more cycles?
I would understand if there something to gain by not having a removable battery. But really, does it save any space at all? Usually the bottom of the battery is the exterior of the laptop, so it doesn't have to fit "inside."
I don't think it was about saving space as much as increasing the capacity of the battery. If I'm not mistaken the best the previous removable batteries could do was about 6 hours. By removing the thin but not negligible casing that the removable battery needs they were able to make the battery slightly larger without compromising the overall size of the laptop.
I don't usually make this kind of argument, but honestly if you have a need to own one of these and use it for an extended length of time while away from a power outlet I'd think you'd also be sitting in business class or first class where you'd have access to the airline power plug, and on land you'd be the kind of person who would have access to some sort of off-the-grid power generation capability under most circumstances. This doesn't seem like the machine to take backpacking down the Appalachians, for instance. So from a practical perspective it's fairly unlikely that anyone will ever need to use multiple batteries.
What about the hard drive? I will not turn over a laptop for service without removing the disk. On my ThinkPad, that takes removing one screw. Apparently it takes 13 on the new 17" MBP.
Things I can replace on the ThinkPad with 6 screws or less:
- Keyboard
- Memory
- Touchpad
- Hard drive
- Optical drive
- WLAN card
- WWAN card
- Modem
- Clock battery
- DC power connector (it's on a separate PCB, not soldered to the system board)
- Battery
Keyboards break when you dump Diet Coke on them. Hard drives crash. Clock batteries die. Batteries get recalled.
What do you do when your ThinkPad is out of warranty and something breaks? You buy the part for cheap on eBay, download the service manual for free, and spend 20 minutes replacing the part. Or, if you're not savvy, you pay someone to do it for you - and it's relatively cheap.
What about when your MacBook breaks and isn't under warranty?
Because the battery doesn't need to fail for the laptop to benefit from replacing the battery.
Typical batteries lose maximum energy storage over time. So if a new battery lasts 4 hours, an old one might "need replacing" 3 years later when it only lasts 2 hours (but this isn't covered by warranty because the laptop still 'works').
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by making the battery completely internal they save enough space to increase the battery size by 40%
Citation please.
I would believe 10%. 40% sounds like a bunch of crap.
For example, the amount of space used by the casing and connector on my cellphone battery is miniscule.
This design choice sounds like removing the ability to change the wiper blades from a car as a "weight reduction" measure.
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So for the 1% of the population who take plane trips long enough that the Macbook Pro 17" 8 hour life is not quite enough computing time for you, you have these options:
1) You don't use the laptop at all - basically true of anyone not flying business class. I gave up working on even a 15" laptop in economy a long time ago. Plane seats are simply too close together to work much at all, let alone eight hours. Get a netbook or something and sync it to a larger laptop (or just use that if it's enough), would be one solution...
2) you use in-flight power, which you have if you sprung for business, which you did if you are in fact so very busy you simply must compute in-transit
3) For those of us on the fringes who simply WANT to compute in-transit as long as possible even if we really don't have a need, there are external battery packs. For the life of me I've never seen why people consider any sealed device unable to run longer than just the internal battery will allow, since these external packs are not much larger than the equivalent extra battery would be and thus are no more trouble to carry. Same goes for the iPhone, or the Air. People who have an issue with sealed batteries are people who really have a grudge to bear against the company they are complaining about (see: Apple Hater).
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The 40% number comes from Apple's product announcement, and is a direct comparison of the battery size in the new 17" Macbook Pro to the battery size in their previous 17" Macbook Pro.
> For example, the amount of space used by the casing and connector on my cellphone
> battery is miniscule.
I'm going to assume that you've actually opened up the battery to verify this, right? Do you mind posting the numbers for the casing and connector, on both the battery end and the phone end (note that there's extra material in the phone so that it doesn't just collapse when the battery is removed).
But on a more serious note, it really doesn't take much of a difference in linear dimensions to make a big difference in volume, especially if some of the linear dimensions are pretty small (e.g. the thickness of the battery).
I did that whole drawing thing with an iBook. Somehow, I still ended up with extra screws. :-D
As for the question of easily removable vs. unremovable, I don't think anybody expected it to be hard to replace in terms of servicing. I know they say that these batteries should last an order of magnitude longer than what's in other laptops, but they'd have to be crazy not to hedge their bets on something like that. In terms of failure rate over the years, I've had more battery failures in laptops than all other parts put together with the exception of the wire leading to the power supply brick. Most computer manufacturers tend to put parts with higher failure rates in easy-to-reach places to minimize service time. It's just common sense.
That still doesn't cover the question of removability. That mostly affects people who expect to use a laptop while traveling, however, and the set of people who use laptops on long airplane flights and the set of people who use 17" laptops are pretty much disjoint sets, making this something of a moot point, IMHO. Just my $0.02. That said, I do hope that this is not part of a trend towards making batteries unremovable in other laptops. Having multiple batteries when flying is a life saver.
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Most multi-year warranty plans explicitly exclude the battery. Not sure if Apple is different here, and naturally you can frequently buy extra battery coverage, but they are not one and the same.