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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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Now all you have to do is make your own replacement battery.
Then you probably shouldn't be replacing a MBP 17" battery.
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.
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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If the thing is still in warranty, why the heck would you be replacing the battery?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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).
They made me throw my nail clippers away once, but let me keep the knife that was right next to the nail clippers. It's not so much that you're getting lucky as TSA is staffed by idiots.
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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).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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).