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."

Comments

Re:WOW

[MightyYar]

But really, does it save any space at all?

Almost certainly. It saves both size and weight, since you no longer need to reinforce the walls of the laptop to handle the battery connection, and you of course eliminate any casing around the battery itself. You also get rid of the fairly heavy-duty external connector, and at least the iBook batteries were fairly complicated - they had a button and lights to indicate charge.

Now, is it a worthwhile tradeoff? I suppose the market will decide. Personally, I've never removed the battery from any of my laptops (except to replace) so it doesn't affect me. But if I routinely swapped out batteries, I'd have to consider another laptop. Or, more likely, I wouldn't waste money on a new OEM battery and instead I'd get one of those universal external batteries - if only because then you could charge both at the same time.

Re:/sarcasm

[MoonBuggy]

As much as that sucked, it at least made it understandable when Apple claimed that only service centres should replace the drives (not that I ever understood why they designed it that way in the first place...).

What I find odd is that this battery is still classed as non-user-serviceable, even though the (user serviceable) hard drive and RAM require the exact same procedure. Apple are quite happy for you to take off the back casing, pop out the memory and remove a further couple of screws to pull the hard drive, but if you dare touch the three screws to remove the battery while you're at it you lose your warranty.