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Best Buy Recalls MacBook Pro Batteries
redletterdave writes "A recent line of complaints from MacBook Pro users forced big box retailer Best Buy to finally issue a recall notice for 5,100 MacBook Pro replacement batteries after the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission advised customers to 'immediately stop using the recalled battery.' Both the CPSC and Best Buy received 13 individual instances of the MacBook Pro battery catching fire, with one incident resulting in 'a serious burn to a consumer's leg.'"
The summary might have mentioned that these were third-party batteries, yeah?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
You mean with batteries made by Sony? As such the issue wasn't isolated to Apple laptops but affected Dell, IBM, basically everyone who used Sony batteries. Yes Apple really was at fault for that.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It could also have mentioned "2008"... the year the black and white plastic case Mac laptops and the replacement batteries from ATG were sold.
Best Buy has been fighting this recall of the third party batteries they sold to these consumers for about 5 years now.
First, the unibody Macs have batteries that are replaceable by anyone with a Torx driver and enough eye-hand coordination to use it. Secondly, if the Apple branded battery squashed bits inside the Mac, you'd have a good warranty claim to replace the whole computer. What's not to like?
Currently, I think LiOn batteries are a crap shoot. Of the dozen or so I have on various bits of equipment, I've had one Apple brand battery expand rapidly, one aftermarket battery for an older white MacBook do the same, one Nikon battery actually start smoking, two Wasabi batteries go tits up and one GoPro battery just petulantly refuse to do anything right out the box.
That's why all my battery chargers sit on a nice 1/4 thick aluminum plate with 72 inches of clear ceiling above them.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Please don't flame me into oblivion for saying that. I know Apple stuff is manufactured as cheaply as possible these days, but the fact of the matter is that Apple at least has standards given that they're a major corporation. They generally know what they're doing on the hardware end of things, and can be held accountable if a battery explodes or bursts into flames and burns down your house.
I have personally dismantled one of these effected batteries (on a consultation contract from an insurance company). The insides look nothing like the equivalent Apple replacement P/N. For one, the Apple batteries are actually pretty advanced- they've got a built in uC that actually monitors a bunch of variables pulled off the cell, and even keeps track of the number of cycles the cell has gone through and some min/max stuff from the last charging cycle. There's a temperature sensor and a whole bunch of fuses/disconnects designed to protect the unit from a hard short. The SMC built into the computer side communicates with the battery uC and provides a bunch of variable reporting, error handling, and emergency shutdown stuff.
The third party battery basically has none of this. The external chassis is compatible with the Apple unit (as to fit in the laptop properly), but that's about it. The micro controller built into the third party battery basically does nothing- it only implements enough functionality to keep the SMC happy and allow the laptop to identify and use the battery. There are no thermal safeties, no fuses, nothing. The laptop should be able to detect a defective cell on the Apple branded unit and actually refuse to charge it- but that is impossible on these third party batteries because the uC is hardcoded to basically return "I'm OK!" irregardless of the physical state of the lithium packs.
IMHO; these things shouldn't have been sold at all. The fact that they're going up in smoke now is absolutely no surprise. I can only compare the cheapness of these batteries to other "Apple compatible" accessories that come from third party companies in China. They skimp out on everything possible, and you get something that if you're lucky just barely works- and if you're not, then it burns your house down. If you want to check that kind of thing out, just google the difference between the official Apple USB wall chargers, and the design of the Chinese 3rd party equivalent. It is vastly the same thing with these lithium batteries.