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The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
21–30 of 246 posts
Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
#22I'm curious what other people's perspectives are on the (what appears to me anyway) dominance of Macbooks among developers these days. Is it the convenience of a Unix-y machine with decent drivers, or something else?
When I have freelanced, turning up with an Apple laptop made the client think I was more experienced than turning up with a Windows or Linux laptop. As a result, I bought a Macbook and then ran Linux on it.
Also, it's easier to run Windows on an Apple machine than it is to run OSX on a non-Apple machine. As someone who has to test websites in OSX, it's just easier having native access to OSX.
Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
#23"Next toss in the problem that Apple thought I didn’t have AppleCare on the machine"
I had that happen on a machine bought through Apple education. Had to argue we always buy AppleCare. I was rather annoyed.
Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
#24Batteries are the reason I stopped buying laptops. Pry my desktop from my cold dead hands.
Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
#25Over the course of my professional life with laptops, I've used Apple, Alienware, Dell and Lenovo machines. I can safely say that the three-day turnaround in an actual bricks & mortar store offered by Apple is far and away the best service I've ever received (the worst being a two-week wait that didn't resolve the issue!).
Regarding the business-level support, I think it's fair enough for the store to deliver a baseline level of support to consumers for free and a paid-for service for people who need priority and/or loaner machines to cover the repair period. I personally don't think that yelling at managers should result in priority over other people in the queue.
I think the main issue here is that because Apple integrate their batteries like they do, it's not possible to perform what was once a simple repair yourself. I'm personally okay with that, because the outstanding battery life on my MacBook Pro is a boon almost every single day.
Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
#26Isn't this sort of a cake-and-eat-it-too situation? If you want a slim, lightweight laptop that still performs at a high level, you can't expect the old pop out batteries with the little switch we grew up with on laptops. While $400 is expensive to replace a battery, it's obviously not as simple as just popping a new one in, which is the compromise one has to make if they want a Macbook Pro. If you want easily swappa…
Is this a trade-off that most buyers are aware of? I'm not sure it's as simple as "shaving off a couple of millimeters", but if that's the case I know I would personally trade those millimeters for better serviceability, especially the day I realize I need a new battery.
I was thinking about switching to a Macbook Pro, but for me this is just another argument to go with something else.
Can't deny that the hardware is great though, but to me this makes it less great. I had my last laptop for 8 years because I could replace broken parts myself, and upgrade to an SSD, I think that's a nice feature of the hardware too.
Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
#27Normally I'm not one to praise Apple, but I feel a 3 day turnaround on a process that necessitates opening the entire laptop is amazing: most other vendors would take several weeks.
Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
#28Isn't this sort of a cake-and-eat-it-too situation? If you want a slim, lightweight laptop that still performs at a high level, you can't expect the old pop out batteries with the little switch we grew up with on laptops. While $400 is expensive to replace a battery, it's obviously not as simple as just popping a new one in, which is the compromise one has to make if they want a Macbook Pro. If you want easily swappa…
Agree. My older Macbook Pro basically has a dead battery and I'm thinking about just replacing the battery and swapping the hard drive for an ssd to give it some new life. That said, it is used primarily at the house so we just plug it in to watch some netflix and browse the web or pull up a recipe for dinner, so it isn't that big of an issue in the first place for my purposes.
Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
#29> Next toss in the problem that Apple thought I didn’t have AppleCare on the machine. This is Apple’s extended warranty. This was despite me showing a receipt that showed that I bought both at the same time. Turns out that if you don’t by the machine from an Apple Store, you have to actually fill out some online form to register your warranty. If you buy at an Apple store, they automatically attach it. Anywhere else,…
Criminal? AppleCare from a 3rd party retailer is literally just a box with a serial number inside. All you have to do is enter the serial number of the computer that you want to attach the warranty to and the AppleCare serial number online in order to link the two. I hate "pointless paperwork", but this is not it.
Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
#30Isn't this sort of a cake-and-eat-it-too situation? If you want a slim, lightweight laptop that still performs at a high level, you can't expect the old pop out batteries with the little switch we grew up with on laptops. While $400 is expensive to replace a battery, it's obviously not as simple as just popping a new one in, which is the compromise one has to make if they want a Macbook Pro. If you want easily swappa…
Depends. These days with hardware failure rate becoming higher (maybe it's just an illusion due to the ability of providing feedback on the Internet, but I argue that most of the old machines I know still work today but not so many with the more recent one), the next victim can be your SSD. Apple does get some good SSD from Samsung though. The benefit of a lock-down is controlling variable, and placing Apple at a hig…
I've been nothing but Apple laptops since 2001, when I ran Yellow Dog Linux on a TiBook, and co-ran a company with ~40 people all using MBPs, and my experience is that Apple hardware is getting significantly more reliable than it was before.
I think the effect you're seeing is just that more people are using Apple computers than were even 5 years ago, and so there's just more feedback to read.