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The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

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Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

#81

Post by zipwitch »

jakejake wrote: post #18

There's a trade off to having a laptop that seemingly defies the capabilities of the day - they have to glue parts and remove coverings. Apple has been shedding ports & user-serviceable parts in laptops for years to get them thinner and lighter. Almost every complaint in the article has a counterpoint. Bought AppleCare but didn't register it. Complains about the Genius Bar repair time - try finding somebody to even s…

I've never been able to understand the appeal of the ultra-light, ultra-thin laptops. That it comes at the cost of user-serviceability just makes it that much more incomprehensible.

Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

#82

Post by n1000 »

Well AppleCare is terrible IMHO. On the phone most of them have no clue. If the issue gets escalated you have someone who understands the issue but cannot do a thing. Then you always end up in the Apple store and they will only become active if the issue is acknowledged by Apple and their hardware tests find something. All other issues are basically ignored. I am having kernel panics since 10.10.3 [1] and there is no way to make myself heard... Had to leave my MBP with them for 5 days and they didn't replace a thing even though it has full coverage.

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7000724

Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

#83

Post by Daishiman »

rayiner wrote: post #11

Out of warranty battery service on a Mac ranges from $130-200: https://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=servicefaq&geo=Unite... . I think that's a reasonable price considering Lenovo charges $140 for a 75-watt hour 68+ battery for the T450s: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/itemdetails/0C52862/460/D91DC49... . And for $130-200, they will replace your top-case (including keyboard and touchpad). I have had it done more than…

The difference is that the T450s takes literally 5 seconds todo a battery swap and you can keep using the machine during the time. No downtime, no bureaucracy, just go to Amazon and wait 2 days for your battery arrive.

Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

#84

Post by giarc »

nickgeiger wrote: post #61

I found this Apple page that appears to offer battery service for $129: https://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=servicefaq&geo=Unite... I have the same "Service Battery" warning and I was hoping to eventually get this service on my 13" MacBook Air.

>Pricing is for service through Apple.

Likely the $129 is for the labour portion and doesn't include the parts cost.

Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

#85

Post by yeukhon »

tptacek wrote: post #30
yeukhon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the old ones, I am referring to non-Apple machines.

Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

#86

Post by franze »

aaronmiler wrote: post #46
MBCook wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried another browser? Chrome has notoriously TERRIBLE effects on battery life on Macs. I'm not kidding. Try Safari for two days and be amazed. There are probably things you can do to make it better, but for whatever reason Google doesn't seem to care and ships (what I would say is effectively) broken software.

Exactly this. Open up your battery menu, it will say Chrome is using significant energy. I've never not seen it there

89% charged, 4h calculated time http://replycam.com/i/batterylifetime_1BE12F3F.png (but in reality, it will be shorter)

yeah, chrome is in there.

but switch to safari? my thoughts a) i'm a developer, i rather like new APIs, latest HTML 5 features b) my whole company infrastructure relies on google services (and they work best in chrome, no surprise there) c) my old macbook air (2013, maverick, killed one month ago by my son with self made kombucha) had about 7h battery-life

Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

#87

Post by [deleted] »

mikestew wrote: post #36
thearn4 wrote: post #3

I'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?

Solid machinery, has a genuine Unix shell ("Unix-y"? More Unix than most Linux distros), if it runs on Linux there's probably a port for Mac OS, sound works out-of-the-box (I know, cheap shot), and I get my work done with a minimum of fuss when I plug in hardware. Personally, it's the only choice if I'm going to work on iOS, and conveniently I can do Android work as well. Basically (and again, personally) it does eve…

[deleted]

Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

#88

Post by Caprinicus »

aaronmiler wrote: post #46
MBCook wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried another browser? Chrome has notoriously TERRIBLE effects on battery life on Macs. I'm not kidding. Try Safari for two days and be amazed. There are probably things you can do to make it better, but for whatever reason Google doesn't seem to care and ships (what I would say is effectively) broken software.

Exactly this. Open up your battery menu, it will say Chrome is using significant energy. I've never not seen it there

Chrome also turns on the discrete GPU for seemingly no reason.

Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

#89

Post by mbrock »

thearn4 wrote: post #3

I'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?

I got tired of it and looked up the best Linux laptop available, which seemed to be the Dell XPS 13 developer edition, with a handful of contenders.

The trackpad is laughably horrible. I wonder if anyone at Dell ever tried using it. Or maybe my fingers are weird or whatever, but I just cannot for the life of me make the goddamn cursor go where I want. I feel like I'm arthritic.

And I haven't managed to get suspend to work properly. Amazingly, the side effects of the brokenness is that some random subset of font characters become garbled or replaced with other characters. I truly have no idea how that happens but I'm very curious! Maybe there is some obscure kernel patch somewhere, but whatever, I just shutdown and reboot...

I also haven't found the right Xorg settings to make smooth scrolling look actually smooth, which is psychically distressing.

The sound quality is kind of crappy, since the whole chassis resonates, like the equalization isn't set properly and/or again nobody tried using the damn thing.

I still appreciate the laptop. Aside from these inevitable quirks, I love having a fast Linux machine with me.

But every time I get out my MacBook, I feel relieved. I don't buy into any magical notion of Apple, but I'm pretty grateful that the basic components of their hardware feel like someone tried them for at least a whole day and incremented until it was usable enough.

There are complex reasons for all of this and so on... but I really just wish some person with a bunch of capital would just make a simple functioning laptop that works with a plain Linux kernel. I'd pay a month's paycheck for that.

Re: The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

#90

Post by morcheeba »

somewheres wrote: post #38
ant6n wrote: post #2

On my macbook pro, the battery is a bit worn down and it hard-crashes when the Battery is at around 5%. You'd think that Apple would be able to write an OS that detects this new low for the battery and adjust the meter correctly and hibernate the computer, so you it doesn't cause you to accidentally loose work. But I guess AAPL can't afford those kind of development costs; or maybe improving the pixels on some transi…

I'd rather see a hard crash and know for sure that the battery is too empty to perform work. Stupid battery warning meters are a lie, and a waste of valuable power. If you have enough power to show me that you don't have power, I know your battery meter is full of shit. It means the board can still operate, and is probably performing a small subset of tasks without my awareness, in a low power mode. Maybe the acceler…

Requiring a battery can be a design decision. Let's say a computer uses 10W on average with a 40W peak for short bursts. If you've got a 20W power supply, it won't be able to supply those bursts. But add in a good battery and it will be able to. Of course, you could just make the power supply twice as powerful, but it will weigh more, be physically bigger, and become less efficient.
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