The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by scholia » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:34 PM UTC

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…

Depends if you are buying a business machine. If you buy, say, a Dell, you can buy three or four years of next-day on-site support for a relatively small charge. This isn't complicated -- it's a check-box item -- and it really works (in my UK-based experience).

Incidentally, it turned out that on-site didn't mean a specific site. My son got on-site service both at home and at his student digs, 200 miles away.

Dell also offers 24/7 phone support.

Apart from that, there are independent third-party support services that will handle PC laptops, and most cities have both large and small shops that will repair PCs.

Repairs are, of course, much less of a problem with desktop PCs, which sensible businesses use for ergonomic reasons (as well as for their superior price/performance and greater longevity).

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

#92

Post by n1000 » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:34 PM UTC

stevesearer wrote: post #28

dchuk wrote: post #4

Isn'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.

Once the battery is completely dead the CPU will throttle however.

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

#93

Post by jws » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:34 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #5

> 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,…

The registration is because there exist clever amoral people.

If they didn't require you to register the warranty to a particular machine while that machine is still under its original warranty period you could buy one AppleCare and wait to see which of a number of machines broke, then register it for that one. Better yet, buy a bunch of AppleCares each month then sell them a year later on a secondary market to people with broken computers.

If Apple accepted a receipt as proof of co-purchase, then people would print receipts.

Maybe Apple could have a refund program for people that bought AppleCare and failed to activate it? Their computers must know how many AppleCares go unactivated. Perhaps it isn't a widespread problem. I suppose they have no way of contacting the people that bought the AppleCare-in-a-box products and didn't activate.

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

#94

Post by jacobr1 » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:34 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #33

andrelaszlo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They've dedicated whole chunks of keynotes to talking about how the new batteries are integrated with the chassis. Obviously, most of their customers don't care, but then: you can say that about this story too! Most people just take their laptops back to the Apple Store when they want anything changed.

> Most people just take their laptops back to the Apple Store when they want anything changed.

Yep, and this would still be true if the laptop was more serviceable. Most people don't change the oil on their car either even if it relatively easy. In fact most people don't even put air in the tires and instead rely on getting that done during quarterly oil changes!

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

#95

Post by gambiting » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #71

giarc wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A SSD and some ram upgrade can do wonders for an older machine (and price is pretty reasonable for both these days). You can even get kits that allow you to take out your 'superdrive' and install a second hard drive.

Yep. I'm still using a 2010 MBP. I maxed out the RAM a few years ago and it performed better. Now I've got an SSD in it and it feels like new. Almost nothing I do pushes it so I simply have no good reason to replace it. If I hadn't put the SSD in I would have replaced it two+ years ago because it felt slow.

I'm actually still using a 2009 MacBook Pro(core2duo+4gb ram), I put in a Kingston 128GB SSD and the machine runs El Capitan without any problem. I keep it permanently on as a kitchen PC, for looking up recipes and stuff.

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

#96

Post by Caprinicus » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

EC1 wrote: post #6

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?

It took me one day to get up and running and hasn't messed up for me since (3 years on a MBPr that rarely leaves home). Have 3 monitors connected and a ton of other stuff. Never had to fiddle with getting anything working. Apple support has always served me well too.

I am on the same OS X install since like 2009 that I have gradually updated and transferred. Whereas my windows pc seems to need a new install every time there is a major hardware switch.

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

#97

Post by russell_h » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #45

franze wrote: post #17

new (1 month old) macbook retina, 12 inch, el capitan http://replycam.com/i/Pasted_Image_28_10_15_17_10_1BE12B12.p... fully charged battery -> 4h max ... (running mostly chrome and keynote) not really the "all day battery life" they promised ( http://www.apple.com/macbook/design/ )

Chrome has long been known to kill battery life, hence most Mac users sticking with Safari

I don't know anybody who uses Safari, and everyone I know is a Mac user.

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

#98

Post by zzleeper » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #40

redidas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd rather have a few extra mm of thickness and batteries that are not glued to a keyboard. Efforts could be made to keep this tech more repairable.

Speak for yourself. I want a thin laptop that feels almost like a slab of mysteriously lightweight solid aluminum, and Apple is delivering that. It's not like this was a cost-saving measure for them; they're not pulling one over on you. They went nuts trying to make these things solid, lightweight, and skinny, and this was a tradeoff they made --- at significant expense.

It reminds me of printer sales or high-fee consumer credits.. they benefit from consumer myopia about the future. There's even a lot of literature about that:

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4554333/Laibson_...

In this case, I'm guessing many people that are not that well-off still buy macs but don't really realize the future repair costs..

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

#99

Post by donkeyd » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:36 PM UTC

blowski wrote: post #10

Just as a side-note (IANAL), in the EU, retailers can't refuse to fix something just because it's past their warranty period. If you can establish that the product has broke under reasonable use then you can argue that the product wasn't fit for purpose when you bought it, and therefore it is still the retailer's responsibility to repair it, replace it or give you a partial refund. I did this with Apple when my logic…

> establish that the product has broke under reasonable use

This is incredibly tough to prove. Also, in some countries, the burden of proof is with the consumer as soon as 6 months after purchasing (Netherlands).

People think that the EU law makes them incredibly powerful. However, if you are arguing with a well-informed employee, the outcome might not be what you expect.

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

#100

Post by somewheres » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:36 PM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #55

Out of curiosity, am I alone in not wanting to use apple products because I find such practices as this to be unethical engineered extortion to extract more money from the consumer? I find such things exploitive and the product's success giving a green light for other manufacturers to re-engineer their products based on less honorable principles. For instance, on flip phones, batteries would eject if you dropped it i…

You are not alone. It's just that Hacker News suffers from some extremely myopic forum sliding and public relations tactics, as well as groupthink among industry insiders who have rationalized perfectly sensible reasons to never cross the party line on topics regarding the things that make them money.

Partly, they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. Partly, they know damn well that they're screwing people over. True believers that actually buy the Brooklyn bridge are rare birds.