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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

#201

Post by jahewson »

newjersey wrote: post #59
creshal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually you have a warranty exception on batteries, though, because they naturally degrade with use.

I assume Apple is still liable, at least for Europe. I'd say Apple knows very well the requirements very well too and the stronger consumer protection factors into the decision of manufacturers to price their devices higher in Europe.

The don't price their devices higher in Europe, they explicitly include free AppleCare. So it's the bundled warranty service that pushes up the price.

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

#202

Post by somewheres »

morcheeba wrote: post #90
somewheres wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's be honest, those 40W spikes are due to video playback and/or other GPU bound tasks. Sorry, wait for the battery on those. But booting the OS should be unconditionally permissible on AC power.

So design the OS bootstrap to never spike consumption past the load capacity of the power supply. Once booted, deny access to processes that will slam power consumption, until you have a sufficiently energized battery.

Hey, presto, a weightless solution solved in software without any additional added mass!

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

#203

Post by waspleg »

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…

Yes. I also abhor their walled garden business practices. Here's Richard Stallman from 2011 on Job's death, I completely agree with him:

"Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective."

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

#204

Post by patio11 »

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 some good natured ribbing from friends for being the last Rails developer on Windows Vista, which Bingo Card Creator was built on. Went to Windows 7 with a VM for doing work on Ubuntu. Eventually switched to Mac last year.

My reasons:

+ The iPad was my gateway drug to the iPhone. The iPhone was my gateway drug to the Apple ecosystem. All of the "relearn an OS" cruft I was expecting to hit was greatly, greatly shortened by the experience of being on iOS.

+ Apple is a monoculture in the development communities most of interest to me. Ruby gems would break randomly on Windows due to e.g. using `ls` to get the contents of a directory rather than using any of the stdlib functions. All tutorials start with the assumption you're using homebrew. The final straw for me was when I started needing infrastructure pieces that just wouldn't run on a Windows machine -- Redis was, IIRC, the motivating technology. (MS sponsors a Windows Redis these days. Good call, a few years late. Sorry guys.)

+ I'm no more immune to social pressure than anyone else is, and my peer group was actively mocking me for running Windows since, minimally, five years before I switched.

+ I do a lot of international travel and need a laptop with me. Previously I used "the best Dell makes", generally a Dell Studio, with a big screen and lots of RAM. I affectionately called my Dell "the aircraft carrier", because it was heavy and bulky. My most recent Dell was a replacement for one which, when on a shoulder-mounted laptop bag, swung out an inch too far and caused the power button (side-mounted) to collide with a door frame, breaking it. (I had to turn that machine on by shorting the two wires attached to the power button which now strick from the case!) Every time I got back from the airport I complained bitterly about how heavy the bag was, and was mocked again by friends who ran functionally equivalent computers which seem to weigh about half as much.

+ Might not be relevant to everyone, but highly relevant to me personally: my main development machine also has to play video games. This was a major thing keeping me on Windows, and literally the day before I bought my first Mac, I said "I might get myself a Mac purely for programming, but my main machine has to play games." "Which games?" "Recently, League of Legends and Starcraft 2." "Both are available on Mac." "I'm buying a Mac tomorrow."

+ As Thomas said, every Macbook looks like it has been sculpted out of aluminum. Equivalently powerful PCs are... am I allowed to say ugly? I used a Dell machine made and marketed specifically to artistic professionals -- it's literally called "Studio" -- and even to my very limited standards it seems to lack artistic taste, particularly when it is sitting next to a row full of Macbooks.

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

#205

Post by rayiner »

eevilspock wrote: post #115
rayiner wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the MB Retina, but I get more than the advertised 9 hours on my rMBP 15" running Word and Outlook. Your problem is probably Chrome + screen brightness. Recommended monitor brightness in an office setting is 100-150 cd/m^2. The MB gets up to 375 cd/m^2 for outside use, but inside it should be at like a 35% setting. Also, Chrome guzzles juice like there is no tomorrow--use Safari.

It would be nice if they added a per app power usage tracking feature like they have on iOS to isolate such culprits. But yes, Chrome is the worst in battery and CPU usage.

I'm pretty sure Activity Monitor had per-app power usage tracking before iOS.

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

#206

Post by hackaflocka »

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…

The arguing, was it face-to-face or via email. I can do email, but I hate arguing with people face-to-face. Also, if it was face-to-face, was it with just one person, or did it take escalating (and if it did, how many levels did you need to escalate, and who made the final decision?). Sorry for all these questions, I just want to become a more informed and effective consumer.

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

#207

Post by jpatel3 »

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…

My knowledge may be limited, but some of the things they do is beyond me.

- they came up with 3 different chargers so far, and may come with more types opposite to industry standard.

- phones goes from 16gb to 64gb, no 32gb

- Their mac charger top pin gets broke in year, and it cost $80+. And they have different chargers for macs in last 3 years (Air and pro). It would be fine in PC world to get away with this kind of things as there are different manufacturers. Here apple is the only one who designs and creates it.

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

#208

Post by ardacinar »

DavidAdams wrote: post #74
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…

That would partially explain why an Apple laptop in Europe routinely costs $500+ more than in the US.

Sales Tax/VAT is probably the bigger reason, though.

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

#209

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

jahewson wrote: post #193
riquito wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The base 13 inch MBP costs $1299 in the US and £999 in the UK Are they both `after taxes`?

The US price is pre-tax (depends on state: 8.5% in California). The UK price, like most other countries in the world, already includes all taxes (VAT is 20%). In California the $1299 MBP will actually cost you $1414 including sales tax, a difference of just $117. In the UK the price includes AppleCare (under EU law), which would cost an extra $249 in the US. So if you were going to buy AppleCare anyway, then it's act…

> In the UK the price includes AppleCare (under EU law), which would cost an extra $249 in the US.

No, it does not include AppleCare. Apple must provide a limited 2 year warranty under EU law. But they still sell their 1-year and 3-year AppleCare plans.

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

#210

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

jahewson wrote: post #201
newjersey wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume Apple is still liable, at least for Europe. I'd say Apple knows very well the requirements very well too and the stronger consumer protection factors into the decision of manufacturers to price their devices higher in Europe.

The don't price their devices higher in Europe, they explicitly include free AppleCare. So it's the bundled warranty service that pushes up the price.

> they explicitly include free AppleCare

They don't. You have to buy AppleCare if you want it: http://www.apple.com/uk/support/products/mac.html

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