The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop

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 transition animation is more important.

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 swappable batteries, get a different machine.

Also, $400 to get a brand new battery to essentially revive a computer that will probably work great for a few more years is a whole lot cheaper than having to buy a new computer. Just food for thought.

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.

Laptops for devs are a pain, especially since IBM sold Thinkpads to Lenovo. Apple makes reliable and stable hardware, and Linux generally just works on it. That's just not true for almost all of the other manufacturers.

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 board failed just under two years after buying a Macbook Pro 2009 model. I argued that the product had only experienced normal use, Apple's website implied that their laptops should last 5 years (since they talk about upgrading Macbooks for 5 years), and the price of the laptop was a premium price so I should expect it to last for that period of time. It took a bit of arguing, but in the end they did the work for free.