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The battery in my 2014 MacBook Pro is going bad for the second time. Replacing the battery last time was expensive and a major ordeal. It's more difficult than

by _qulr 6y ago

The battery in my 2014 MacBook Pro is going bad for the second time. Replacing the battery last time was expensive and a major ordeal. It's more difficult than replacing the battery in my car. Replacing the battery in my 2006 MacBook Pro took all of 15 seconds. If the lifetime of a battery powered device is expected to be much longer than the lifetime of the battery, then the battery needs to be easily user replaceable. Otherwise, the manufacturer has zero credibility on the environment. Don't even get me started on vendor OS lockdown and its effect on the environment. They're intentionally making devices disposable.

samfisher83 6y ago
I mean all the phone manufacturers are doing it, but phones used to have replaceable batteries. I think companies realized they could make more by selling new phones. But the iphone has never had a replaceable battery.
- quonn 6y ago
  I never got a new phone because the battery was not good enough anymore (and it can be replaced, just not by yourself). Apple charges about $50, obviously 10x cheaper than a new phone.
  - rkagerer 6y ago
    Funny, my last few phone upgrades were in large part because of that. I went through 3 replacement batteries on my last phone (a Galaxy S5) over the course of 4-5 years because the OEM ones kept bulging (possibly due in part from heat generated by my aftermarket Qi panel). I find it terribly annoying being pushed to upgrade my device every couple years. I bought a brand new S10+ and after a year of use there's a noticeable difference in battery life. It's the model with 1TB Flash storage (yes) so I'm not eager to throw away the investment. I wish I could put in a new battery without need for adhesive peeling, a heat gun and luck. I agree with the comments about user-hostile design in regard to smartphone batteries.
Spivak 6y ago
Does it really matter if it’s “user serviceable” or does it just need to be “serviceable.” Because I think Apple meets that bar. I don’t really care that for all practical purposes my transmission isn’t serviceable by me personally, but that I can take it to the shop for an okay price. Getting my iPhone battery replaced was a pretty painless experience compared to my old Nexus. Hell it was actually easier than my Samsung that had a user replaceable battery because by the time it needed replaced I couldn’t find a 1st party replacement battery!
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  EDIT - When looking up Watch service prices I missed that there was a cheaper $80 battery replacement vs the general out of warranty service price. But that's still 47% of the current street price (S3 is $170 from Amazon, Target, or Walmart). Similarly, AirPods are $50 each for battery replacement, another $50 for the charging case, versus a list price of $200 and having gone on sale for $150. So if your batteries are shot in both AirPods and the case it's 75% of list price, or the entire full cost of buying them on sale. And this is a device where when brand new the tiny little batteries were barely good enough. If my car's transmission blew and it was $10,000 to get it repaired, I'd be taking it to a scrapyard instead of a mechanic. Same goes for a 2-3 year old gadget if I'm expected to spend 75% of the replacement cost to get a battery replaced. I'm just going to say "I guess it's time for an upgrade" and see if someone on CraigsList will pay me for the old one, maybe just for spare parts depending on how bad the battery is. If Apple really wants to extend the lifetime of their devices, they need to get the price down for replacing the disposable components, or make the disposable parts user replaceable again. I've said it before re: AirPods battery life, but this was a predictable outcome for something with a 5 hour battery: https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/28/airpods-battery-life/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/28/airpods-battery-life/
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    The economics of a extremely large machine with thousands of parts are different than the economics of a $150 piece of electronics with 4 parts. I'm not sure why this surprises people.
hinkley 6y ago
There are some structural limitations to doing this. Car side impact performance is substantially hampered by the very large holes we need to make the driver and passengers replaceable. Nobody wants to crawl in the top like a tank, and we compromise heavily because of this. One solution that occurs to me is to look at what 3M has for a thermally stable version of the removable adhesives they use for those wall hooks. How many watt hours of capacity do you lose making space for 1) the adhesive, and 2) lower tolerances to account for human error in centering the new battery? I suspect this could be engineered to be less problematic. Possibly with some sort of tool for aligning the battery and dropping it in (thinking suction cups and some rails to drop it straight in).
- emsy 6y ago
  In one of my first laptops the battery lid was the battery. But this doesn’t allow for a sleek unibody. Apple sacrifices a substantial amount of functionality for the sake „sleekness“. Another prominent example is the keyboard which they not only kept long after they knew it was bust, but the repair was also made needlessly hard because of the Macbook’s design. There are some laptops where you can replace the keyboard without opening the laptop. I don’t expect Apple to make battery lids and swappable keyboards but the current design is user hostile and environmental unfriendly.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Apple had those for quite a while. The problem is that a battery compartment has six sides. The lid is, best case, only one of the two largest. Square voids are very difficult to brace around. They started stir welding the braces to the unibody to improve stiffness not too long before they did away with the discrete battery. Then they started manufacturing (assembling, really) their own prismatic cells to substantially reduce the amount of packaging and gaps in the laptops. The model where this all came together, by the way, got a roughly 2-fold increase in battery life. That is not a small compromise you are talking about. Sure, 30% of that was from OS improvements to manage peak power draw, but the rest was due to better, larger batteries by filling every void in the case with custom, higher density cells (with no shielding of their own). I do not like that the batteries are bonded to a board that takes $400 to replace. You should absolutely be able to separate those, I just don't agree that it's worth having to carry a spare battery in order to have a spare battery.
kempbellt 6y ago
It's not an easy task to make an extremely efficient and sleek design, and still make it easy to disassemble/reassemble/upgrade/etc. The strides Apple has made to make devices smaller, more efficient, and more powerful are incredible. Though they come with obvious downsides. Cramming all that tech into a small space means you don't have an easy "click to remove" battery cell any longer - or hard drive, or memory sticks, or floppy drive bay... ;) Not to negate your point - battery lifetimes are quite poor compared to the lifetimes of all other electronics in a computer and making them easily replaceable would be ideal. Do we want smaller, faster, more efficient computers, or do we want easily modable computers? Obviously both would be ideal, just not sure if that's really feasible with the way the technology is progressing.
- markholmes 6y ago
  We’re talking about a difference in thickness of millimeters though. Was my 2014 Macbook Pro really that bulky? The prevailing sentiment over the last several Apple announcements seems to have been “fewer gimmicks, more power”. Maybe software engineers aren’t the target market for these computers anymore though, or perhaps my bubble is too small.
- coralreef 6y ago
  Thin and sleek are "nice to haves". Reduced environmental impact should be "musts".
  - minhazm 6y ago
    Thinner, lighter and overall smaller footprint also have noticeable environmental impact. You have to ship these products and at millions of devices these things add up. The battery is also replaceable by Apple. People also recycle their computers, in which case a lot of these raw materials are recovered too.
- rakoo 6y ago
  > Do we want smaller, faster, more efficient computers, or do we want easily modable computers? It's not about making them moddable, it's about making them more sustainable. Of course everyone's values differ, but wanting to repair your own stuff is something that has become more than just gimmicky, and for good reason in my opinion.
ogre_codes 6y ago
I don't think laptops should be designed to optimize relatively rare events like battery swaps over day-to-day use. My MacBook Air is 8? years old and I've never cracked the case. If it's common for MacBook batteries to last 3 years as it has for you, that's a far bigger concern than the fact that it's difficult to replace. I think that's pretty uncommon though, I don't have numbers either way.
- jedberg 6y ago
  > I've never cracked the case. You may want to pop it open and blow the dust out of the fans. They need annual maintenance to run at full efficiency. You might even notice the speedup in your computer if the CPU has been running slower to keep the heat down.
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  > I don't think laptops should be designed to optimize relatively rare events like battery swaps over day-to-day use. Is this reversing cause and effect? Battery swaps will indeed be rare if you have to disassemble the entire computer to do it.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > Is this reversing cause and effect? Battery swaps will indeed be rare if you have to disassemble the entire computer to do it. As I said above, if you need to replace the battery frequently, that's a big concern regardless of whether it's the laptop is serviceable or not.
    - LeoPanthera 6y ago
      You're assuming the only reason to replace a battery is to replace it because it is faulty but back in the day people used to just carry spare batteries to increase capacity. Now we're limited to those crazy plug-in power banks that don't work on most laptops anyway. If you could still carry a spare battery, a lot of people would.
kanox 6y ago
If the product is 100% carbon neutral then selling multiple copies of that products would have no impact either. This means that planned obsolescence and being impossible to repair for the user would have no effect on the environment.
- openfuture 6y ago
  That is a huge(!) leap. 'Carbon neutral' does not mean 'no side-effects' it means literally 'carbon neutral' of course there is pollution from the churn of obsoleting devices left and right. Can we not keep repeating this myopic 'the only problem is X' and then creating a bunch of new problems from not accounting for externalities. I am reminded of the great horse-shit meeting of europe that ended with no solution and then the car came along and everyone was 'yay no more pollution' because for them 'pollution' was horse shit, not exhaust fumes.
- Teever 6y ago
  What about the ecological disruption involved in mining all of the material for those multiple products? Being carbon neutral isn't sufficient to undo the damage that we have done. We need to become carbon negative.
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  The environment is composed of more than CO2 levels.
GeekyBear 6y ago
>They're intentionally making devices disposable. Well no. This is what intentionally making devices disposable looks like. >According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop isn’t repairable at all. In fact, it got a 0 out of 10 for repairability and was labeled a “glue-filled monstrosity.” The lowest scores previously were a 1 out of 10 for all previous iterations of the Surface Pro https://www.extremetech.com/computing/251046-ifixit-labels-surface-laptop-glue-filled-monstrosity https://www.extremetech.com/computing/251046-ifixit-labels-s...

by _qulr 6y ago

samfisher83 6y ago

I mean all the phone manufacturers are doing it, but phones used to have replaceable batteries. I think companies realized they could make more by selling new phones. But the iphone has never had a replaceable battery.

quonn 6y ago
I never got a new phone because the battery was not good enough anymore (and it can be replaced, just not by yourself). Apple charges about $50, obviously 10x cheaper than a new phone.
- rkagerer 6y ago
  Funny, my last few phone upgrades were in large part because of that. I went through 3 replacement batteries on my last phone (a Galaxy S5) over the course of 4-5 years because the OEM ones kept bulging (possibly due in part from heat generated by my aftermarket Qi panel). I find it terribly annoying being pushed to upgrade my device every couple years. I bought a brand new S10+ and after a year of use there's a noticeable difference in battery life. It's the model with 1TB Flash storage (yes) so I'm not eager to throw away the investment. I wish I could put in a new battery without need for adhesive peeling, a heat gun and luck. I agree with the comments about user-hostile design in regard to smartphone batteries.

Spivak 6y ago

Does it really matter if it’s “user serviceable” or does it just need to be “serviceable.” Because I think Apple meets that bar. I don’t really care that for all practical purposes my transmission isn’t serviceable by me personally, but that I can take it to the shop for an okay price. Getting my iPhone battery replaced was a pretty painless experience compared to my old Nexus. Hell it was actually easier than my Samsung that had a user replaceable battery because by the time it needed replaced I couldn’t find a 1st party replacement battery!

wlesieutre 6y ago
EDIT - When looking up Watch service prices I missed that there was a cheaper $80 battery replacement vs the general out of warranty service price. But that's still 47% of the current street price (S3 is $170 from Amazon, Target, or Walmart). Similarly, AirPods are $50 each for battery replacement, another $50 for the charging case, versus a list price of $200 and having gone on sale for $150. So if your batteries are shot in both AirPods and the case it's 75% of list price, or the entire full cost of buying them on sale. And this is a device where when brand new the tiny little batteries were barely good enough. If my car's transmission blew and it was $10,000 to get it repaired, I'd be taking it to a scrapyard instead of a mechanic. Same goes for a 2-3 year old gadget if I'm expected to spend 75% of the replacement cost to get a battery replaced. I'm just going to say "I guess it's time for an upgrade" and see if someone on CraigsList will pay me for the old one, maybe just for spare parts depending on how bad the battery is. If Apple really wants to extend the lifetime of their devices, they need to get the price down for replacing the disposable components, or make the disposable parts user replaceable again. I've said it before re: AirPods battery life, but this was a predictable outcome for something with a 5 hour battery: https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/28/airpods-battery-life/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/28/airpods-battery-life/
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  The economics of a extremely large machine with thousands of parts are different than the economics of a $150 piece of electronics with 4 parts. I'm not sure why this surprises people.

hinkley 6y ago

There are some structural limitations to doing this. Car side impact performance is substantially hampered by the very large holes we need to make the driver and passengers replaceable. Nobody wants to crawl in the top like a tank, and we compromise heavily because of this. One solution that occurs to me is to look at what 3M has for a thermally stable version of the removable adhesives they use for those wall hooks. How many watt hours of capacity do you lose making space for 1) the adhesive, and 2) lower tolerances to account for human error in centering the new battery? I suspect this could be engineered to be less problematic. Possibly with some sort of tool for aligning the battery and dropping it in (thinking suction cups and some rails to drop it straight in).

emsy 6y ago
In one of my first laptops the battery lid was the battery. But this doesn’t allow for a sleek unibody. Apple sacrifices a substantial amount of functionality for the sake „sleekness“. Another prominent example is the keyboard which they not only kept long after they knew it was bust, but the repair was also made needlessly hard because of the Macbook’s design. There are some laptops where you can replace the keyboard without opening the laptop. I don’t expect Apple to make battery lids and swappable keyboards but the current design is user hostile and environmental unfriendly.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Apple had those for quite a while. The problem is that a battery compartment has six sides. The lid is, best case, only one of the two largest. Square voids are very difficult to brace around. They started stir welding the braces to the unibody to improve stiffness not too long before they did away with the discrete battery. Then they started manufacturing (assembling, really) their own prismatic cells to substantially reduce the amount of packaging and gaps in the laptops. The model where this all came together, by the way, got a roughly 2-fold increase in battery life. That is not a small compromise you are talking about. Sure, 30% of that was from OS improvements to manage peak power draw, but the rest was due to better, larger batteries by filling every void in the case with custom, higher density cells (with no shielding of their own). I do not like that the batteries are bonded to a board that takes $400 to replace. You should absolutely be able to separate those, I just don't agree that it's worth having to carry a spare battery in order to have a spare battery.

kempbellt 6y ago

It's not an easy task to make an extremely efficient and sleek design, and still make it easy to disassemble/reassemble/upgrade/etc. The strides Apple has made to make devices smaller, more efficient, and more powerful are incredible. Though they come with obvious downsides. Cramming all that tech into a small space means you don't have an easy "click to remove" battery cell any longer - or hard drive, or memory sticks, or floppy drive bay... ;) Not to negate your point - battery lifetimes are quite poor compared to the lifetimes of all other electronics in a computer and making them easily replaceable would be ideal. Do we want smaller, faster, more efficient computers, or do we want easily modable computers? Obviously both would be ideal, just not sure if that's really feasible with the way the technology is progressing.

markholmes 6y ago
We’re talking about a difference in thickness of millimeters though. Was my 2014 Macbook Pro really that bulky? The prevailing sentiment over the last several Apple announcements seems to have been “fewer gimmicks, more power”. Maybe software engineers aren’t the target market for these computers anymore though, or perhaps my bubble is too small.
coralreef 6y ago
Thin and sleek are "nice to haves". Reduced environmental impact should be "musts".
- minhazm 6y ago
  Thinner, lighter and overall smaller footprint also have noticeable environmental impact. You have to ship these products and at millions of devices these things add up. The battery is also replaceable by Apple. People also recycle their computers, in which case a lot of these raw materials are recovered too.
rakoo 6y ago
> Do we want smaller, faster, more efficient computers, or do we want easily modable computers? It's not about making them moddable, it's about making them more sustainable. Of course everyone's values differ, but wanting to repair your own stuff is something that has become more than just gimmicky, and for good reason in my opinion.

ogre_codes 6y ago

I don't think laptops should be designed to optimize relatively rare events like battery swaps over day-to-day use. My MacBook Air is 8? years old and I've never cracked the case. If it's common for MacBook batteries to last 3 years as it has for you, that's a far bigger concern than the fact that it's difficult to replace. I think that's pretty uncommon though, I don't have numbers either way.

jedberg 6y ago
> I've never cracked the case. You may want to pop it open and blow the dust out of the fans. They need annual maintenance to run at full efficiency. You might even notice the speedup in your computer if the CPU has been running slower to keep the heat down.
LeoPanthera 6y ago
> I don't think laptops should be designed to optimize relatively rare events like battery swaps over day-to-day use. Is this reversing cause and effect? Battery swaps will indeed be rare if you have to disassemble the entire computer to do it.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Is this reversing cause and effect? Battery swaps will indeed be rare if you have to disassemble the entire computer to do it. As I said above, if you need to replace the battery frequently, that's a big concern regardless of whether it's the laptop is serviceable or not.
  - LeoPanthera 6y ago
    You're assuming the only reason to replace a battery is to replace it because it is faulty but back in the day people used to just carry spare batteries to increase capacity. Now we're limited to those crazy plug-in power banks that don't work on most laptops anyway. If you could still carry a spare battery, a lot of people would.

kanox 6y ago

If the product is 100% carbon neutral then selling multiple copies of that products would have no impact either. This means that planned obsolescence and being impossible to repair for the user would have no effect on the environment.

openfuture 6y ago
That is a huge(!) leap. 'Carbon neutral' does not mean 'no side-effects' it means literally 'carbon neutral' of course there is pollution from the churn of obsoleting devices left and right. Can we not keep repeating this myopic 'the only problem is X' and then creating a bunch of new problems from not accounting for externalities. I am reminded of the great horse-shit meeting of europe that ended with no solution and then the car came along and everyone was 'yay no more pollution' because for them 'pollution' was horse shit, not exhaust fumes.
Teever 6y ago
What about the ecological disruption involved in mining all of the material for those multiple products? Being carbon neutral isn't sufficient to undo the damage that we have done. We need to become carbon negative.
dwaltrip 6y ago
The environment is composed of more than CO2 levels.

GeekyBear 6y ago

>They're intentionally making devices disposable. Well no. This is what intentionally making devices disposable looks like. >According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop isn’t repairable at all. In fact, it got a 0 out of 10 for repairability and was labeled a “glue-filled monstrosity.” The lowest scores previously were a 1 out of 10 for all previous iterations of the Surface Pro https://www.extremetech.com/computing/251046-ifixit-labels-surface-laptop-glue-filled-monstrosity https://www.extremetech.com/computing/251046-ifixit-labels-s...