I was actually working on this exact problem in grad school, but gave up when we couldn't start fires (and so did Barnaby Jack, according to Forbes -- http://bl

I was actually working on this exact problem in grad school, but gave up when we couldn't start fires (and so did Barnaby Jack, according to Forbes -- http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/07/22/apple-laptops-vulnerable-to-hack-that-kills-or-corrupts-batteries/ http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/07/22/apple-lapto...). What put the nail in the coffin for us was finally discovering the PTC devices on the individual cells -- they make a rather loud click and shut off if you short the cell. We also found evidence of them on cylindrical cells pulled from a PC battery. It's not limited to Macs, but Apple's the only company I could find that released battery firmware updates. Other machines do seem to use the bq20z80, but it was easiest by far to play with battery firmware on Macs (i.e. I never got anything working on any other kind of machine). A semi-plausible fraud threat is that you can buy old batteries off ebay that have disabled themselves in hardware due to undervoltage, re-enable them, recharge them, and resell them as "like new." They'll work for a few days and then bulge.