Apple to Charge $199 for Battery Replacement on MacBook Pro with Retina Display

justperry said:

I say BS.

Do you know how much time it takes to get everything out of the Top case/Unibody to actually replace it with a new battery, it will take hours.
You even have to get the display of.
My guess is that the battery is glued with hot glue, they will simply heat it up to lets say 60-70 degrees celsius and will remove the battery and glue in a new one.
If they have to replace the whole top case they would have to do way to much work, if they just replace it with all things inside the serial number would also be different since it is embedded in the motherboard.
They could discharge the battery first(to a hard 0%), Lithium Ion still holds a certain charge even when the computer says it's 0%, it gets cut of below a certain threshold/voltage (3.3 Volt) because if Lithium Ion goes below that threshold it will be broken.
Also the top case/unibody is made of aluminium and too expensive to just replace.

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Well your BS call would be wrong. Take it from someone who knows this is going to be what happens. FYI taking everything out of a top case and replacing it takes about 30 mins on the non retina MBP or about 15mins on a 13in MBA.

ouimetnick said:

The battery is glued to the top case, NOT the logic board.

The battery and top case are to be replaced together. Logic board is completely separate.

For those saying the just peel off the battery.. Thats incorrect. I imagine that Apple would require them to be replaced together. Apple authorized technician (Geniuses included) would replace the battery with the top case. Apple's support site states that the battery should not attempt to be removed (separated) from the top case. Safety concerns as you can imagine. The batteries can spark and catch fire if bent. The defective part (top case/battery) is then returned, and they probably have a fancy machine that separates them w/o causing damage. Also, its not glued it, but held in with double sided 3M sticky tape.

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Just wanted to chime in and say that all of your assumptions are correct. The batteries in these machines are amazing for what they do, but at the same time you should be very careful when handling them as any damage to the battery cells could be quite harmful to both the person and machine.

How comfortable are you sending Apple your Macbook not being able to remove the drives?

Mr Bigs said:

How comfortable are you sending Apple your Macbook not being able to remove the drives?

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File Vault.

ghettochris said:

I'm on a 2008 MBP right now and it's on it's way out this year for sure. I maxed the ram when I got it, have done fresh hard drive os installations periodically, and it still chokes up a little on the web, and dealing with hd video is painful.

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i find that hard to believe. i have a 2004 Dell Inspiron 8600 with a Pentium M and 2GB of DDR RAM and a 128MB ATI Radeon 9600 and it has no problems with the web and it plays HD video just fine. what it can't do is stream internet HD video (netflix, CNN HD, etc). it can play a 720p mp4 just fine.

not only that, the original battery still gives me 1 1/2 hrs of usage.

how is it that your 2008 MBP can't handle HD movies?

Yup more money for a larger battery or is this the sign that the dollar is weakening?

93%, 120 Cycles. 8 Month old MacBook Air 13" (Mid-2011).

Pretty sexy if you ask me.

monokitty said:

File Vault.

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Apple could probably bypass that quite easily.

I would take it to the Apple store and tell them to pull the drive out, assuming I was foolish enough to buy this thing in the first place.

RBR2 said:

I would take it to the Apple store and tell them to pull the drive out, assuming I was foolish enough to buy this thing in the first place.

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Why? From the looks of it, it's a good drive. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6005/apples-new-ssd-its-fast Edit: also it's on a separate card.

Why does this seem to be a problem. The battery in this case is worth like 1/11th as much as the machine itself, which seems completely normal.

On Dell's $500 Latitude computers to upgrade the battery to a 97wh version costs $80. A spare 60wh battery costs $150 and a spare 97wh costs $180.

Given that Apple's batteries are (in my experience) ten times better than Dell's that price seems to be reasonable.

ghettochris said:

wtf are you going to do in 2016 with a 2009 mbp? Imagine trying to use one from 2005 now? My last one before this was a 2005 model, so I know it would suck balls. it can't even play 720p video smoothly. The web of today would crush it.

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I have two 2006 macs, both running mountain lion comfortably, both running 1080P video. I have no issues with these machines at all and I am even considering putting SSDs in them to make them even better. Yes they are not as fast as modern machines for video encoding and the like but normal web stuff I notice no difference.

I have no idea what is wrong with your machines but as I and others here have said there is nothing wrong with the old machines.

I want to get at least six hours per full charge... 80% of 7 hours is only 5:36... I think I'll hold onto my original MBA for another year; maybe apple can boost how long the batteries last by next year.

i still got 91% on my mid 2009 mbp after about 300 cycles. but i'm pretty ocd and barely use it unplugged

subsonix said:

Why? From the looks of it, it's a good drive. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6005/apples-new-ssd-its-fast Edit: also it's on a separate card.

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The comment has nothing to do with the quality of the drive. It is a matter of security. I would do the same with a rotating drive. I don't trust FileVault either in terms of security or reliability, with lingering doubts about its reliability being a reason to not use it. It is true that it has been a while since it routinely borked systems.

The rest was a gratuitous comment about the new design which I do not like, most especially because of the soldered RAM and glued battery. Deleting the optical drive is no big deal and is almost a given when considering current user demands for lighter weight. I do wish that an Ethernet port had been included though I understand the argument about wireless and available adapters. Just how much space would one have taken up. At least Apple finally joined the USB3 party.

I recognize that AppleCare is a given when purchasing a laptop as they are expensive to repair in any event. I foresee a lot of these things being sold while there is some AppleCare left.

I suppose Apple intends to be guided by public response (sales) of the new design to determine whether to spread the concept across the entire lineup.

In fairness, I suppose that many prospective users will find a 3 year service life acceptable and will enjoy having a laptop which is more capable than the MBA and is lighter than the current designs.

Probably the most disappointed group is the 17" MBP community which is concerned that their chosen equipment has been EOL'd.

Cheers

RBR2 said:

The comment has nothing to do with the quality of the drive. It is a matter of security. I would do the same with a rotating drive. I don't trust FileVault either in terms of security or reliability, with lingering doubts about its reliability being a reason to not use it. It is true that it has been a while since it routinely borked systems.

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I see, but then that applies to all computers sent in for service, no different in this case.

subsonix said:

I see, but then that applies to all computers sent in for service, no different in this case.

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Yes, though ease of access varies.

Cheers

10% of the laptop to replace a main component, seems very reasonable to me, especially considering the battery itself, no doubt there's a lot of labour involved in removing it, or even just replacing the logic board if needs be.. but the battery itself must have a lot more cells and whatnot than previous MacBooks.

carlgo said:

Probably use a heated wire. Or there is a wire under the battery that can be heated up. Some car windshields have that arrangement.

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Just use a heat gun. The case is solid aluminum, shouldn't take more than about 10 seconds with a proper jig to heat only where the battery is attached, to heat the glue up enough without hurting the insides.

covertsurfer said:

Excuse my ignorance but what do they count as a cycle?

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I'm really surprised no one answered this.

A cycle is a complete pass through the capacity of the battery.

100% to 0% = 1 cycle

100% to 70% = 0.3 cycle
*recharge*
100% to 30% = 0.7 cycle

So you can see a cycle has nothing to do with your recharging. You can also see that cycles don't actually rack up that fast unless you are *always* running the battery.

Cool, thanks. So in my working scenario my cycle count won't go up very quickly.

MarkMS said:

I'm at 652 cycles at 91% health on my Mid-09 15" MBP. I can see myself going with this battery for another 3-4 years easily if it keeps degrading at this slow rate. 1200-1300 cycles at 75% health is good enough for me for a 6-7 year old MBP.

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Batteries don't deteriorate at a linear rate. Once the cells start dieing it will rapidly deteriorate.

For it to be one cycle has to go from being dead 0% to it being charged 100%. A battery indicator showing 50% and you charge it to 100% will be 0.50 cycle.

Well, if you believe all the Apple haters, you have to "throw away" your MBPwR when the battery goes.

This is a fair price.

Death-T said:

lol. I know it's not a great analogy/comparison--I was just using the idea that a car is bigger, more powerful, and expensive than a laptop. In all fairness the cost isn't something to worry about too much as it likely wouldn't be a problem until a few years after using the machine, by which time a new PC wouldn't be out of the question anyway. The overall pain in the butt with upgrading the computer is what's annoying me a little bit.

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That makes absolutely no sense. The only valid augment you could make is if you're talking about an electric car but even then, that makes no sense because the batteries in an electric car averages in tens of thousands of batteries. You'd have to pay thousands of dollars to replace them. A Prius battery pack would put you back 2-3 grand and you'd have to pay more to have it replaced by a specialist.

Your car is NOT powered by a battery, the battery is there to let you start the car, provide power for some security and so on but it is the fuel that powers the car and the alternator recharges the battery when it is working properly.

Also, you can easily replace your own car battery while you can't do this easily with a MBP-RD.

In other words, a car battery only covers less than 5% of your car while the laptop battery covers 100% in a laptop.

Death-T said:

I can buy a car battery from Walmart for $90. This price is ridiculous. Hopefully it will be cheaper by the time I need a replacement though.

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I don't think that will fit in your new Macbook Pro.