Has anyone else had this experience? I purchased a secondary MBP from Ebay that was supposed to be in excellent condition. From the outside it was. Based on the model (M1 Pro) and the battery info, I suspect the seller replaced the OEM battery with a third-party one. I returned it, got an M4 and the same thing happened.
Is this common? I was trying (like everyone these days) to save some money and get a used model, but I'm put off by these replacement third-party batteries.
Any advice? Thanks.
Its important to ask these questions first. It is not necessarily malicious sometimes people think they are doing a good thing by putting in what they believe is a fresh battery or taking it to a shop to swap it out either because they wanted to use it for a bit more or so that way the person they sell it to wont complain about the battery.
Another thing is often times Ebay is a dumping ground for big (or small) companies that take in trade ins on behalf of apple and just resell them so they have no idea other than a quick physical inspection. Ask if there was any repairs done. Ask for a copy of the system report on key things such as battery health etc that will not only have the cycle count, and how much charge is left but also the serial and model number so you can verify its correct.
3rd party batteries are a genuine concern just because there is a huge unknown factor and a bad battery can cause your house to burn down (I know extreme scenario but the risk is there). Sometimes they are great and made to Apple's specification exactly. It just depends on who did the repairs and what they did to it.
I personally never buy used laptops because I make a ton of money off of my Apple hardware so:
A) I get a nice write off to reduce my income tax burden
B) I need it to be 100% reliable and covered by Apple Care in case anything goes wrong I can easily swap it out.
Edit:
I have and will buy used desktops like mac minis etc to be used as backup servers or hot fail overs so I am willing to risk some reliability to get a reasonable price, but never as a primary server. I also know what I am doing so I will take them apart and redo their thermal past etc to improve long term reliability and clean out any dust and build up. Most recently I got a 2018 i7 mac mini with 32 gb of ram and 10 Gb ethernet for only $300 which will serve perfectly as a mongo node.
It is very strange for an M4 to have a battery swapped. I still have an M3 Max that I use VERY heavily for computation, compilation, and AI work (my fans are screaming hours a day) and I still have 92% of my battery capacity left. So that is a bit of a concern, can you post a screenshot of the battery info in the system report.
