Terraced battery is gone?

[oneMadRssn]

Remember that the Macbook had terraced battery cells?

It was hailed as hugely innovative at the time. But Apple never brought it to any other product, right? And now that the Macbook is discontinued, the idea is essentially dead.

It's too bad, I thought it was a neat way to pack more battery density into the curved Macbook shape.

 

[Brookzy]

Mark Gurman claimed that the terraced battery design was due to come to the MacBook Pro in the first Touch Bar-iteration model, but that it failed a 'key test'. https://www.macrumors.com/2016/12/20/larger-battery-gold-color-macbook-pro/

Several refreshes later it is still not used, so yes I would imagine this is the end of the terraced battery. Though that said, I can't see how it would have been especially useful in a design that isn't wedge shaped.

For what it is worth though, there did seem to be a lot more reports about 12" MacBook batteries losing their capacities more quickly, and this was certainly my experience. Maybe this was linked to the terraced design?

 

[Grey Area]

Some of the promotional material of the time shows those batteries as consisting of stacked individual layers. I often wondered if that is really all that more space efficient, since you end up with a lot more layer "packaging" per volume than you would with a single bigger battery of the same total height. But maybe the pictures were an over-simplification.

Regarding overall battery life, I think the combination of being fanless and very dense might be explanation enough. The design is probably good at cooking batteries. 😉