new macbook rant
 

The new unibody macbooks have a non user replaceable battery? I mean seriously what the $)()*#!? This is retarded. What is going to happen when I have to send a computer in, or order stock service parts to service an apple laptop with a bad battery?

http://www.apple.com/support/macbook...rvice/battery/

WWDC today they all look to be non replaceable. What a retarded thing to do, especially on a part that is considered to be consumable.

they are going the way cars are....

I can service a car.... but wouldn't want to go near the engine on my Audi.. just in case....!

Not to say tlarkin is wrong ('cause I kind of agree), but I complained about some Apple stuff in front of my wife today and she showed me this. Food for thought :D.

I can change my car battery and you can't parallel that to a battery. It has a latch, one button and you switch it out. Now if it goes bad you have to take it into an Apple certified repair shop or mail it into apple. When before you could go to any retailer that sold apple batteries.

Not a good decision in my opinion.

It's fine for me, I haven't bought a second battery for my MacBook Pro (pre-unibody) yet because the life is so much better than my older laptops even after one year.

But I sympathize with anyone who needs extended runtime. That is a legitimate reason to have a second battery.

I feel uncomfortable with the removal of ExpressCard though. I could never buy a MacBook because of the way the expansion slot in the Pro models had saved my butt a number of times. Now there is no expansion slot in the Pro line.

And the re-introduction of FireWire 800 is both comforting and alarming, because it means Apple is not done playing stupid games removing then adding back ports from generation to generation (the expansion slot may return someday?...who knows).

I have 6,000 Macbooks in my deployment at work, and we have a definite percentage of failed batteries, some only cycle through a few times before they fail.

Unless, Apple completely perfected the technology, I still say this is a bad move.

OT but that strike me too... kind of weird move.
Now you gonna see some 3rd party bringing back FW connections after changing to USB... But how long before Apple dismiss FW again?

So there is no more "MacBook" except for the pre-unibody white guy.

Let's try this on...who else thinks that this is kind of weird, that Apple won't let go of the "MacBook" non-Pro name, and yet they will need to let go of the last non-unibody at some point?

Who else thinks that, by pushing the 13-inch unibody up to Pro status and leaving the non-Pro line nearly empty, Apple is carving out some space for a new sub-pro line of notebooks?

...netbooks???

mmm... interesting. You could be right, but I'd be surprised if that happened in the next six months - wouldn't you?

When is the pre-unibody white due for an update?

WOW!

Did you guys see that Snow Leopard is only a $29 upgrade if you already have Leopard?

Umm - even "rants" need to stay on topic.

Apple is not an enterprise company and therefore they do not make decisions based on enterprise customers.

They also do not announce everything at WWDC; perhaps they will offer a service plan that will meet your needs. Also, the iPod batteries are non-replaceable and I have change the batteries in all of the iPods in my household, so a 3rd party solution may well appear.

I would wager this is a small percentage of Apple's customers. And with many planes offering plugins and a myriad of power adapter options most people will get by.

Apple plays the big number game and tends not to pander to the 20% people who raise the most ruckus. I would wager the people who frequent this forum are NOT your average consumer and therefore don't fit into Apple's grand plan.

Apple is an Enterprise company they are just in denial about it. Regardless of what they think they are, Apple does things like this and it is dumb in my opinion. What if you are a remote user, you know the whole reason for having a laptop and in the field and need to swap batteries with out having power near you? What are they going to sell a usb battery pack now?

What percentage of users do you think this applies to?

I am not sure exactly what number, for me I would like the option as there are times in my work that I am not near power, or enough power or power that is not convienently located where I want it to be.

I can say that most of the time I can get away with out having that ability but I do have an extra battery that is charged at my disposal if I need it.

I will have to wait and see how well these new batteries perform to develop an official opinion on the matter but as of now I don't like it.

The ipods I can understand, they aren't essential devices really, you can have down time with them. The iPhone I think is dumb considering that I have had many cell phones in my life that had batteries just die on them. Until they perfect battery life I don't see a reason not to make it inter-changable by the user.

Apple has *never* been about giving the user options. Jobs et. al. knows what is right and that is the way it is done.

So a small percentage of the time a small percentage of users will be unhappy.

I have not heard a lot of complaints about not being able to change the iPhone battery. I heard a lot of complaints when they were announced and then it just sort of went away and people got used to it. Relating it to a car...I've never changed my car battery, nor anything else on my car. I let the dealer do it, so I see no problem with letting Apple change a battery I will most likely change at most once in the lifetime of the device.

Here is what I am thinking about laptops that need swappable batteries.

1) Anyone in the field doing research, or work that doesn't have power access

2) people that travel a lot, ie office to court house, office to home, home office to satellite stores, so on and so forth

3) People that need to run power hungry apps on battery only.


The fact that only a small percentage of users that may need it doesn't make it not valid. Also, Jobs doesn't always know whats best in my opinion. There are plenty of things he has tunnel vision on. It is obvious that this is a hippy more green movement thing since that seems to be the trend, especially in California. They have having all kinds of state problems with their infrastructure and going green and being efficient. Jobs hopped onto that trend.

Now, here is my major issue with it. Computers are imperfect, and they run amuck all the time. I have seen issues where power management on a laptop goes awry and then drains the battery almost instantly. You are told as a user that when a laptop goes to sleep it consumes up to 99% less power than it normally does, which is true in most cases. However, lets say your power management on the firmware level mucks up, and then it drains your battery while you think it is sleeping. Then what?

Some of the power management is at the firmware level so resetting the SMU is the only way to fix it. Power management also on every single laptops I have ever owned, serviced or supported has never had perfect power management. That is just the nature of a laptop regardless of who makes or what battery you are using.

Plus did we all forget the great battery recall? The one that affected Sony, Dell and Apple and actually destroyed machines and set them on fire? Remember all the quality controls these batteries passed before they were recalled and how many millions of machines it affected?

Apple doesn't make batteries, they buy them from someone else they have no control over what goes into the making of a battery. If there is some major defect that they did not foresee, which very well could happen since you can't predict the future then they are going to have to recall every single freaking laptop instead of just sending out replacement batteries as they did before.

Bad move over all is still my opinion. I also have an iPhone and I still don't like the fact I can't replace the battery as it has already degraded since I first got the thing. I still get a full day of data and voice but I used to get several days, now I get a day to a day and a half at the most. I would like to replace the battery myself and not have to pay someone at the apple store to do it.

Again, there are many ways around this. If you drive, charge it via the cigarette lighter. If you fly, use the power outlet on the plane. Same with train.
[/quote]

I don't understand this use case.

Yes, yes it does. A company must decide if it wants to meet the needs of the majority of their customers or the minority. Apple has chosen to meet the needs of the majority of their customers to the extreme neglect of the minority. A completely valid business decision, IMHO.

I could not agree more with you on this. He has extreme tunnel vision on many things. And yes, that doesn't make it right, but it certainly makes it Apple.

AppleCare.

I'm not sure I agree with you here. They designed and they could very well have a large say in the quality of the batteries. Apple's products consistently come out near the top of the reliability so they must do something right with their suppliers' QC.

Yup, and that has a small chance of happening, so I'm not too worried.

Plugging a phone every night is not a huge hardship.

http://www.google.com/search?client=...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

I have to agree that I don't like the idea of these 'non-replaceable' batteries. I would say on average 1 in 100 machines I come across at my job end up shipping with a bad battery, or end up needing to have the battery replaced within 6 months. The odds may even be higher than that.

What I usually do in the event of a bad battery is swap one of my spare batteries into the individual's machine, ship the battery back to Apple, wait for them to ship me the new one in a couple days, then I swap it back in for the user. 0% downtime.

So, if we decide to purchase these new MacBook 'Pros', if I have a user with a bad battery, I have to pull their HD out and ship the whole machine back? Or are the HDs not removable either? In that case, the user would be days without his machine, and for some of my clients, this is not acceptable. We run class 5,6 or even 7 days a week, and nearly every class is heavily dominated by laptop usage, due to the technicality of my institution.

As far as running apps that require a lot of battery life, that applies to me as well. I am often doing field recordings where I am in the middle of nowhere, or at least a good distance from power. With a non-removable battery, now I have to do my job in 2 hour increments? Then wait another 2 hours to charge? Sounds very counter-productive, unless they are offering some sort of USB battery pack, or something along those lines...

DE9,

You would be forced to keep service parts in stock and become a certified apple shop is what I am guessing, or have to deal with the genius bar at an Apple store. Which I hate dealing with the genius bar......


I am going to have to disagree, it is a bad move I think period. Also trying to say Applecare is needed is just asinine to the consumer. It is saying oh don't have faith in our product since you can't change a simple battery, but here add $350 on top of the laptop and it will all be taken care of, yet you still have to go do a damn Apple Store to get it done.

I don't know why people keep thinking this. The situation is exactly the same as it is with the 17-inch that was the first to go nonremovable battery. the HD and RAM are user-replaceable. The most obvious evidence is that Apple tells you how to do it in the manual. I just checked the PDF manuals released for the new 15 and 13 inch, and they still contain the same whole chapter on how to replace your RAM and HD by yourself.

I am concerned about battery service for users who live nowhere near an Apple store or service facility. I guess Apple figured, "it's working OK for the iPhone, our trial run with the 17" is OK, let's go nonremovable across the line."

You know, non-replaceable batteries doesn't seem to have had much of an effect on iPhone sales, and people were pitching a fit about that when they first came out. Maybe that is where Apple took their cue from?

To be fair the iPhone hasn't had any real competition. In fact that new Palm cell phone is the first competitor to actually put out a multi touch cell phone. So we will see how the consumers react once an actual comparable phone comes out.

This sounds ominous for me. My nearest Apple Store is in a whole different country, across the sea. Up here we have only licensed retailers. In practice, I expect that the ALR would ship it to the other country for me. I'll ask them next time I see them.

Are you not counting the Blackberry Storm? Or the G1 from T-Mobile with Google Android as it's OS? Which, I might point out, according to Apple's own stats Android is a fairly well supported OS to boot.

Apple has had competition for a little while, people still prefer Apple. Either it's a better product, or it has better marketing, who knows. But people don't seem to care all that much about the non-removable battery.

Granted, I can see where you're coming from. I think swapping out batteries can be pretty handy (and for anyone who wants me to prove the usefulness, no, I won't, I just find it useful, okay?) But despite the fact that you and I find it useful, it would seem the majority of people couldn't care less. So we have what we have now...

My hope is that they'll at least make it replaceable to those of us who don't mind opening the computer up. That way we can at least replace it when it dies...

Yes, and I looked at getting a G1 but it is not multi-touch and neither is the blackberry storm. Apple still has the only multi-touch phone on the market as far as I know.

Battery greenness?
 

TL, et al.,

Maybe "Greenness" is an issue?

Battery disposal isn't always done well by end-users.

eValuone.

Greenness wouldn't justify a change of this scope. I think the driver was that Apple decided battery runtime was a competitive advantage they could exploit. Since Apple doesn't like external extended-runtime batteries like you get on PC laptops, and since battery technology is not progressing, Apple probably decided it was worth trading off all the hardware required for removability, in exchange for space for more cells to increase battery runtime.

Dropped in at my dealer today. The position for those in countries without an Apple Store is that Apple Licensed Retailers are sending selected staff on a course to become authorised battery replacers. In this city, this won't be complete until the autumn, so if anyone here had just bought a new laptop with a duff battery, I guess they'd have to Fed-ex it to London.