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Comment by exoque | Hacker News Reader

That's not at all what I think of when I hear the words 'replaceable battery'. Too bad.

I don't get it - the battery isn't glued in, and you can remove it without damaging other parts. Isn't that pretty good?

It's still an entire procedure. You have to remove the trackpad to access all the cells. Most users aren't going to be confident doing that to their $2000 laptop, they will continue doing what they do with glued in batteries today which is hand it off to a technician and playing the flat rate apple repair fee.

Pretty good was the first unibody macbook (open latch with one finger, remove door with two fingers, remove battery with two fingers, done):

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Unibody+Model+A1278+Bat...

When I hear "replaceable battery", it makes me think of the days when packing a spare battery was a viable alternative to bringing a laptop charger with you (I don't think any MBPs were like this, but Powerbooks were). It's funny how the Overton window has shifted.

This procedure looks doable and relatively low risk for technical people, but it's not something that my mom can do while sitting at a Starbucks

The first gen MBP (which was basically a PowerBook with Intel) had this. I remember pondering whether to buy one.

Your spare battery is now a power bank: https://www.powerbankexpert.com/best-power-bank-for-macbook-...

Sure, a bit less power efficient, but surely cheaper than an Apple product, and you can choose your features e.g. AC inverter!

Great, after dongle-ing USB-A, Displayport, and M.2, now my battery can be a dongle too!

I'm not buying a laptop unless it includes DVI-I, DVI-D, VGA, Mini DisplayPort, Mini HDMI, and Micro HDMI.

I'm not even joking, when you dock my Thinkpad it has every single one of those ports.

These days the battery lasts so long you don't have to bring a second battery with you and your laptop could realistically be charged by any phone charger overnight.

You also have the option of battery banks. As long as you can replace the battery when it wears out, thats all that matters to the average user.

Just curious, do existing M1's accept input as low as 5 watts, given it comes with a 30W adapter?

I just tested and mine is showing the charging symbol when plugged in to the 5w iphone brick. Obviously this will be super slow to charge though.

I remember borrowing my sibling's iBook G4 battery while sitting at the airport back in the day. You'd just push the grey button on the bottom face and it popped out.

I can flip my notebook over, pop the battery out and put a new one in within 5 seconds. That is replacable.

I also replaced a macbook battery once, with a hot air resoldering station (to soften the adhesive) and a metal bucket filled with sand nearby in case it catches fire (the battery was balooning and bending the aluminium frame out of shape). The whole thing took nearly an hour. Ultimately it was also replaceable, but this was needlessly painful.

Yeah there's still a long way to go to get back to where we used to be.

What is the use case? Modern batteries hold their charge for a long time. In a review I saw today, the reviewer - a professional photographer and filmmaker no less - said that he managed to shoot edit and export a video on a single charge[0]. The need to swap out batteries with these device has all but disappeared, save for permanent replacement.

[0]https://youtu.be/I10WMJV96ns?t=643

Just noting an alternative use case: When I used to take my laptop (a Dell XPS M1530, later a Dell Studio XPS 13) on my walk between home and university, I'd take it without the battery in as that made it much lighter. There were power points where I was going anyway.

The use case is the ability to easily replace/upgrade the batteries, RAM and drives by the end consumer without requiring any specialized tools or procedures barring removing some screws.

This is what we used to have with laptops 10+ years ago.

Swapping batteries due to charge issues was never particularly important to the majority of consumers and is a red herring.

The benefits provided by SoCs outweigh the benefits of user upgradeable RAM for me.

> Swapping batteries due to charge issues was never particularly important to the majority of consumers and is a red herring.

Why?

>The benefits provided by SoCs outweigh the benefits of user upgradeable RAM for me.

And 90% of laptop users. Utility of computer upgrades for most people’s needs stagnated 5 to even 10 years ago. I think the last big material improvement before M1 for regular consumers was SSD replacing HDD.

You say that like those are somehow mutually exclusive.

They kind of are by definition - System on a Chip. I'll rephrase; the benefits of having on-package RAM (unified would be even better!) outweigh the benefits of user-upgradable RAM. User upgradable/appendable storage is another thing entirely.

The _only_ real benefits of on-package RAM are cost and forcing planned obsolescence. You get maybe 0.2ns latency difference by not laying out ram socket next to CPU.

Please show me a workload constrained by memory latency/bandwidth on MacOS. I'd really love to see how those benchmarks turn out so the average user can decide for themselves.

I'd love to see less passive/aggressive responses, but this is the internet...

Editing images and video comes to mind. Average users are doing that a lot more, since they have access to high resolution RAW output via mobile devices that struggle less than their desktop to cope with the throughput.

> I'd love to see less passive/aggressive responses, but this is the internet...

You're the guy who decided to drag this argument off onto the soapbox that you wanted to talk about that I never cared about. I wrote you off from the tone of your first response... because this is the internet...

About as replaceable as a tesla's battery. You simply cant do it yourself. Seems like a trend.

This is dismissive and incorrect. iFixIt, the authors of this piece, provide everything someone needs to do such a replacement: tools, parts, and in-depth user guides. I've replaced an older-generation MacBook's battery using their stuff, and it worked fine. What more do you want?

I had a 2007 MacBook Pro. Replacing the battery for that laptop meant toggling two switches and popping it out, then dropping a new one in.

It's not unreasonable for people to ask for that level of simplicity.

It's similar for most older laptops too. I have a few older HP laptops, and on every one the battery just slides out if you pull it hard enough - no screws at all.

The vast majority of people are not comfortable opening their computer and mucking around the guts. In the old days Apple made this simple for their users:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Unibody+Model+A1278+Bat...

> The vast majority of people are not comfortable opening their computer and mucking around the guts.

That's why Apple offers to do it for them.

Sure, completely user-replacable would be ideal but such a battery design surely comes with other trade-offs and compromises.

Apple used to have some of the best-engineered batteries, now they don't. Simple as.

Coming from a x220, x230 thinkpad, removing anything at all or needing to use a screwdriver at all is way above what most are capable of doing. Obviously what I am willing to do to fix my spouses iphone, and what the average person is willing to do to self - replace are very different.

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