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Comment by destitude | Hacker News Reader

I still remember when you didn't even have to open up the "MBP" and could replace the battery directly from the bottom. Even had green led indicator to show how much charge it had directly on the battery case.

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Maybe you also remember batteries wore terrible, especially durability. It was quite common to see people replacing batteries on less than 1 year old laptops. Nowadays batteries easily endure 2 to 5 years without becoming useless. Sure, there are still memory issues and reducing total time over the years. But replacement is required way less often.

lipo pouch batteries are not durable, they swell up and deform housings quite often... all it takes is heat.

Durability in this context clearly relates to charging cycles, not physical durability.

Old batteries wouldn't be useable at half the age most modern batteries to start swelling

Fair point. I bought at least 2 or 3 replacement batteries for the G3 iBook I had in college.

Then again, I was probably harder on the battery in those days than I am now, with my laptop often plugged in. I supposed my 2011 Air lated until at least 2018 on the original battery though.

Wow, I totally forgot about that period. I recall that I used to plug in my laptop when I arrived at my desk, then remove the battery to ensure that it was running exclusively on wall power in an effort to improve battery health. I never did have to replace that battery...

Was this MBP era or iBook/PowerBook era? I seem to recall this being the case on the old Titanium Powerbooks in the early 00s.

Remember the glowing light near the laptop latch that would slowly swell to tell you that your laptop was asleep?

There was a MacBook Pro era - even a couple Unibody revisions - that kept the easy user replaceable battery intact.

The Unibody had this lovely latch mechanism that also allowed you to easily replace your hard drive and/or RAM.

God, I miss those days. :(

Yup my beautiful 2008 "ALU" MBP had this. Was very sleek.

MBP era, I owned the first of the Aluminium unibody Macbook's which were released around 2008 which had a removable body with a tab.

I have never seen "swell" used that way. I thought you were saying your battery was making the entire casing swell.

Man, I wish they would go back to having battery indicator on the case again. Truly miss that as I don't want to wake it just to find out if I need to seek a plug.

I remember thinking it was absolutely genius when they first released it on the 2008 Alu Unibody Macbooks. I found that in practice I never ever used it.

Those were the days. I remember replacing the battery on my iBook G4 when it died. :)

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