Apple Silicon MacBook batteries can't be replaced under warranty by third party
lapcatsoftware.com
lapcatsoftware.com
[1] https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85
You post suggests you think optimizing for other things (cost, weight, thinness, etc) is bad. People can and do vote with their wallets by choosing products that optimize things that are important to them. That's not wrong.
I don’t think average “Apple product buyers” think about “optimizing things that are important to them” when they buy Apple products. They just buy them because they look “pretty and shiny”. Most of them don’t understand how Apple takes advantage of them. Any reasonable person would be repulsed being treated like that. Unfortunately, most people either are not tech savvy enough or don’t care to understand that Apple takes advantage of them. People need to be educated on how computers work and should work so that they understand what companies are doing and so that they could vote with their wallets.
I'd get a Framework if I didn't have Apple Silicon as an option, but I like having a supercomputer in my backpack that can run for 6-8 hours on a charge with two VMs, 10 web browser tabs, a smart code editor, and several chonky Electron chat applications open. It also has 64GiB of unified CPU/GPU memory, making it able to run non-trivial local LLMs.
I have never seen an Intel or AMD laptop that delivers both those things. There are underpowered light ones that last a long time, or portable workstations that will cook an imprint of the bottom of the case into your legs. AFAIK there is nothing in that domain that can run large LLMs due to either underpowered iGPUs or separate GPUs that would never have that much RAM on a laptop. A laptop CPU that can run, say, llama3 at a decent speed without GPU would be a portable space heater.
I could replace the battery if I wanted but it's been two years and it still holds a charge fine.
The thing that would make me ditch Apple is if they locked down the OS any more than it already is. Right now macOS treads a fine line between being restricted enough to be secure and safe for the less-technical user while remaining a "real computer." If they took away even the possibility of sudo root or worse tried to lock people into the App Store I'd be gone within a week or two.
Also why I am not an iPad customer. It's basically a giant phone and as near as I can tell putting M processors in them is simply a waste. If I'm buying something that big and that expensive it should be a real computer. Part of the definition of real computer is that I can run any arbitrary code I want on it. If I can't do that it's a "console," which is how I classify most phones as well.
Edit: making iDevices able to run VMs would get you almost there. You'd be able to run any code in theory but it'd be too disjoint from the main experience so still probably a nope for me.
> I like having a supercomputer in my backpack
This shows where your priorities are, which is personal abundance over helping bigger global issues like waste and resource mining. Unfortunately you are joined by the majority of the population which is why things like climate change and poverty are still increasing even though everyone is very well aware of it.
The biggest source of gratuitous pointless e-waste isn't laptops anyway. It's pointless "IoT" devices and random gimmicky e-bullshit like that ridiculous "AI pin" that made the rounds.
I don't think what laptop you buy has any effect on climate change. Replacing coal is like 40% of that problem, then as much oil as we can, then gas, in that order, and everything else is a rounding error. Your Framework modules don't help if they're manufactured with coal power and shipped with the same bunker diesel that ships Apple products over here.
This is the same attitude as people that say 'The plane is flying anyway whether I am on it or not'.
Nothing will change while people are still making decisions on an individual rather than global level.
In reality Apple products overall have very good build quality, long software support timelines and very good software-hardware integration. OSX is more user friendly than Linux and a lot less user hostile than Windows. Spending 8 hours fighting whatever idiocy Windows or Linux or Dell throws at me costs me much more than an extra $500 for an Apple laptop.
For example, my Macbooks have never woken up in a backpack at 2am and proceeded to thermally cook themselves for 6 hours to the point of the battery not working at all after 6 months. My windows laptops have.
Linux at least never breaks userspace. x86 sadly can not match arm on efficiency, so the MacBooks are king for thermals/battery life. Although I don't travel enough to need more than 1 work days battery life, which I easily get on a Linux Ryzen laptop. If I could run Linux on the MBP I might consider it - I find macOS is not ideal for an engineer.
But in this modern age of extreme levels of e-waste and resource mining, companies should definitely be forced to prioritise repairability and sustainability over things like cost, weight, and thickness.
I dont mean to offend anybody but IMO if you think that having a thinner laptop is more important than reducing electronic and plastic waste on the planet then yes, you are wrong.
My thinner essentially “unrepairable” laptop is now on its 6th year of use and I will probably get another 2 years out of it and has never required repair. The highly repairable all plastic laptop my company tried to provide me lasted 3 years and was repaired twice. I don’t mean to offend you…but if you are really worried about e-waste, you need to really think about longevity stats of the device as a whole within the brand and model. Even if you get a lemon that breaks and requires replacement because it cannot be repaired, that might be offset by a hundred or two that have lasted years.
I'm saying Apple's laptop design optimization wasn't the problem, the problem is that Apple refuses to sell replacement batteries. I think refusing to sell replacement batteries is worse than optimizing a laptop for thinness instead of reparability.
As much as I hate tech corporations, I don't really agree that the Macbook Pro is "built to work against you". Mostly it's a great laptop that serves my needs really well. It's mildly annoying that I'm paying for integration with a whole Apple ecosystem that is of no value to me (no iPhone, no iCloud), but it's nothing like intrusive marketing shitscape that is Windows.
This is exactly why Apple is thriving. People have no patience, and are not willing to wait or compromise on anything to get their powerful laptop right now.
To my surprise the technician inspected the laptop and said that the keyboard was damaged (a few keys were wonky, remember the butterfly keyboards?) and that there was an official repair program for that. It turns out that the battery, keyboard, and trackpad is a single repair item. If you want to replace one, you have to replace all three. So instead of a battery replacement, I got a keyboard replacement which just happened to include a new battery and a new trackpad. At the beginning of last year the battery started to expand again and I went to an unofficial repair shop instead. They replaced just the battery for ~$150.
Swell/Swollen means to increase in size
Swallow means either a small bird or what you do with a drink.
* Incidentally, I've received at least half a dozen battery replacements under AppleCare over the years for this reason, going back to the original Titanium PowerBook G4. As far as I can tell, leaving a (Power/Mac)Book plugged in, closed, and running most of the time kills batteries in a warranty-preserving fashion.
During the "stain gate" incident where the anti-glow coating came off by itself ruining the display, I went to the authorized repair shop to get the free replacement.
Apple rejected my repair because the screen has a small cosmetic dent at the corner. The free replacement replaces the whole screen unit, but no, that minor dent precludes my laptop...
Of late I’ve been getting this idea of building a high end desktop PC with Linux as a daily workhorse and use the lowest end MacBook for cases when I have to move around the house or work from office. When I’m paying $3000+ I expect local shops to be able to repair and service them without the manufacturer throwing a tantrum.
In contrast, I had no problem buying a Steam Deck the moment it came out (even though I had never bought gaming hardware before) because I had confidence that the customer experience is going to be better.
I mean companies pay significant amounts for trivial software because of maintenance costs.
The big issue was that the repair shop wasn't allowed to keep any parts in stock. They always had to order a part from Apple and then promptly return the defective one.
This meant you could have extra batteries in your bag. This was the first computer with a real "all day on battery" capability.
It took 2 seconds to pop the back, 1 second to remove the battery, 1 for the new one, and 2 seconds to click the back back on.
All around a battery swap took 1 minute which included phone booting.
Oh and that S4 was waterproof.
Your £3000 laptop has a lifetime of ~800 charge cycles. That's all. Enjoy.
But regardless of what kind of laptop you have, if you use it constantly and your time at it is worth a lot, having a backup in your closet makes sense. When you think of what tools cost in many professions, a backup laptop isn’t the wildest idea.
I always have an extra machine around the house in the event either my machine or my wife's machine fails. I've setup an account for her on my machine as backup for her to work with my machine if hers fails, etc.
After years of being remote/hybrid, we now have spare keyboards and mice around as well for when one inevitably breaks as well.
It's usually the same people who will pay $2500 a year for routine service on their car without saying something but bitch about $500 repair on the principal income generator they have (their macbook).
Maybe, just maybe, they consider it wasteful to throw away a working machine. The hardware is not exactly green to make, so sure, lets everyone buy a new laptop every year.
But my time has value too, and upgrading from Intel to the new M series did cut compilation times in half for a particular project I was working on. I'm not willing to sacrifice that much time to just keep on using an old machine. Then there's the problem of reliability. Even if I have a spare MacBook lying around there's a non zero chance my work machine will die at a very inconvenient time (like on site at a customer or when working against a short deadline). After 5 years the bathtub curve starts going up and I don't want to depend on old hardware, even when it's working.
There's a wide gulf between "singularly dependent on a 5 year old PC" and "just throw it out every year".
If the business is so important getting a second one and setting it up would probably take less time than coming up with that article.
Apple had bizarre policies sometimes sure, but I think this is 10% Apple’s fault and 90% the person posting this not being responsible enough for his business tools.
Completely untrue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40534047
Some commenters (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40533735) seem to want to assume that I'm an idiot, but no, I'm not. I'm trying to avoid a hassle, but I'm not facing any kind of existential crisis to my business.
I did stop using Macs a few years ago. When my iPhone 11 dies I’ll probably switch to an older Pixel and install GrapheneOS on it.
And keep in mind, my laptop batteries have generally lasted over three years, and I might be able to postpone this battery replacement for another year. As a lone indie dev, I don't make a huge amount of money, and it would be ridiculous to have a clone of a $3000 computer in a closet for a once-in-three-year occurence. That specific time vs. money tradeoff doesn't make much financial sense.
Rest assured, though, I'm not "one dropped cup of coffee away from not being in business anymore", as one silly reply suggested.
But jumping between computers is such a rare occurrence for me. I used the same MacBook Pro from 2014 to 2022 and was never without the machine for more than 8 hours.
I optimize for my personal daily productivity. I don't optimize for a once in 3 year or once in 8 year occurrence. That would be suboptimal overall. If some kind of emergency occurs, I'll manage, but I'm not going to base my whole workflow on the remote possibility of an emergency.
It cannot be both suboptimal and cannot be without. No need to be defensive either. I was simply sharing that I have found it easier to have a desktop backup on hand but I also don't have any incantations to do to get my working environment setup.
Also worth nothing that every time I have shipped in a Macbook for repair I was giving a timeline and it always came back before the deadline. Shame they don't give out the number of days anymore.
This is just being pedantic. When I said that I can't, I didn't mean it's literally impossible. I meant that it would be a major, intolerable hassle, and thus I refuse to accept Apple's ridiculous terms.
That's not what you said. You said, "I am sorry you embellished your story and cannot stand when people provide helpful alternatives", which is a blatant insult, not an apology.
> No need to be so hostile.
You've been hostile from the beginning, wrongly second-guessing or criticizing me in every single one of your comments.
That limit has been 1000 for all models since about 2010.
(Also I have a spare iMac and a spare Mac Mini and an iPad I can work on)
YMMV but redundancy is good.
Not trying to be critical of you, just curious why the batteries get cycled so much. I have used machines heavily over two year periods but perhaps the difference between they were generally plugged in so I was not cycling the battery as quickly.
Yes, that would be the difference. I generally only plug in to charge and don't actually work at a desk a lot.
But is it worth it?
I have a high end Dell Precision 7670 with their top NBD support option. The machine has been a shit show. Dell had no parts for it when it failed and took a week to find one. The NBD support doesn't always turn up on the NBD. It's more 2-3 days, if you are lucky.
Lenovo are even worse.
I had my XPS fans replaced just last month, in my living room, for free.
(UK)
I buy Dell Precision laptops running Ubuntu, with "next-day" on-site repair. It costs me a few hundred dollars for 3 years of coverage, about what I'd spend for AppleCare. Here's my experience:
- The Precision laptops do get more weird hardware failures than I'd like. Higher than one of the good Mac models, lower than some other well-known vendors.
- "Next-day" service in Vermont is usually more like a couple of days, because they often have a single technician covering Vermont and upstate New York, and they sometimes send the parts to the wrong depot.
- They really do send a technician in person to fix everything, for no extra charge.
AppleCare isn't too bad here. But the turnaround is often a lot longer unless I'm willing to travel to a big city where they have parts on hand. So Dell comes out narrowly ahead, in my experience.
My experience is that systems like this can be developed pretty easily in Windows, Linux or MacOS. I'd spend most of my time in a Jetbrains IDE like IntelliJ IDEA and it is mostly the same except MacOS has that thing with the option and control keys. I don't find it hard to switch. I mean, I have a compact keyboard on one computer with no arrow keys and I switch between that an a normal keyboard every day. It's a small difference.
If you use WSL in Windows you can use the exact same commands and shell scripts on Linux, Windows and MacOS. I mostly use my IDE or I use vim which is the same on all these platforms.
Personally I think the WTF/mile is worse in MacOS and Linux than in Windows. I thought Ubuntu's desktop was a train wreck 10 years ago, today I think it's just fine. If I go to work for company X I am going to have no problem using whatever OS they use.
Everywhere else I got a machine that was the same as what everybody else got except for the place that used Macs everywhere but I was the machine learning engineer so I got an Alienware laptop with a good GPU.
> This is nothing new and non-news
You should check the news again, because the pandemic is over now.
Also, I got my 2014 MacBook Pro battery replaced onsite in 2021 for $200.
In the United States?
Which state are you in?
No, it's definitely performed in-house. I can literally see their workshop and talk to the technicians. Not to mention that same-day service would have been very difficult if it were passed off to someone else. And there aren't many AASPs in my town anyway.
As stated in the blog post, my last two MacBook Pro battery replacements, without AppleCare, were $200 not $600, so clearly something has changed.
As for the battery being sold with the top case, I have less of a problem than many with this as it's difficult to ship the batteries safely or remove or replace them in these machines. That's a design flaw which I hope they will sort out at some point but at the moment it is what it is. What is objectionable is that the rebate for the part that is returned is really really poor if you use the self-service repair store. £510 spend for an £85 return. If that's just the battery that's gone it's a rip off.
My risk is that if I have a problem with mine, I will just buy another one though. It paid for itself in under 3 days when I bought it.
Also we have been shipping laptop batteries forever... so it is possible.
I am curious how a 1500$ macbook paid itself in 3 days?
Batteries - well they need to be stuck to something so they don't bend. Apple's design flaw is sticking it to the top case which is the problem.
Well it was a $2500 MBP and it paid itself off because I made more cash than that in 3 days with it (unfucking an iOS app for someone).
It is an off the shelf model. I bought such a model specifically because I knew it would be easier for returns and such.
So just ask the store for a loaner. Or rent one. Or buy another one and return it before the cooling off window closes.