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Comment by _qulr | Hacker News Reader

The battery in my 2014 MacBook Pro is going bad for the second time. Replacing the battery last time was expensive and a major ordeal. It's more difficult than replacing the battery in my car.

Replacing the battery in my 2006 MacBook Pro took all of 15 seconds.

If the lifetime of a battery powered device is expected to be much longer than the lifetime of the battery, then the battery needs to be easily user replaceable. Otherwise, the manufacturer has zero credibility on the environment.

Don't even get me started on vendor OS lockdown and its effect on the environment. They're intentionally making devices disposable.

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I don't think laptops should be designed to optimize relatively rare events like battery swaps over day-to-day use. My MacBook Air is 8? years old and I've never cracked the case.

If it's common for MacBook batteries to last 3 years as it has for you, that's a far bigger concern than the fact that it's difficult to replace. I think that's pretty uncommon though, I don't have numbers either way.

> I've never cracked the case.

You may want to pop it open and blow the dust out of the fans. They need annual maintenance to run at full efficiency. You might even notice the speedup in your computer if the CPU has been running slower to keep the heat down.

> I don't think laptops should be designed to optimize relatively rare events like battery swaps over day-to-day use.

Is this reversing cause and effect? Battery swaps will indeed be rare if you have to disassemble the entire computer to do it.

> Is this reversing cause and effect? Battery swaps will indeed be rare if you have to disassemble the entire computer to do it.

As I said above, if you need to replace the battery frequently, that's a big concern regardless of whether it's the laptop is serviceable or not.

You're assuming the only reason to replace a battery is to replace it because it is faulty but back in the day people used to just carry spare batteries to increase capacity.

Now we're limited to those crazy plug-in power banks that don't work on most laptops anyway.

If you could still carry a spare battery, a lot of people would.

> ... back in the day people used to just carry spare batteries to increase capacity

"Back in the day" batteries lasted 2 hours or less and even then I didn't know many people who bothered buying a spare. The extra weight and expense weren't worth the trade-off.

Now with 8+ hour battery life, the trade-off is even worse.

Interesting argument. If people didn't bother buying a spare even when battery life was shorter, maybe longer battery life doesn't really matter all that much. ;-)

Incidentally, I had a spare that I brought along when traveling. When I wasn't traveling, I generally didn't need the spare, but it was great when I did need it.

Well it's only my anecdata vs your anecdata but that wasn't my experience at all. In the 90s through 2000s it was extremely common for people who primarily worked on laptops while travelling to have a "laptop bag", inside which you'd carry your power adapter, whatever PCMCIA cards you needed, a mouse, and a spare battery.

> Well it's only my anecdata vs your anecdata but that wasn't my experience at all.

Indeed and much likely depended on use-cases.

But battery life is vastly different now regardless.

> PCMCIA cards you needed

LOL do not miss those. I did have a sweet PCMCIA network card because Linux didn't support the onboard NIC. Back in the days when you had to scour 30+ web sites to find a laptop you could run Linux on reliably.

It wasn’t that long ago that our agency had thousands of people with laptops who travelled often (2007). We used to give them two batteries, a home charger and a car charger. You could get almost four hours on a full battery and that was not running a ton of software and no WiFi or wireless. Seemed common if you travelled to have more than one battery. Now it seems like you just want one of those battery backups to bring with for times when you don’t have a plug nearby.

It's not an easy task to make an extremely efficient and sleek design, and still make it easy to disassemble/reassemble/upgrade/etc.

The strides Apple has made to make devices smaller, more efficient, and more powerful are incredible. Though they come with obvious downsides. Cramming all that tech into a small space means you don't have an easy "click to remove" battery cell any longer - or hard drive, or memory sticks, or floppy drive bay... ;)

Not to negate your point - battery lifetimes are quite poor compared to the lifetimes of all other electronics in a computer and making them easily replaceable would be ideal.

Do we want smaller, faster, more efficient computers, or do we want easily modable computers?

Obviously both would be ideal, just not sure if that's really feasible with the way the technology is progressing.

We’re talking about a difference in thickness of millimeters though. Was my 2014 Macbook Pro really that bulky? The prevailing sentiment over the last several Apple announcements seems to have been “fewer gimmicks, more power”. Maybe software engineers aren’t the target market for these computers anymore though, or perhaps my bubble is too small.

Thin and sleek are "nice to haves". Reduced environmental impact should be "musts".

Thinner, lighter and overall smaller footprint also have noticeable environmental impact. You have to ship these products and at millions of devices these things add up. The battery is also replaceable by Apple. People also recycle their computers, in which case a lot of these raw materials are recovered too.

> Do we want smaller, faster, more efficient computers, or do we want easily modable computers?

It's not about making them moddable, it's about making them more sustainable. Of course everyone's values differ, but wanting to repair your own stuff is something that has become more than just gimmicky, and for good reason in my opinion.

I upgraded the RAM, did two hard drive swaps, and replaced the battery in my 2009 MBP. That laptop case also had less flex to it than the 2018 MBP I'm using today. I would much rather have a thicker but upgradeable/maintainable/solid laptop than the current models.

Thermal management on the 2018 models is also not great. Ambient temps on my house didn't really impact the 2009 model, but they definitely do for the 2018 version. I think most of this comes from processor improvements over those nine years, so there's a tradeoff, but don't know for sure. Only ARM will tell.

Totally agree that the efficiency and power management on the iPhone line is amazing. They've done a lot of work there. So far, the batteries in my iPhones have lasted about as long as the rest of the device, typically four years.

The possibility of a convergent device, like an iPhone I could use with an external display and keyboard (see https://youtu.be/yBeza4UNOm8), is intriguing. I would like that. And I would be more likely to accept the compromises for that form factor, because I can get down to one computing device.

But just having a sleeker design is not enough for the tradeoffs I see with the vintage vs. modern MBP line.

Everyone says this because they never have to put their money where there mouth is and daily drive a behemoth like the old MBPs. My mom uses my 2010 MBP. The thing is enormous, ridiculously heavy. Huge, hard to fit in a backpack. Battery life is mediocre. It gets pretty hot too despite its size.

I would never go back to then, nor would most consumers. I want my laptop to last a long time and be portable. People moan about upgrades but I doubt that is even half a percent of Apple's consumer base now.

I would go back to my 2006 17-inch MacBook Pro form factor in a second. Best laptop I've ever owned. Well designed.

There used to be a distinction between Pro and non-Pro. If you valued light and small over power, then you'd buy the non-Pro Mac. But Apple won't let us make the tradeoff anymore. Do Pro users even want the Touch Bar? Mostly not.

Sure you would, that's what everyone says who doesn't have to do it or can't.

I still have the machine. The only reason I had to stop using it is that it can't run anything later than Lion.

This is my point. It's easy to say you'd do something you'd never be forced into doing. It's just rose-colored glasses "back in my day...blah blah blah"

> This is my point.

You have no point. My point is that I can literally put my 2014 and 2006 MacBook Pros next to each other and compare them, in the present, right in front of my eyes, not wearing any glasses, much less "rose-colored".

On every Apple device I've owned, the thing that became end-of-life first has always been the software. The battery and hardware health have always kept on going, long after the device stopped getting OS updates. To the point where you had to either jailbreak or throw away perfectly good hardware because the software was hopelessly out of date and inevitably contained unpatched vulnerabilities.

I have a 20 year old PC sitting next to me with a Pentium 4 in it that still happily runs the latest Debian, but I can't get this coming year's OS updates for a seven year old phone or a six year old MacMini.

> It's not an easy task to make an extremely efficient and sleek design, and still make it easy to disassemble/reassemble/upgrade/etc.

If we're just talking about the battery, that's bullshit.

1) They could use Phillips or even Torx screw heads instead of Apple's Pentalobe screw head. The back already comes off relatively easily.

2) The batteries are already connectorized, but they could use a pull-tab adhesive or a thin screw plate to secure the battery instead of fucking epoxy. There's zero space for the cells to move... they're not going to slide around. The only thing the glue does is guarantee that you're going to destroy the cells when you attempt to remove them.

3) They could sell replacement cells on their website like every other manufacturer.

Socketed mobile CPUs are probably never coming back, but RAM and SSD sockets are still a trade-off for pretty much every other manufacturer. Nobody is surprised by Apple's direction here, but it's absolutely possible to design a nice, high-end thin and light laptop with socketed RAM and storage, and many manufacturers are doing just that.

It's just laziness. The interior of modern laptops is mostly space that can be filled by batteries. Laptop packaging is far easier than it was 25 years ago. A screw on cover and a pluggable cable aren't going to ruin anybody's precious design.

I think if there is any company that could wow us with upgradeability and repairability, it would be Apple after they decided to innovate in those areas.

There are some structural limitations to doing this. Car side impact performance is substantially hampered by the very large holes we need to make the driver and passengers replaceable. Nobody wants to crawl in the top like a tank, and we compromise heavily because of this.

One solution that occurs to me is to look at what 3M has for a thermally stable version of the removable adhesives they use for those wall hooks. How many watt hours of capacity do you lose making space for 1) the adhesive, and 2) lower tolerances to account for human error in centering the new battery? I suspect this could be engineered to be less problematic. Possibly with some sort of tool for aligning the battery and dropping it in (thinking suction cups and some rails to drop it straight in).

In one of my first laptops the battery lid was the battery. But this doesn’t allow for a sleek unibody. Apple sacrifices a substantial amount of functionality for the sake „sleekness“. Another prominent example is the keyboard which they not only kept long after they knew it was bust, but the repair was also made needlessly hard because of the Macbook’s design. There are some laptops where you can replace the keyboard without opening the laptop. I don’t expect Apple to make battery lids and swappable keyboards but the current design is user hostile and environmental unfriendly.

Apple had those for quite a while.

The problem is that a battery compartment has six sides. The lid is, best case, only one of the two largest. Square voids are very difficult to brace around. They started stir welding the braces to the unibody to improve stiffness not too long before they did away with the discrete battery. Then they started manufacturing (assembling, really) their own prismatic cells to substantially reduce the amount of packaging and gaps in the laptops.

The model where this all came together, by the way, got a roughly 2-fold increase in battery life. That is not a small compromise you are talking about. Sure, 30% of that was from OS improvements to manage peak power draw, but the rest was due to better, larger batteries by filling every void in the case with custom, higher density cells (with no shielding of their own).

I do not like that the batteries are bonded to a board that takes $400 to replace. You should absolutely be able to separate those, I just don't agree that it's worth having to carry a spare battery in order to have a spare battery.

I definitely agree but there's a lot of room for compromise between "user servicable battery" and "repair shops can't even buy the parts".

I mean all the phone manufacturers are doing it, but phones used to have replaceable batteries. I think companies realized they could make more by selling new phones. But the iphone has never had a replaceable battery.

I never got a new phone because the battery was not good enough anymore (and it can be replaced, just not by yourself). Apple charges about $50, obviously 10x cheaper than a new phone.

Funny, my last few phone upgrades were in large part because of that.

I went through 3 replacement batteries on my last phone (a Galaxy S5) over the course of 4-5 years because the OEM ones kept bulging (possibly due in part from heat generated by my aftermarket Qi panel).

I find it terribly annoying being pushed to upgrade my device every couple years.

I bought a brand new S10+ and after a year of use there's a noticeable difference in battery life. It's the model with 1TB Flash storage (yes) so I'm not eager to throw away the investment. I wish I could put in a new battery without need for adhesive peeling, a heat gun and luck.

I agree with the comments about user-hostile design in regard to smartphone batteries.

>They're intentionally making devices disposable.

Well no. This is what intentionally making devices disposable looks like.

>According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop isn’t repairable at all. In fact, it got a 0 out of 10 for repairability and was labeled a “glue-filled monstrosity.”

The lowest scores previously were a 1 out of 10 for all previous iterations of the Surface Pro

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/251046-ifixit-labels-s...

Does it really matter if it’s “user serviceable” or does it just need to be “serviceable.” Because I think Apple meets that bar. I don’t really care that for all practical purposes my transmission isn’t serviceable by me personally, but that I can take it to the shop for an okay price.

Getting my iPhone battery replaced was a pretty painless experience compared to my old Nexus. Hell it was actually easier than my Samsung that had a user replaceable battery because by the time it needed replaced I couldn’t find a 1st party replacement battery!

EDIT - When looking up Watch service prices I missed that there was a cheaper $80 battery replacement vs the general out of warranty service price. But that's still 47% of the current street price (S3 is $170 from Amazon, Target, or Walmart).

Similarly, AirPods are $50 each for battery replacement, another $50 for the charging case, versus a list price of $200 and having gone on sale for $150. So if your batteries are shot in both AirPods and the case it's 75% of list price, or the entire full cost of buying them on sale. And this is a device where when brand new the tiny little batteries were barely good enough.

If my car's transmission blew and it was $10,000 to get it repaired, I'd be taking it to a scrapyard instead of a mechanic. Same goes for a 2-3 year old gadget if I'm expected to spend 75% of the replacement cost to get a battery replaced. I'm just going to say "I guess it's time for an upgrade" and see if someone on CraigsList will pay me for the old one, maybe just for spare parts depending on how bad the battery is.

If Apple really wants to extend the lifetime of their devices, they need to get the price down for replacing the disposable components, or make the disposable parts user replaceable again.

I've said it before re: AirPods battery life, but this was a predictable outcome for something with a 5 hour battery: https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/28/airpods-battery-life/

The economics of a extremely large machine with thousands of parts are different than the economics of a $150 piece of electronics with 4 parts.

I'm not sure why this surprises people.

I'm not surprised, I just think Apple could do more to keep old devices in use if they were really concerned about it. Going 100% carbon neutral on your supply chain is great, but it's even better to just make and dispose of less stuff to begin with.

The economic incentives of selling gadgets less often obviously don't line up with making Apple more money, but neither do all of their other environmental initiatives. Some things they do because it's the right thing to do.

On the phones side I'm holding them to a high standard, knowing they already do a better job keeping phones useful compared to any of their competition. I don't think that's the case for laptops and other devices where there are serviceable alternatives though; I see a lot more old ThinkPads in use than I do old MacBooks. That's probably because an old laptop still gets OS updates, and other manufactures make more repairable laptops than Apple does. Apple's gadgets (laptops and everything else) eventually hit limited software support.

> The economic incentives of selling gadgets less often obviously don't line up with making Apple more money...

I disagree. Longevity is a big part of why I buy Apple products. Laptops that last 8-10+ years and the fact that they hold enough resale value that I can sell it used when I need to upgrade are massive selling points. Likewise the fact that I get 4-5 years of useful (supported) life out of the iPhone versus 2-3 for Android phones.

> I don't think that's the case for laptops and other devices where there are serviceable alternatives though; I see a lot more old ThinkPads in use than I do old MacBooks.

My MacBook is 8 years old and will likely be in use for at least a few more years. Pretty much every Mac I've owned has lasted for a decade or I've sold it while it was still running. As I said above, reliability is a big chunk of why I started buying Macs.

Apple's single standout reliability on MacBooks as far as I know is that keyboard issue.

YMMV I guess. My Mac longevity has been less impressive, MacBook Pro I got for college lasted 4 years and then went totally unbootable, and the Air replacing had its audio inputs/outputs die around 3 years. I dragged that one out for a while longer with bluetooth headphones and replaced it when the 2016 MBPs launched, which as you mentioned have keyboard problems. Otherwise still solid, so maybe this will be my first 8-year Mac.

My iPhone SE 2016 is >4 years though, so I'm doing above average on that one at least.

I would define serviceable as replaceable with reasonable cost or effort, with reasonable being closer to the price of the component than the whole device.

In other words: if the part is a battery that costs around $70, I should expect a change to be around 100-150max, not 500-600, where I’d consider upgrading to the next device.

Also it would be nice if certain components would be interchangeable in the way chargers are, though I understand that there’s higher customization for things in the device and this might not be feasible.

If the product is 100% carbon neutral then selling multiple copies of that products would have no impact either.

This means that planned obsolescence and being impossible to repair for the user would have no effect on the environment.

That is a huge(!) leap. 'Carbon neutral' does not mean 'no side-effects' it means literally 'carbon neutral' of course there is pollution from the churn of obsoleting devices left and right.

Can we not keep repeating this myopic 'the only problem is X' and then creating a bunch of new problems from not accounting for externalities. I am reminded of the great horse-shit meeting of europe that ended with no solution and then the car came along and everyone was 'yay no more pollution' because for them 'pollution' was horse shit, not exhaust fumes.

What about the ecological disruption involved in mining all of the material for those multiple products?

Being carbon neutral isn't sufficient to undo the damage that we have done. We need to become carbon negative.

The environment is composed of more than CO2 levels.

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