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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not laziness. Nothing about the internal design of the Mac is due to "laziness". Apple has clearly decided that the battery is better held in place by adhesive than by a "system of tabs". This could easily be for durability or safety reasons. It's a big, big problem if a battery gets damaged.

If your argument is that the replacement process has too many steps, this argument fails: you'd save at most one step (out of your claimed 50) if the adhesive were not there. Because the battery is not terribly accessible.

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Apple batteries are glued for two reasons:

  - The aluminium laptop case is part of the battery.  In the old days there was a plastic case/shell around the battery cells. Now the laptop case is that shell.

  - It allows them to make the laptops thinner. When you are talking about the need to save millimeters here and there in order to have a very thin total design then you need to remove screws, tabs and stuff that pads up space.

Planned obsolescence and user hostility, got it.

My 2015 Air has an easily replaceable battery. It's needed replacement once and only requires a screwdriver. That's good design. Gluing a battery in is only "good design" if you want to make it as difficult as possible for people to repair their own machines.

Heck, I still have MBPs that had hot swappable batteries. That was even better design.

> Apple has clearly decided that the battery is better held in place by adhesive ...

They decided to glue the battery down. You may assume that each decision by Apple seeks an optimum, so you concluded this decision was for the best. But better for whom -- Apple or the consumer?

Note also, that when I replace a battery that's been glued in, there are many more steps than for devices that aren't so glued down. Possibly because the people who designed it were thinking about repair and replacement scenarios.

>>If your argument is that the replacement process has too many steps, this argument fails: you'd save at most one step (out of your claimed 50) if the adhesive were not there.

Thank you for making an assumption on my behalf, but that's actually not my argument - I do have an issue with the fact that replacing the battery requires pouring solvent behind the case, as the guide clearly warns you that if you mess this up you will damage other components and the screen. That's an unacceptable process for a battery replacement, I don't mind the disassembly of everything else to get to there. I will repeat myself - there is absolutely no reason to use glue in a case as tight as that of a modern MacBook.

It's probably being done for ease of manufacturing. The bots can handle glue better than tabs and straps. Also, they can put batteries in every dead space available in the machine to maximize system battery life. I agree it's ridiculous you need to use a solvent, carefully, in order to remove the batteries. I suppose this is the state of the art for now?

Glue is not protective. The only purpose of glue is to prevent the battery from moving around, which tabs and straps do perfectly well. The battery is protected by the metal casing and nothing else, glue or no glue.

This could easily be done for profit, as well!

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