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Comment by drclau | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK, replacing the battery on the previous generation meant replacing the top part of the body, to which the battery was glued. That included replacing the keyboard and the touchpad (not 100% sure if the old keyboard and touchpad could have been kept; maybe they were replaced just because of the damage done to them by the expanding batteries). At the same time, the previous generation had battery problems and keyboard problems (as pointed out in sub-comments), which meant many were replaced for free even out of warranty (as it happened to me due to faulty battery).

I suspect someone at Apple realized how much would have been saved if only the battery was not glued to the case.

Edit: mentioned the keyboard problem, which would result in replacing the battery too it seems.

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It had the nice side effect that I got a brand new battery every time I had a single janky keyboard key. My battery is always nearly-new! :)

Same, but then the last time the battery went bad (swelling) with only about 30 cycles on it.

That's definitely a "glass is half full" view of the MacBook keyboard quality situation. :)

Yep I had annual keyboard replacements on all the butterfly macs I owned. I considered it a nice feature that the keyboard had this defect because it also meant a free annual battery replacement.

As I get older I start thinking more about our e-waste problem. This seems fairly egregious in that regard.

I wonder if all of the recent interest in right-to-repair laws by various states impacted the new design.

I wander if the new keyboard design with plastic rather than aluminium between the keys will also make it easer to replace it too, it almost looks like the module that could be swapped. I'm sure we will find out from iFixit soon!

I suppose it also means that the top case is no longer tied to different keyword layouts, fewer SKUs. That will have helped cut costs!

(written on a 2019MPB with duff ender key)

it's a black anodized aluminum inset from what I can find online

Some YouTube video said you still have to replace the whole top

Unfortunately there is a lot of really wild speculation going on that places a lot of the thinking into “upper management” and ignores the realities of engineering and production. IIRC - This is the first time the battery attachment method has been changed since they were made to be fully enclosed units. It could really be as simple as eng/Production standardising battery attachment tech for unibody enclosures and the switch to m1 was the first meaningful redesign where that could have happened.

This is underlined by Apple’s “repairability scores” being mostly random - it seems that apple just doesn’t spend a lot of R&D time obsessing about repairability tweaks in bump-releases, especially if they’re going to get in the way of their vision for the device.

I suspect that they see the right to repair movement and are trying to preempt it, at least to an extent.

It's probably just that replacing too many parts when one breaks was getting too costly for them

You know, it could be both...

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but adding convenient pull tabs really does feel like a shift in direction to at least be less hostile to non-Apple or DIY replacements. They could have easily opted for a special battery removal tool.

What good are pull tabs when you cant buy original replacement battery(1)?

/1 without giving up your business books for 5 years selling your customers privacy, and giving up ability to do component level repair.

More good than not having available replacement batteries and also having the original glued to the case?

This is also how I got two new batteries replacements when I had to send my MBP in for keyboard replacement due to the stupid thing breaking (repeatedly).

Each time the system showed 0 cycles on the battery and I basically got a nice reset. Loved that part of it at least.

hahaha, my 2016 MBP chews through batteries - I'm on my fourth, I think - and every time I get a new battery it comes with a new keyboard, so I haven't had any of the keyboard problems some are plagued with.

That's what "authorized service providers" do. Unauthorized ones do replace just the battery by ungluing the old one.

Which involved hours of using chemicals to dissolve the glue with a plastic card. It was ranked one of the hardest repairs on ifixit.

I did it myself with some kit bought online for a 2013 (I think it might have actually been specifically an iFixIt kit). Ungluing the battery took all of 15 minutes and the plastic card jiggering was fairly trivial.

I’m quite positive the actual reason for its high difficulty score is that actually reaching the battery basically requires completely dismantling the whole laptop — the battery is under the motherboard, and every little module has to be removed and taken out fully before the motherboard can go. And putting them back in, the connectors are ridiculously small and fiddly.

The battery being glued was completely a non-concern IME.

I recently did my 2013 MBP, and while it was a massive pain that left my hands hurting afterwards, I was able to do it without solvents or having to dismantle the entire system like iFixit said I would need to.

Probably spent about 20 to 30 minutes using some old sacrificial credit cards to break the glue & pry the cells out.

Huh, no, the hardest one was opening the first Google Pixel without damaging the screen. I did break mine by prying too carelessly.

Still, replacing just the battery ends up being a lot cheaper.

At some point they ran out of that part, so they gave people refurbs. They didn't have the fr-CA keyboard in Germany, so I got upgraded from a 2012 mid-specced MacBook to a 2017 top-specced one for the price of a battery change.

Then I got two more battery swaps when my keyboard failed.

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