Should it be this hard to replace a MacBook Pro battery ?

[trs96]

A friend of mine asked me to fix their Early 2015 Retina MBP that doesn't power on. I've never owned one of these so I thought the battery replacement would take at most 10 minutes for a swap. To my surprise, Apple recommends a trained Apple tech do the job which takes one hour. What they've done is glue in the battery pack to make it extremely dangerous to remove. It requires use of acetone or some other solvent. I'd really like to know who made this design decision and send them an email about it. I'll do this myself instead of paying Apple $250 or more.

All I can say is the person at Apple who came up with this idea and the horrible butterfly keyboards should be fired immediately if they haven't been already. To make it this difficult to perform a simple laptop battery replacement is insanity. I could live with soldered on ram. You simply buy more at the time of purchase instead of upgrading later. Fine. Ram doesn't fail as often. Batteries are guaranteed to fail at some point in the life of a MBP. It's pretty much a certainty you'll have to replace it at least once. I guess Apple expects these Late 2013 or newer laptops to be disposable items. Not great for the environment.

 

[pastrychef]

The sad fact is that all these devices are considered disposable nowadays.

Even on iMacs, which are desktop computers, trying to get to the guts involves trying to cut through glue.

 

[trs96]

The sad fact is that all these devices are considered disposable nowadays.

Even on iMacs, which are desktop computers, trying to get to the guts involves trying to cut through glue.

Has anyone at Apple heard of something called velcro ? I'm certain they could hold the battery in place quite easily with that. It's only been around for the past 60 years.

Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral invented his first touch fastener when, in 1941, he went for a walk in the woods and wondered why burdock seeds clung to his coat and dog. He discovered it could be turned into something useful.[2] He patented it in 1955, and subsequently refined and developed its practical manufacture until its commercial introduction in the late 1950s.

 

[pastrychef]

Has anyone at Apple heard of something called velcro ? I'm certain they could hold the battery in place quite easily with that. It's only be around for the past 60 years.

The best velcro I've seen are quite thick and would not work well with the "thinner at all cost" mentality that has consumed Apple.

But that's not an excuse for desktops. I mean, seriously, there's absolutely no need to glue the glass to the frame. Magnets worked well for years...

 

[trs96]

The best velcro I've seen are quite thick and would not work well with the "thinner at all cost" mentality that has consumed Apple.

There are also screws holding the battery in place as well as the back cover which fits tightly against the battery. It wouldn't require much to do what the glue is doing. Again, Mac laptops through 2012 did fine without using any glue at all. So it is possible to do.

 

[pastrychef]

There are also screws holding the battery in place as well as the back cover which fits tightly against the battery. It wouldn't require much to do what the glue is doing. Again, Mac laptops through 2012 did fine without using any glue at all. So it is possible to do.

I agree. It makes no sense. It's also why I recently purchased another Dell laptop to hackintosh rather than buy a MacBook despite knowing they will be abandoning Intel soon.

 

[trs96]

Here is an 8th gen HP EliteBook x360 13.3" laptop. It looks very similar to a 13" MBP Retina from about 2013-15. When you look at how they applied/installed the battery it's similar to the way Apple did in the older Unibody MBPs yet it's got an 8th gen CPU.

Apple could easily avoid glue to install their newer more powerful batteries. Battery replacement takes maybe 5 minutes for the HP and one hour with the MBP. The worst part about the Apple battery is that if your trackpad fails or just wears out you also have to de-glue the battery for a simple trackpad replacement. Ugh !

 

[scottkendall]

Just curious do the batteries move around in the older Macbooks that did not glue them in place? My MIS laptop has a battery on the inside and it comes out easy once the bottom is removed but I can also hear it moving around.

Fun Fact: Creeky floors are caused by a poor job of gluing the subfloor "plywood" to the floor joists during construction.

 

[trs96]

do the batteries move around in the older Macbooks that did not glue them in place?

Not at all. They are held in with screws like the HP pictured above. There are 3 tabs along the bottom that keep it secured. There is also no space for them to move around. It's never been a problem in any that I've owned.

Here's how easy it used to be. Shouldn't take one hour and the use of acetone for just a simple battery replacement.

 

[zipb]

I just got the (really expensive) 2020 MBP 13-inch with 4 TB ports. There are literally zero user serviceable parts on this thing. I watched a video yesterday of someone replacing the battery with the help of an iFixit video. Really hard work with lots of glue remover. Yikes.
SSD and RAM soldered on the mobo.