I HATE APPLE

just letting the second shoe fall here

Any of you ever install a MacBook Pro battery on your own? My early 2015 Mac Pro Retina battery is getting older/weaker, and I'm getting the "service recommended" alert. They sell kits at the usual places that include new batteries, all tools, adhesive remover and even safety goggles/gloves for a relative modest price, like $90, but the process seems like a pain. Notice I said "adhesive remover?" "Safety goggles?" Apple, for some stupid fucking reason, *glues* its batteries in place. Apparently even their techs are not trained to remove and replace the battery. They simply remove and replace an entire chunk of the computer, including the keyboard and so on, rather than go through the trouble of replacing the battery itself.

Now, it looks doable from the instruction video, but even the site selling the kit recommends getting a pro to do it. My preferred local pro won't do it. And the other local Apple servicer for some stupid reason refuses to just quote me a price. Apple itself seems to sell the battery for $199, plus I assume there will be labor on top of that, but I can only imagine it could take a couple of weeks rather than a couple of days/hours, which makes the $90 kit price all the more appealing. And yet there is a lot that can potentially go wrong, like, say, the battery blowing up or something. Still ... doesn't seem like that will happen unless I remove it with, like, a hammer. Or will it/can it? I dunno.

Dude just live with it til the arm MacBook comes out

Eh, I don't want a new computer, since my current computer is more than I need. I just need a new battery, or will, eventually. Unless the new MacBooks are the same cost as a new battery, but that seems ... unlikely.

I tried this week to replace the battery on my first gen iPhone SE, which is also glued on, and i fucked it up, the WiFi antenna was out of place and would only pick up from less than a foot away afterwards, so I just got a new SE instead. I’m leery of replacing glued batteries again.

I’m pretty sure the $199 includes labour and it only takes a couple of hours.

Assuming you live somewhere with an apple store or service provider and they are open, that is.

I own a 2013 MacBook Pro Retina 13" and recently got a repair guy to replace the keyboard as my o key had died on me. He warned me that the battery was dangerously swollen so I accepted his offer to kill two birds with one stone, since you need to remove the battery to reach the keyboard anyway. I know my laptop will soon be turning seven and that I should probably consider getting a new one, but it's in very good condition otherwise and I've got a PC for gaming purposes anyway.

I thought of replacing the parts myself as I've had some success with other models in the past, but after skimming through a YT tutorial I figured it just wouldn't have been worth the extra hours I'd have likely sunk into it out of sheer inexperience, not the mention the risk of bungling it somehow. It ended up costing a bit more than I would have liked (standard Montreal rate, based on every other place I contacted for a quote), and it took a lot longer than I expected because French Canadian keyboards were initially out of stock, but I paid upfront and kept using it while waiting for shipping delays to get resolved. And it was still cheaper than via Apple, who stopped supporting 2013 models a while back anyway (thankfully this does not apply to MacOS yet).

Good to know the $199 includes labor. The Apple certified local place I suspect wanted me to come in to lock me into the $50 diagnosis fee, which would go toward the work, but I don't want to commit to that until I know the price for sure is the same as just going to Apple. Last I heard back from the local place they gave me some bullshit response about a "range of price," but I don't know what the fuck they are talking about, and I don't find the shadiness reassuring.

(I totally know I can do this myself, btw, but as with electrical work the threat of bodily harm makes me more uneasy than the worry over screwing it up.)

Even if you use the local guys, book it through Apple, they regulate the prices and guarantee the work.

The battery varies wildly with model and if it's the same as my work laptop it's a 5-part battery that's glued all along the bottom of the case, under the trackpad. Others are much easier to replace.

I have a slight bulge in mine, just enough so it wobbles on a flat surface, but not enough to worry me.

i have never worked on whichever mbp this is, but here's my take:

macbooks are generally easier to work on than phones, so if you've replaced a battery in a phone, this should be ok

battery replacements are among the easiest things you can fix yourself

i have fixed a bunch of things that call for heating pads to loosen glue and i have literally never needed them (or had access to them).

ok to be fair your one looks like it sucks https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+Display+Early+2015+Battery+Replacement/45137

the screws: be sure to keep track of which is which

the cables: i have never damaged one fwiw, but there are a lot in this repair, so unusually many opportunities to mess up. concentrate i guess?!

the acetone/heat: lol. it's not out of the question that your battery will lift right out with mild hand prying. it's 5 years old. the glue may be long gone.

Yeah, that's the one. Mine's 15" though.

Comments suggest that some steps can be skipped and that you can thread thin wire behind the batteries to break the glue rather than using chemicals but...

Pity the design genius of Apple doesn't stretch to fixability.

My 2014-15 MBP-15-Retina battery is also on the way out (900+ recharge cycles, tends to shut down if you tax it with anything more strenuous than web-surfing when it's below 60%). The tutorial I saw was 55 steps... to *remove* the old one. I have zero confidence I could do it myself. I tried to isolate the display issue with my old Toshiba W8.1 laptop (bought spring 2013, retired when I got the Mac) to see if I could get it working as a backup for the kids; it's still in bits under the bed several weeks later.

£200 to keep this thing going until the last MacOS update it receives (should be good for a couple after Big Sur, right?) seems acceptable. But not yet.

The fixit tutorial seems to be several steps above and beyond, possibly in the name of caution/overkill. The OWC (video) tutorial still seems like a pain, but doesn't contain nearly as many steps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lue6lVWhh4o

The biggest concern seems to be care/handling of the battery. There is no way to know how stuck on there it is after so many years, so yeah, may take some time/work/caution. Second after that are the number of connections, but I've changed out my hard drive before and that part doesn't seem nearly as concerning. Last are the screws, which are tiny but which are just screws. I have a compatible screwdriver set already, but if I got a kit it would come with new ones, I guess.

I'm leaning toward going through the authorized rep. $200 vs. $90 is not a terrible difference for such an important component (and potentially problematic and def. PIA DIY project).

I think 5-6 years life on any laptop is decent enough nowadays

Again, not talking about the laptop. Laptop is fine! It's the battery. Seems silly to replace a laptop for the battery, it's a bit like replacing a car for new tires.

A few points: lithium polymer batteries can catch fire if they are pierced. The Apple repair job is more or less guaranteed not to wreck your machine. Exposure to major solvents is not a healthy thing to do. And you’ve no way of knowing if the third party battery has the same actual capacity as the original part.
I repair the shit out of MacBooks all the time but I would hesitate before tackling a glued in battery. Check it out on ifixit and YouTube first hey.

I think 5-6 years life on any laptop is decent enough nowadays

What’s a major solvent?

caek, you're making me feel bad for not replacing the keyboard myself (and the battery along with it), but when I revisit this dude's guide, my stance is still 'fuck it, I'm glad I dished out an extra 150 (Canuck) bucks':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJBAlM32NY

Some years ago I looked into upgrading the CPU of our MacAir. Everyone said it was impossible except this one dude I found online with an epic instructional video involving solvents, soldering, the whole deal. The video itself was I want to say 90 minutes at least, and super intricate. I immediately thought, who the fuck would do this? So I read the comments and people were indeed asking, hold up, how in the world did you get these skills? Turns out the dude was a former Apple factory employee from China. I figured if it was a PIA for him (however achievable) then no way would I even consider it.

my new air seems good

i've shared this guy's videos before. great lad

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl2mFZoRqjw_ELax4Yisf6w

What’s a major solvent?
Anything other than water or ethanol - acetone, xylene, naphtha, DMSO. They're all carcinogens to varying extents. It's not a technical term tho, just an adjective I chose.

I mean don’t huff it but acetone is a household chemical. I don’t think there’s much additional personal risk from using it in these amounts one time in a world where people drive cars and use bleach.

I stand corrected on acetone - years of working in labs have given me a dread of all the solvents we used to work with happily on the bench, and later found out to be major health risks (formalin, xylene etc), so I over-generalised.

ach, formalin's not a solvent but you know what I mean. Just remembered all the tissue clearing I did with chloroform too, sitting next to the wax embedding gear on a sunny afternoon.

Sent my old iPhone 7 back to apple fo get a battery replacement and I’d say the new battery has about 75 pct of the capacity of one that comes with a new phone (though batttery health shows 100 pct unsurprisingly)

maybe let it run down to zero a couple times to dial it in - battery estimation is an inexact science, especially with a new one.

i'm using my iphone 6s as a webcam, it's very nice!

What software are you using to do that? I tried to get my old 6s running with CamTwist on my MacBook, but nothing shows up.

Camo

https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/

40 € a year?

It's recurring? Didn't see that. There are other apps, too, but I feel like our phone already gets abused enough daily without turning it into a constant video conferencing driver.

yeah it's $$ but i have sympathy for the view that subscription is really the only way to make indie development work these days, and $0.99 is not going to cut it for a team. also my work pays for mine hahaha.

fwiw I ended up going the official route for a battery replacement. $199 all in, including tax and shipping to my home and includes for the sake of simplicity a new keyboard, trackpad etc is better than the DIY route which would have cost $90 plus tax and shipping, plus might have blown up. They are already a day past the work estimate though.

I will say the repair process is starting to make me a little irrationally angry. I dropped the computer off on Sunday, they gave me a completion estimate for September 30th. The last automated update I got was first thing in the morning on the 29th which said the repair was in progress. Having looked into this I know for a fact the repair as they do it, just replacing that whole part of the computer, does not take days, so I'm getting a little impatient, even though getting it back by now would still have been pretty fast.

Ok, all I wanted from these ding dongs was a new battery. Now I get a vague email claiming that they want authorization to do a new repair, this one costing not $199, but $999 (!), plus tax. It's unclear what the problem is, at least until I speak to them, but it might involve changes I made to the computer, which include putting in a new hard drive and adding RAM. Yet that should have absolutely nothing to do with a $1,000 repair, since there was nothing wrong with those parts of the computer, I just wanted a new battery! Either way, as if I would pay $1,000 to repair a 5-year-old MacBook. But now I'm forced to wait for the stupid store to open just for the satisfaction of yelling at a human.

Easy tiger

Pfft, if you can't get mad after bringing in a computer for a new battery then hearing back that not only did they not put in a new battery, now they want to charge you several hundred dollars more for an unspecified repair, essentially totaling the cost of a new computer, then I guess you can't get mad at anything. I feel bad for the suckers that get messages like this and okay the repair.

that is fucking insane and I am sorry for suggesting the official repair was a better idea

okay, I just got off the phone with Apple, and in some ways it makes perfect sense and is also crazier than it seems. a while back I installed a hard drive and some RAM myself with generic, non-Apple components. Apple, however, whenever they so much as do anything beyond opening up a computer, automatically adds a 90-day work guarantee to whatever repairs or changes they make. But because there were non-Apple components I installed in the machine, Apple would not/could not invoke its 90-day work warranty. So that $1,000 quote was in essence a fee for replacing my perfectly good hard drive and perfectly good RAM with Apple versions of that hard drive and RAM so that Apple could add that 90-day warranty to its work, in this case simply replacing my battery. Long story short, they will not replace my battery - or essentially do anything to my computer, ever, even though it is out of warranty and I want to give them my money - unless I have Apple replace my hard drive and RAM with Apple products.

wow, that is super obnoxious

okay, so I now have some cash, and want to buy a new laptop. should i continue to wait until Apple unveils these ARM machines or just plunge in...

tbh i'm working on a 2013 13" MBP and it served my needs well until a year or so ago— i've started needing to utilize InDesign and Acrobat a lot more for work and other purposes, and the machine simply cannot keep up with my commands at this point.

other than this, I'm mostly using it to write, download/listen to/manage my digital music files, as well as teach seminars and such.

i know i asked about this over the summer, but thought it wise to ask again, since things might have changed? anyway, i'm sorry i'm such a clueless idiot about this stuff, i just don't have time to parse through all these reviews that litter the internet.

and thanks in advance for any help!

I would wait if you can, they've said they will introduce the first ARM laptop before the year's out and it will probably be a 13 incher.

i'd wait as well, unless you have specific needs for Intel

Go for used, every time. The depreciation is insane on these things. At least with recent generations the RAM is on the motherboard and the chance of a non Apple SSD is very low, so you won’t run into the scenario you’re in now. That said, the SSDs can be third party upgraded up until a few years ago.