Carsten Frauenheim and Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit:

Apple’s official replacement process requires swapping the entire top case, keyboard and all, just to replace this single consumable component. And it has for a long time. That’s a massive and unreasonable job, requiring complete disassembly and reassembly of the entire device. We’re talking screws, shields, logic board, display, Touch ID, trackpad, everything. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t get transferred are the keyboard and speakers. The keyboard is more or less permanently affixed to this top aluminum, and the speakers are glued in — which, I guess, according to Apple means that the repair is out of the scope of DIY (we disagree).

At least one does not need to send in their laptop for a mere battery replacement. Still, I do not understand why this — the most predictable repair — is so difficult and expensive.

I hate to be that guy, but the battery for a mid-2007 15-inch MacBook Pro used to cost around $150 (about $220 inflation-adjusted) and could be swapped with two fingers. The official DIY solution for replacing the one in my M1 MacBook Pro is over $700, though there is a $124 credit for returning the replaced part. The old battery was, of course, a little bit worse: 60 watt-hours compared to 70 watt-hours in the one I am writing this with. I do not even mind the built-in-ness of this battery. But it should not cost an extra $500 and require swapping the rest of the top case parts.

[…] But for now, this tedious and insanely expensive process is the only offering they make for changing out a dead battery. Is it just a byproduct of this nearly half-a-decade-old chassis design, something that won’t change until the next rethink? We don’t know.

“Nearly half-a-decade-old” is a strange way of writing “four years”, almost like it is attempting to emphasize the age of this design. Four years old does not seem particularly ancient to me. I thought iFixit’s whole vibe was motivating people to avoid the consumerist churn encouraged by rapid redesigns.

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Even if you are not interested in the iPad or Apple product news generally, I recommend making time for Federico Viticci’s review, at MacStories, of the new iPad Pro. Apple claims 3.5× performance gains with A.I. models, so Viticci attempted to verify that number. Unfortunately, he ran into some problems.

Viticci (emphasis his):

This is the paradox of the M5. Theoretically speaking, the new Neural Accelerator architecture should lead to notable gains in token generation and prefill time that may be appreciated on macOS by developers and AI enthusiasts thanks to MLX (more on this below). However, all these improvements amount to very little on iPadOS today because there is no serious app ecosystem for local AI development and tinkering on iPad. That ecosystem absolutely exists on the Mac. On the iPad, we’re left with a handful of non-MLX apps from the App Store, no Terminal, and the untapped potential of the M5.

In case it’s not clear, I’m coming at this from a perspective of disappointment, not anger. […]

Viticci’s frustration with the state of A.I. models on the iPad Pro is palpable. Ideally and hopefully, it is a future-friendly system, but that is not usually the promise of Apple’s products. It usually likes to tell a complete story with the potential for sequels. To get even a glimpse of what that story looks like, Viticci had to go to great lengths, as documented in his review.

In the case of this iPad Pro, it is marketing leaps-and-bounds boosts in A.I. performance — though those claims appear to be optimistic — while still playing catch-up on last year’s Apple intelligence announcements, and offering little news for a user who wants to explore A.I. models directly on their iPad. It feels like a classic iPad story: incredible hardware, restricted by Apple’s software decisions.

Update: I missed a followup post from Viticci in which he points to a review from Max Weinbach of Creative Strategies. Weinbach found the M5 MacBook Pro does, indeed, post A.I. performance gains closer to Apple’s claims.

As an aside, I think it is curious for Apple to be supplying review units to Creative Strategies. It is nominally a research and analysis firm, not a media outlet. While there are concerns about the impartiality of reviewers granted access to prerelease devices, it feels to me like an entirely different thing for a broad-ranging research organization for reasons I cannot quite identify.

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John Gruber, responding to my exploration of the MacBook Pro A.C. adapter non-issue:

The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply re-using a good one they already own, normal users have no idea what makes a “good” power adapter. I suspect there are going to be a lot of Europeans who buy a new M5 MacBook Pro and wind up charging it with inexpensive low-watt power adapters meant for things like phones, and wind up with a shitty, slow charging experience.

Maybe. I think it is fair to be concerned about this being another thing people have to think about when buying a laptop. But, in my experience, less technically adept people still believe they need specific cables and chargers, even when they do not.

When I was in college, a friend forgot to bring the extension cable for their MacBook charger. There was an unused printer in the studio, though, so I was able to use the power cable from that because it is an interchangeable standard plug. I see this kind of thing all the time among friends, family members, and colleagues. It makes sense in a world frequently populated by proprietary adapters.

Maybe some people will end up with underpowered USB-C chargers. I bet a lot of people will just go to the Apple Store and buy the one recommended by staff, though.

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Are you outraged? Have you not heard? Apple updated its entry-level MacBook Pro with a new M5 chip, and across Europe, it does not ship with an A.C. adapter in the box as standard any more. It still comes with a USB-C to MagSafe cable, and you can add an adapter at checkout, but those meddling E.U. regulators have forced Apple to do something stupid and customer-unfriendly again. Right?

William Gallagher, of AppleInsider, gets it wrong:

Don’t blame Apple this time — if you’re in the European Union or the UK, your new M5 14-inch MacBook Pro or iPad Pro may cost you $70 extra because Apple isn’t allowed to bundle a charger.

First of all, the dollar is not the currency in any of these countries. Second, the charger in European countries is €65, which is more like $76 right now. Third, Apple is allowed to bundle an A.C. adapter, it just needs to offer an option to not include it. Fourth, and most important, is that the new MacBook Pro is less expensive in nearly every region in which the A.C. adapter is now a configure-to-order option — even after adding the adapter.

In Ireland, the MacBook Pro used to start at €1,949; it now starts at €1,849; in France, it was €1,899, and it is now €1,799. As mentioned, the adapter is €65, making these new Macs €35 less with a comparable configuration. The same is true in each Euro-currency country I checked: Germany, Italy, and Spain all received a €100 price cut if you do not want an A.C. adapter, and a €35 price cut if you do.

It is not just countries that use the Euro receiving cuts. In Norway, the new MacBook Pro starts at 2,000 krone less than the one it replaces, and a charger is 849 krone. In Hungary, it is 50,000 forint less, with a charger costing about 30,000 forint. There are some exceptions, too. In Switzerland, the new models are 50 francs less, but a charger is 59 francs. And in the U.K., there is no price adjustment, even though the charger is a configure-to-order option there, too.

Countries with a charger in the box, on the other hand, see no such price adjustment, at least for the ones I have checked. The new M5 model starts at the same price as the M4 it replaces in Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the United States. (For the sake of brevity and because not all of these pages have been recently crawled by the Internet Archive, I have not included links to each comparison. I welcome checking my work, however, and would appreciate an email if I missed an interesting price change.)

Maybe Apple was already planning a €100 price cut for these new models. The M4 was €100 less expensive than the M3 it replaced, for example, so it is plausible. That is something we simply cannot know. What we do know for certain is that these new MacBook Pros might not come with an A.C. adapter, but even if someone adds one at checkout, it still costs less in most places with this option.

Gallagher:

It doesn’t appear that Apple has cut prices of the MacBook Pro or iPad Pro to match, either. That can’t be proven, though, because at least with the UK, Apple generally does currency conversion just by swapping symbols.

It can be proven if you bother to put in thirty minutes’ work.

Joe Rossignol, of MacRumors, also gets it a little wrong:

According to the European Union law database, Apple could have let customers in Europe decide whether they wanted to have a charger included in the box or not, but the company has ultimately decided to not include one whatsoever: […]

A customer can, in fact, choose to add an A.C. adapter when they order their Mac.

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