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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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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Jeff Johnson:

Yesterday I took the M1 MacBook Pro to my local Apple-authorized service provider that I’ve been going to for many years, who performed all of the work on my Intel MacBook Pro, including the battery replacements and a Staingate screen replacement. This is a third-party shop, not an Apple Store. To my utter shock, they told me that they couldn’t replace the battery in-house, because starting with the Apple silicon transition, Apple now requires that the MacBook Pro be mailed in to Apple for battery replacement! What. The. Hell.

The battery in my 14-inch MacBook Pro seems to be doing okay, with 89% capacity remaining after nearly two years of use. But I hope to use it for as long as I did my MacBook Air — about ten years — and I swapped its battery twice. This spooked me. So I called my local third-party repair place and asked them about replacing the battery. They told me they could change it in the store with same-day turnaround for $350, about the same as what Apple charges, using official parts. It is unclear to me if a Apple could replace the battery in-store or would need to send it out, but every Mac service I have had from my local Apple Store has required me to leave my computer with them for several days.

The situation likely varies by geography. Apple’s Self Service Repair program is not available in Canada, which means a battery swap has to be done either by a technician, or using unofficial parts. If you are concerned about this, I recommend contacting your local shops and seeing what their policies are like.

In a recent interview with Marques Brownlee, John Ternus, Apple’s head of hardware engineering, compared ease of repair and long-term durability:

On an iPhone, on any phone, a battery is something […] that’s gonna need to be replaced, right? Batteries wear out. But as we’ve been making iPhones for a long time, in the early days, one of the most common types of failures was water ingress, right? Where you drop it in a pool, or you spill your drink on it, and the unit fails. And so we’ve been making strides over all those years to get better and better and better in terms of minimizing those failures.

This is a fair argument. While Apple has not — to my knowledge — acknowledged any improvements to liquid resistance on MacBook Pros, I spilled half a glass of water across mine in November, and it suffered no damage whatsoever. Ternus’ point is that Apple’s solution for preventing liquid damage to all components, including the battery, compromised the ease of repairing an iPhone, but the company saw it as a reasonable trade-off.

But it is also a bit of a red herring for two reasons. The first is that Apple actually made recent iPhone models more repairable without reducing water or dust resistance, indicating this compromise is not exactly as simple as Ternus implies. It is possible to have easier repairs and better durability.

The second reason is because batteries eventually need replacing on all devices. They are a consumable good with a finite — though not always predictable — lifespan, most often shorter than the actual lifetime usability of the product. The only reason I do not use my AirPods any more is because the battery in each bud lasts less than twenty minutes; everything else is functional. If there is any repair which should be straightforward and doable without replacing unrelated components or the entire device, it is the battery.

See Also: The comments on Michael Tsai’s post.

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