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Thread: YIKES !! MacBook exploding battery syndrome !!

  1. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by Marco View Post
    I suspect some cheap China-sourced PSUs to be the root cause of this. If that's what Apple are using, and charging £150 for, it's not on. You can't take chances with people's safety. Mike, glad your daughter was ok!

    Thankfully I've had no such issues with my Mac, and it's left powered up for many hours every day, but I'll certainly watch out for anything untoward.

    Marco.
    Appears to be only the 13” without Touch Bar that’s affected.
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  2. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ali Tait View Post
    Appears to be only the 13” without Touch Bar that’s affected.
    Nope - if you do a bit of digging it appears it can affect any laptop from Apple (and probably others) from at least the last ten years and right up to the present.
    Its an inherent risk to all laptops fitted with Lithium Polymer or Lithium Ion batteries.

    Apparently you should get a built in warning that the battery is 'due for replacement' but its can also occur quite suddenly and without warning.
    Actual occurrences are also a lot more common than I expected but have not been really openly acknowledged as a threat by Apple until very recently.
    Even then, they made it appear to be a limited issue .....

  3. #13
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    It’s not just Apple. Remember the burning Dell laptops? Then there’s the Boeing Dreamliner battery’s, Samsung and Nokia phones. That hover board thing etc etc. Anything that has a Lithium battery has a potential to explode or burn, it’s the nature of them...oh Tesla as well, try not to crash. Talk to RC enthusiasts who use fast charging techniques for their batteries and the issues there of.

    I have a feeling MacBooks may have a longer use life than a similar windows laptop in that they are in single ownership for longer as they are expensive to start with and continue to be usable for a long time. My 2011 MBA is still going strong (it’s on its second battery) unlike my Dell latitude which became unusable after 3 years.
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  4. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by Marco View Post
    I suspect some cheap China-sourced PSUs to be the root cause of this. If that's what Apple are using, and charging £150 for, it's not on.
    Most (if not all) of what Apple sell is 'made in China' - and has been for a long, long time.

  5. #15
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    But let's not forget that the one under discussion here is 6 years old. Mines' 9 years old, been on 24-7 stills holds 93% charge
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  6. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by mikmas View Post
    Most (if not all) of what Apple sell is 'made in China' - and has been for a long, long time.
    Yeah, that's fine as long as they're not cutting corners unsafely on the bit that supplies mains power to the unit, just as often happens with Chinese valve amps.

    Marco.
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  7. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by sq225917 View Post
    But let's not forget that the one under discussion here is 6 years old. Mines' 9 years old, been on 24-7 stills holds 93% charge
    True - which is why I have always been happy to pay over the odds in the first place.
    Longevity is one of the key reasons I have been using Macs since 1993.
    My first Mac iBook G3 lasted about 12 years, albeit with a replacement (original) battery; only stopped using it when it became redundant tech.
    Safety and reliability have also been other deciding factors and the main driver when we bought the MPB for my daughter (despite the high price).

    What I never expected was for it to die in such a spectacular fashion

    I had heard rumours of swelling batteries in MacBooks (I had a similar experience with a 'refurbed' iPhone off ebay) so always assumed it affected ones that had also been 'refurbished' with dodgy after-market parts and never paid it much heed.
    More fool me it seems ... yet another nail in the coffin of the trust in Apple that I (mistakenly) had.

  8. #18
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    Just to add closure to this sorry tale on a relatively high note.

    I assembled a range of suitable small screw drivers today and sent them off to daughter and also emailed links to good 'how to' pages so she could remove the hard drive before some enterprising soul broke the back gate lock and legged it with the conspicuous looking laptop in the back garden.

    As luck would have it, her boyfriend was visiting from London and between them, and with the sole aid of a small phillips screwdriver that came (literally) from a christmas cracker, they managed to get the bottom plate off and remove the hard drive.

    Unfortunately they couldn't remove the battery and save the rest of the MacBook because Apple (in their infinite wisdom) have secured it with tri-point headed screws ... presumably to stop consumers replacing batteries themselves and instead be tied to Apple's ludicrous replacement charges .....GRRRR !!

  9. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ian7633 View Post
    Absolutely disgraceful!!. You would think a company such as Apple would design top notch gear, especially with the prices they charge. .
    Why would they want to do that?

    They have people queuing down the street to buy overpriced substandard gear, why waste money making it last longer?
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  10. #20
    montesquieu Guest

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    Apple laptops in general have in the past lasted hugely longer in usable condition (ie fast enough for hard working professional use) than even the highest-spec PC laptops. I've seen the wife go through a succession of high end Sonys and Lenovos with touch screens and the like, while my last two Macbooks (13in Macbook Pro from mid 2009, and a 2011 15in Macbook Pro, just go on and on forever. Both have had replacement batteries and no issues other than occasionally losing rubber pads or screws from the back. (They do need tightened up now and again). The 2012 Macbook should be a very good machine as it was made before the brand hit the skids.

    Sadly, there are clear signs that Apple started to go down the pan even before Jobs died - the whole thing with dongles where they keep changing/removing connection options, building phones where the camera sticks out in a stupid way (early lenses were flush), and generally doing stupid things like the touch ribbon. They have lost control of their supply chain (as well as their design integrity) in a never-ending quest to increase their margins (hence the doubling of the price of the most expensive iPhone since only 2015), and these quality control issues such as described above. I would be absolutely furious too.

    I'm curious though - if this is a 2012 laptop then it's likely to have had at least one battery replacement - was it bought new or a few years back as a refurb from the Apple store? There are a lot of fake 'Apple' batteries around so just buying a battery off ebay and sticking it in is not the best idea. With genuine batteries I really don't think they would need replacement annually.

    It's a shame as Apple has pretty much always had THE state of the art laptop to have (the original Luggable from 1989 excepted which was a total turkey) ... I've owned Macs since 1985, the year after the Mac came out, and never been without at least one ever since. I even worked for them for back in the 90s. I've owned pretty much all of the iconic desktop and laptop models (such as the SE30, IIfx, the original Apple Powerbook, the early iMac, the G4 desktop) though I didn't get into the iPhone till the 4S, being stuck with a corporate Blackberry till then. Their reputation for quality used to be absolutely deserved. Not any longer though.

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