MacBook swollen battery

Jan 27, 2010 · Follow on Twitter and Mastodon

I have previously written about my numerous problems with my new, white MacBook, which I purchased in August 2007. As icing on the case the battery has now swollen.

My MacBook is absolutely amazing, and I am so happy to have left the PC world for Apple. However, I am very disappointed with the MacBook’s build quality. For instance:

  • The fan roared like crazy and required service.
  • The audio port shone with a red light and acted as an optical device was connected.
  • The audio port optical mode turned of all sounds from the internal speakers.
  • The plastic chassi cracked(!).
  • The color wheel of death appeared every now and then, freezing the computer.
  • The computer stopped waking up from sleep.
  • The computer stopped recognizing my hard drive and displayed a ? when booting up.

Fortunately, I documented all these problems while they were happening and wrote a long issue report. The support person I sent the computer to doubted that I would get the errors accepted as a reclamation, but as I handed him the report, he said that it improved my chances drastically.

And so it did. I got the computed repaired, and after that, it has worked like a charm. That is, until the battery decided to swell. I didn’t notice it at first, but after a small bump, it quickly became worse.

Before I knew it, the battery was very swollen. Apple did NOT accept this complaint, so I had to buy a new battery. I luckily found a reseller that sold unofficial batteries for half the price, but the damage to the computer was already done.

I will write about this in the next entry…the green/orange color toggle problem.