Currently browsing Posts Tagged “laptops”

One of the more provocative news items to come out of Macworld this week was the retooling of the MacBook Pro 17” to no longer house a removable lithium ion battery. Instead, Apple engineers custom-designed a lithium-polymer cell battery and essentially built the battery in to the laptops under-carriage. According to Apple, doing so has eliminated the huge space requirements standard removable batteries normally require:

They built the battery right into the computer, eliminating the space-consuming mechanisms and housings that standard removable batteries require. The result is a battery that’s 40 percent bigger than the previous generation and offers up to 8 hours of wireless productivity on a single charge — all in a notebook that’s less than an inch thin, weighs just 6.6 pounds, 3 and remains the same price as the previous-generation model.

This is certain to be the major talking point for the foreseeable future – people will most definitely complain about how Apple is increasingly making it more difficult to self-service your gear. iPod batteries are not changeable and are perceived to have a short lifespan, so consumers will likely have similar feelings about this transformation.

But the real question is this: how many times have you ever used a second battery? How many people even own a second battery? I bet the answer is inconsequential, hence why we are where we are today.

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