While all this talk about Smartphone battery replacement is happening, nobody seems to ever talk about the laptop batteries these days also being a hassle to replace.
30 year IT Professional here, who has run laptop depots.
Absolutely mandatory in an enterprise environment.
The number of dead batteries I have seen throughout the years is too many to count. Having to dispatch a replacement laptop, instead of just a battery is really irritating. Sure the affected laptop comes back and my techs can take care of it and put it back into inventory. That comes with the cost of needing to keep extra full laptops in the rotation. Not to mention having to cross ship two laptops. Instead of just having much cheaper batteries that I can send off to the user, then they pop it in and drop off the old battery at a local store that accepts used batteries.
I like how your first hand experience is “It’s a necessity, duh!” and execs area still racking their brain going “idk, what profit does this leave us”.
More than this, I’d like if they have a law where all laptops need to charge through USB-C
(With an exception if your laptop needs more than 240W, the limit of USB-C)
I don’t disagree with you, but there are loads of technical issues for laptops in the range between 100W and 240W where it just isn’t feasible to do it this way.
240W is 48V and creates massive amounts of heat, which is difficult to deal with in a small laptop.
You also run into problems with cable length if you want to connect to a dock and have that power with high bandwidth data transfer. Longer cables makes the bandwidth fall of a cliff, and the ones that follow the specs are insanely expensive.So I’d say yeah, it would be nice, but we’re not there with the tech yet for more power hungry laptops, sadly.
I dont need them to be clip on and clip off but if I unscrew the back I should be able to easily replace the battery.
And the RAM and SSD.
And please ffs let us actually unscrew the back, not just take out a couple of pointless screws and then wrestle with those awful plastic clips that always snap off and never quite go back into place properly afterwards
And then the touchpad never works quite right ever again.
or certain keys on the keyboard
My last laptop was 5 screws and the back just slid off… now my laptop is like 1cm thinner but has 12 screws and 20 clips.
On a totally unrelated note, I haven’t cleaned out my laptop recently and in relying on the fans going to max to clear any hair in them by just slicing it up. Hopefully.
Ooohhh - now I want a laptop with razor blades on its fan. Maybe also get the fan to occasionally run in reverse to blow the crud back out the intake.
For laptops the battery replacements are easy to do usually. Apple is the only one who’s devoted their whole brand to making it impossible to repair full sized devices. I’ve replaced about 15 random dell laptop lithium batteries in the last year.
Most consumer crap can be hard, but far from impossible.
I recently visited a friend and noticed her laptop was turning into a spicy pillow. I opened it up, showed her which replacement battery to order and call me when it’s here to install it.
Next week she called me, she had successfully installed the replacement battery herself. “Ah I saw where it went, I just tried”
Typically it’s not hard, you just need to know where to look and not be afraid “ooh it’s tech”.
be sure to ask if they have swiped on the locking thing too
Exactly. I always ask if they’re comfortable using a screwdriver, if so, they can do it.
Dells latitudes are more repairable than the average, but I’ve had pleasant experiences with some gaming acers, HP omen, and XPS laptops. Mostly deal with Dell latitude and precisions though
Apple will happy replace your device battery for around $90 to $200. It’s not like it’s impossible to do.
Including themselves as mandatory in the service isn’t exactly a win for right to repair. Dell batteries cost us about 65 dollars or less and they ship them directly to us with no certification requirements. They also offer extended warranties up to 3 years on batteries and 5 years on components.
I own one of these. I have zero issues replacing the cells 😃
Laptop looks like it’s 3 inches thick
Nah. It’s not that thick! It’s only 1.6" thick 😃
I like 90’s style chunky and solid. Weight and bulk aren’t really a concern for me. Solid, open-source and repairable are my priorities. That’s what works for me.
I recently gave up on ARM because I couldn’t figure out how to build Alpine Linux for a nanoPi R6S despite spending hours with ChatGPT, talking to someone in India, etc. It’s kind of depressing because I love my Raspberry Pi and a ton of other ARM devices, but I guess you need to be a total neck beard to get it working.
Maybe ChatGPT isn’t a good source?
Well I asked in Linux communities all around the internet and got no help there, so maybe ChatGPT was more helpful than all the randos with an attitude problem.
I got more help from the meme subreddits than from anywhere else.
My advice, make a meme about it or find a relevant meme with your issue.
It’s so easy, just post false information, someone will correct it.
This. It is an old, tried and true method. The smartass that normally say RTFM or other snarky stuff will correct this in a second
You could try armbian, they recently added official support for R6S.
Taking out ~10 screws to remove the bottom panel and access the battery? That’s par for most laptops.
They look like they’re soldered in there.
They are not. They’re in cell holders.
Should be mandatory.
I don’t care as long as they’re not glued in.
Outside of the ultra thin devices they’re typically just held in with a couple screws. And most laptops aren’t glued shut either so it’s easy to replace them.
Lenovo briefly had a stint offering laptops with a built in battery and an external one so you could hot swap them. But outside of that I think they’re pointless and I’d much rather one internal bigger battery.
I did a swap on a surface pro 4 recently. The battery part alone was easily 30 minutes.
I mostly have old Thinkpads with snap-in batteries. They’re nice. They do need replacement now and then. The one I have with an internal battery was still not too bad. Take out some screws, open computer, swap battery. No adhesives or soldering or anything like that. Conclusion: avoid Apple stuff and you’ll be ok
What about being able to swap the hard drive and/or RAM in a laptop.
I have an old Lenovo one which I love as it had access slots to remove and swap them easily, not have them under metal strips screwed into plastic casing and the circuit board. Despite buying it in 2013, it goes like a charm with 8gb of RAM and a 2tb hdd.
But there’s an old Dell I have that is locked down tighter than a Maga press-pool, so it’s time is coming to an end since even Linux ideally wants more than 2gb of RAM these days.
I have a used Lenovo T470s running Linux. Runs like a dream. I recently took the bottom off, the access is just wonderful.
I don’t care that much, if one is strictly speaking talking about removability, given current battery lifetimes.
But I do care a lot about size.
Batteries that are removable and extend out of the case are amenable to being replaced with larger batteries. Vendors don’t do that these days, since batteries are generally internal.
Also, US flight restrictions permit for more than 100Wh batteries in a device if they’re removed – the Toughbook can do this. So one can run 200Wh with a laptop with two 100Wh removable battery slots. Can’t do that with fixed batteries.
So there are some very real potential capacity benefits to removable batteries.
Both of my last two laptops have internal batteries. Both of them are also fairly easy to replace. The Thinkpad is the easiest (as is usually the case), but my old Zenbook is almost as easy (just requires a very tiny torx screwdriver which I already had from my cell phone repair days).
As long as they’re not glued in and otherwise a huge PITA to replace (like phones), I’m okay with internal batteries.
An idea whose time as come … again.
We’re at a unique moment where a decent computer from 10 years ago is still pretty usable provided you don’t have Windows 11 or a need to run a particularly recent version of Mac OS. There’s no real reason to keep replacing laptops these day outside of physical damage.
Not to mention the advantages of having the ability to pull a battery from a computer that won’t respond even to the power button (a problem I had to deal with for a Windows firmware update I told Windows not to apply … this year or late last year). I ended up connecting USB accessories to run the battery out faster so I could get my computer back. Technically, I could have gotten the battery disconnected but the bottom panel was messed up and I couldn’t sensibly get it off without voiding a warranty.
Bring back swappable batteries. And how about RAM and storage that’s not soldered on while we’re at it?
HP does an okay job of this. If you remove power and hold the power button down for 30s, you get a hard reset.
I reckon electric cars should have replaceable batteries as well.
So some thief can just come take my battery in the middle of the night??? Brother I live in America. Not some first world country like you.
Not worth it for a laptop. Making a laptop battery removable means wrapping the whole cell package with enough material that it can’t be casually punctured on every single side. Further, you now also have to build into the laptop the mechanical means to hold that removable battery, and lose space to the release mechanism. It adds a measurably large amount of weight and size to the laptop.
Way back in the days when you would have to own multiple batteries (with a swap in between) to have a long enough computing session to be useful it made sense. Today it doesn’t make sense. I recently replace the battery on my primary personal laptop, now 7 years old. I had to open the laptop one time to remove the old one and put in the replacement. I’m okay doing that every 7 years and don’t need to sacrifice the size, weight, and battery capacity to have a removable one instead.
Luckily some people actually do! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-yzFxpQLgs
