Battery Replacement Cost for 17” MacBook Pro
An Apple spokesperson responded today to an inquiry from the folks at Gizmodo about the procedure and cost for replacing the internal battery in the new 17” MacBook Pro.
Courtesy of Apple
In case you haven’t heard about it yet, the new 17” MacBook Pro, which was announced yesterday at Macworld, will have an internal battery that is not user accessible or replaceable. The new battery design has outstanding usage specifications: eight hours on a charge when using the NVIDIA 9400 graphics card, and seven hours when using the NVIDIA 9600 graphics card. Apple has said that the expected lifetime of the battery is five years, based on 1000 battery recharge cycles. (Apple expects a user to recharge the MacBook Pro every 1.825 days; 1.825 x 1000 = 1,825 days of battery life, or five years.)
Any Apple Store or authorized Apple reseller may replace the battery. The replacement cost is $179, including the labor to perform the battery swap and the cost of disposing of the old battery in an environmentally friendly manner.
Comments
Batteries for rent at £20 per annum. Think I will give this one a miss.
Apple are getting very greedy.
Hi,
I’m not concerned about the per annum cost of the replacement battery. If the new MacBook Pro battery does indeed meet its expected lifetime of 5 years, then the per annum cost of the battery is pretty much the same as current MacBooks and MacBook Pros, so there is no rental premium for the new battery.
My concern is that you can’t have a spare battery ready to go, because you can’t replace the battery yourself. Also, Apple implies that this battery is new technology; I don’t think it is. More on that in future blogs, but if it is indeed new technology, we will have to wait a while before we know whether the battery will meet its expected lifetime in real-world use.
I’d feel much better if Apple added a 5-year or 1000-cycle warranty on the battery as part of AppleCare for the new MacBook Pro.
Tom