The Daily Bits

Today I was doing some work on my MacBook Pro as usual. The battery got down to 30% (was using wifi, bright screen, etc…) and just died out without warning. When I got home I looked up the problem and it appears to be a battery issue. I phoned Apple customer support, I’m still in the 1 year of hardware warranty but the 90 days of complementary AppleCare has ended long ago.

After waiting about 15 minutes in line for a support rep I lasted about 2 minutes on the phone. Basically I was presented with 3 options:

• Buy the AppleCare extension which I’m sure Apple wants me to do. This would cost about $300 and extend my support for another 2 years. It would enable them to do the “software troubleshooting” and fix any hardware issues that come up.
• The next choice was to spend $69 to spend some time with this representative and go through some troubleshooting on my system. I’m assuming this would include checking battery health, cycles, and any strange settings. Then if this was leading to a hardware problem I could have the machine sent away to be fixed. This is not an option. This is my main computer and can not be without it for an extended period of time.
• The final option was to simply take a URL and troubleshoot the problem myself. This is of course the route that I took as I don’t want to pay $69 just to find out it’s not something hardware related.

After poking around Apple’s support site, macrumors, and Google I am pretty sure that it is a battery problem. The problems described in Apple’s battery exchange program such as shutting off when the battery is still measured to have a charge in it. The options at this point are to either buy my own battery ($159) or keep pressing on Apple support to replace it seeing as it does exhibit those symptoms.

I will be keeping this updated as this issue develops.

S12088