My 2007 MacBook Pro 17: the horror of the swollen battery

Searching Google for the phrase’ MacBook Pro 17 swollen battery’ brings up a list of horror story links, to blogs and Apple Support, as I discovered on Saturday night when I ran the search after noticing my laptop’s battery was apparently with child. I removed the battery and it continued to swell for over an hour before stopping.

I have an (expensive) extended warranty on this 2007 model not due to expire until late 2010 but was informed by the first of three Apple Support people I spoke to this morning that the battery isn’t covered—which is a joke. Fair enough, you’re not covered for a battery worn out just by being used normally over time—but one that is a safety risk to you and your home? The next stage, which I praise the gods I avoided, is said to be that the battery explodes—and that could have caused a fire. If in bed or out of the house, that could have been a disaster and risk to life.

I’d noticed that the trackpad was getting a little sluggish, and the CPU, but it was only when the MacBook Pro was rocking on the table that I thought, is there something stuck under there?–but no, I turned it over, saw the alarming way in which the metal casing was being pushed out, and removed the battery immediately. I bought a spare when I bought the laptop, never used until now despite its expense, and as soon as I put that one in and charged it fully I found the laptop incredibly fast and my trackpad behaving itself.

My old battery, before its pregnancy, was down to reporting three-and-a-half hours’ life on a full charge, still, on the surface, pretty good given I bought the machine in August 2007 but I had noticed it had recently begun running for far less time than was being reported by OSX on the laptop. What’s more the MacBook Pro had stopped warning me when the battery was about to run out of power, instead just switching off completely, sometimes within an hour of charging with the system still reporting over three hours of charge left.

I argued my point on the phone—that a faulty and dangerous, life-threatening battery is fundamentally different to one that’s just run out of juice—and the guy eventually agreed to replace the swollen battery, but I had to give my credit card because if I didn’t return the damaged battery within 14 days of getting the new one then I would be charged £88. Fair enough, I thought—but then my card, he said, was not authorising. Authorising what? I asked. You’re not trying to take the money, right? No, he said, we just check the card is valid. So I called my card company and they said Apple had tried to take £88 three times and, until the end of the month when my next payment goes off the balance, there was only £55 available credit on the card. The card company told me that normally under these circumstances the merchant simply checks the card is valid, or takes a token amount—kind of like PayPal taking a few pence when you first set up a card on there.

I called Apple back, spoke to a woman this time round, and she told me it’s 10 days, not 14, but that she “was right, and the first chap I spoke to was right, because it’s how a person views the time whether it’s from despatching the replacement or receiving the replacement at your end”–say what? She must have been confused because she confused the hell out of me. She said that the money is frozen on the card, inaccessible to me and to Apple unless the defective battery is not returned within that time frame. I was not happy.

There was clearly some piss-poor communication going on. I told the woman that the guy I first spoke to was either telling the truth, and doing the wrong thing—or telling something not true, and doing (from Apple’s perspective) the right thing. I was, however, regardless, unwilling to have £88 locked on my card for a fortnight, for the replacement of a battery that could have burned down our house and killed me and mine as we slept in our bed.

That’s no dramatic overstatement. It could have gone up in flames. A small unit inside a metal laptop exploding? Imagine—an explosion of metal and acids inside a small confined metal and glass unit. I’d rather not. As far as I’m concerned, we had a narrow escape.

Image via Wikipedia

Alarm bells seemed to ring at Apple then, following my increasingly robust arguments on the matter. The woman put me through to someone she said was in ‘second tier’ support and I spoke to a very nice chap who gave me his personal line to call if problems continued, apologised unequivocally several times for my experiences this morning up to that point, and who agreed to waive the credit card requirement, to despatch a new battery immediately, and didn’t even want the defective battery sent back (after all, Apple knows by now exactly why some of these batteries swell and explode). He did, impressively as far as I was concerned, ask me to make sure I disposed of the swollen battery at a recycling centre (I told him, in this house, we’re clued up on such things).

So. After over one and a half hours I got the result I wanted. A new battery. One can only presume there was a defective batch produced, otherwise every 2007 model still in use today could be at risk and I doubt that very much. Well. I hope not anyway. Still, Apple actually discontinued the exchange programme for such dangerous batteries some time ago. It should not have done that if, as it must have known, some of them were still in active use around the world. The company should have issued a product recall, but it didn’t do that: it waited for the complaints to come in, acted on them, and then chose to stop acting on them after an arbitrary period of time had elapsed.

Only it didn’t stop acting on them. Not if the customer, me in this instance, fought long and hard enough to get Apple to do the right thing. Apple should reinstate the exchange programme instead of handling matters on a case by case basis only if the customer complains enough. It should bite the bullet and order a product recall on those dangerous batteries.

Oh, and one more thing: the first support guy wanted me to stick the swollen battery back into the MacBook Pro and boot the machine up. I told him no way was I going to put that bloated horror back in a machine that cost me over three grand, and further risk damage to the computer hardware. As is, the final guy I spoke to recommended I take the laptop into an Apple Store as soon as I can after the end of this month to be assessed, because he said there is a slim chance that the components may have been compromised by the dangerous battery, but I suspect I was lucky and discovered the problem before any serious and lasting damage could be inflicted. Certainly, the trackpad is working just fine now and the machine is back to its high-powered, high-performance heyday.

I’ve also noticed that my spare battery now in use is cool to the touch. The old battery never was, it was always slightly warm and, on its last night of use, rather hot.

What pisses me off now, on top of all this, is the fact that I’ve lost an entire morning of novel-writing time. Apple did the right thing in the end but should have done it from the moment I made clear on the first call what the problem was. Does this experience make me want to rush back to the world of Windoze? Hell, no—been there, suffered the hardware failures, software incompatibilities, hours spent identifying driver clashes, viruses, spyware, Blue Screens of Death… I wasted more time with PCs on a daily basis than I ever have with Macs, even taking into account today’s support nightmare. Still, this has been a scary experience and I’m just glad it’s finally been resolved. And that I’m still alive to tell the tale.

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