[mcphage]

> Amazes me they don't just sell it like that everywhere because it sounds a lot like a product improvement...

I'm not so sure. The first laptop I bought, a Titanium Powerbook, had replaceable batteries. And even better than that: you could hot-swap them while the laptop was running on battery power, and the laptop wouldn't even shut off. It felt leagues ahead of even modern replaceable battery functionality, and honestly? After owning that laptop for years, I felt like I just wasted my money with that additional battery.

Part of it, I'm sure, was that I didn't have an external charger to charge the battery not currently in the laptop. But on the whole, it just didn't feel like it was actually worthwhile, and when Apple stopped shipping replaceable batteries, I've never missed it.

(Hot swapping the batteries really was awesome, though)

[InsideOutSanta]

I had an Apple laptop that had two bays, one on the left and one on the right. Usually, you'd have the battery on the left and the CD drive on the right. But for lots of people, battery life was more important than a CD drive on a laptop, so you could double your battery life by putting in a battery on both sides.

Tech used to be fricken cool :-)

[toyg]

Compulsory Apple-defending post is compulsory.

Non-replaceable batteries are worse for consumers and worse for the environment. The fact that you "do not miss" a better world, does not mean it is not better.

[ssl-3]

I have an old ThinkPad as my only laptop. It came to me used, with an aftermarket battery.

That battery was great for a couple of years before it started to get wonky, so I replaced it with a different aftermarket battery.

This process took zero tools. It took less time to swap in a new battery than it did for me to write this comment. Anyone can do it; it is not an arduous procedure.

What was the added environmental cost here? Some "single-use" plastics that lasted for years?

[endemic]

> Non-replaceable batteries

Most batteries are replaceable. The difference is the level of effort involved.

[bluescrn]

Replacing a Switch 1 battery really annoyed me. No problem with tiny screws and fiddly disassembly.

Big problem with the truly excessive amount and strength of adhesive holding the old one in place, and having a real struggle to remove it (even after trying with IPA and dental floss)

[mcphage]

> The fact that you "do not miss" a better world, does not mean it is not better.

In the abstract, yeah, it's better. But the extra battery cost me a lot of money, and I did not feel it was money well spent.

[wqaatwt]

Easily swappable batteries do have significant downsides, you either need to compromise on capacity or form factor.

Of course that doesn’t mean they should be hard to replace with some tools and effort.

To be fair back in those days laptops only lasted on battery power for a few hours at most (also old batteries had a very short lifetime compared to modern ones) so being able to swap it was an actually useful feature.

[NDlurker]

Phones used to work like that too. I think all my feature phones and first Android phone worked if it was plugged in with the battery removed.

[mcphage]

The thing about the TI powerbook was, it didn't have to be plugged in to hot swap the battery. You could do it when running on battery power. (It had a tiny internal battery, that could run it for like 20-30 seconds, so long as the screen was closed).

It did also run when plugged in with the battery removed, which is good 'cause the battery eventually failed. So this way I can still run it.

[NDlurker]

Oh! Cool!