MacBookPro 17″ Battery Swell Pic 1MacBookPro 17″ Battery Swell Pic 2

Well the rumours are true and Apple has been lying for months. I’ve just had my Apple MacBookPro 17″ battery swell whilst I was using it yesterday. The battery doubled in size and expanded out the bottom of my machine. The thing now looks like some Eero Saarinen building.

Apple Hong Kong is a joke. There is no service line and no way to tell which stores are actually any good for getting service.

Now I don’t think the problem is entirely with the battery. I say this because I’ve been getting unsual problems with my Mac that have been getting worse for the past 3 months.

Firstly I password protected it. So when booting and waking from sleep that means I need to enter a password (and hopefully would delay any dumb thieves from getting to my personal info). This has some rather funny results from time to time. Sometimes it just wont ever come back from sleep. It’s just lost for good. Doesn’t matter if it’s hard powered or running off the battery. Next I often get this visually garbled screen which is what you’d expect if you made your desktop into a sliding puzzle. There’s artifacts from various UI components everywhere. Sometimes that’s doom sometimes that’s rescueable.

Now next is the power supply has started hissing. Not all the time but from the top left corner (near the hinge) of the base of the machine you can quite audibly hear it hissing.

I’ve often closed the lid (or even pressed the power key, selected sleep, watched the screen go black and then closed the lid) then I’ll put it in my bag and go pull it out an hour later and the thing is that hot I can’t even touch it. So it stopped sleeping at some point with lid closed? This is backed up by a time that after manually putting it to sleep, at some random moment it started playing music, that I had running in iTunes prior to sleeping, with the lid closed.

Next on a flight back from the UK I was working away at 60% batt when zonk it just died. Everything gone. Over the next week it repeated this every time I unplugged it.

Then two weeks later the battery blew up. This basically involved it expanding out the bottom of my machine and whilst it appeared to continue operating normally I wasn’t taking any risks so the thing’s dismantled and mothballed until Apple service it.

The thing’s still in warranty so Apple whatcha gonna do?