The New MacBook Pro looks amazing. It’s smaller, faster, better, and cheaper. I practically had my mind made up to buy one, although I was dogged by an awful lot of hesitation.
But one thing irks me. Apple’s been criticized for a long time about built-in batteries. Batteries fail on the iPod and you have to send the whole thing in for service, at which point you might as well buy a new one. The battery on my work MacBook Pro failed (it held 400 mAh), but it was no big deal because we had a new spare so I just swapped them out. It’s right on the bottom: just slide a latch and it pops out.
But the new ones? In the interest of being sleek, they built the batteries inside the laptop. I think I’m going to use this as my excuse to not drop $1800 on a laptop: I’m not going to spend money on a machine that needs to be shipped to a depot if the battery fails. Maybe I’ll scoop up a used MacBook Pro on eBay as prices drop, and just be careful to get one that will take 4GB RAM as opposed to the 2GB on mine.
I agree on that point; not being able to swap out the battery if you need to is extremely annoying. However, note that by making the battery non-removable they’ve added 2 hours to its runtime (5 hours instead of 3).
In addition, whatever chemistry they’re using seems to last at least twice as long as your standard LiOn or LiPoly battery.
Not the notebook for me…but there are some gains here. 🙂