While all this talk about Smartphone battery replacement is happening, nobody seems to ever talk about the laptop batteries these days also being a hassle to replace.
While all this talk about Smartphone battery replacement is happening, nobody seems to ever talk about the laptop batteries these days also being a hassle to replace.
An idea whose time as come … again.
We’re at a unique moment where a decent computer from 10 years ago is still pretty usable provided you don’t have Windows 11 or a need to run a particularly recent version of Mac OS. There’s no real reason to keep replacing laptops these day outside of physical damage.
Not to mention the advantages of having the ability to pull a battery from a computer that won’t respond even to the power button (a problem I had to deal with for a Windows firmware update I told Windows not to apply … this year or late last year). I ended up connecting USB accessories to run the battery out faster so I could get my computer back. Technically, I could have gotten the battery disconnected but the bottom panel was messed up and I couldn’t sensibly get it off without voiding a warranty.
Bring back swappable batteries. And how about RAM and storage that’s not soldered on while we’re at it?
HP does an okay job of this. If you remove power and hold the power button down for 30s, you get a hard reset.