I Swapped My 2018 MacBook Pro for a 2010 Model

Reading Time: 5 minutes.

I know what you’re thinking, I’ve gone crazy. “She just started working from home, how did this happen so fast?” Well, dear reader, I’m not crazy. Yesterday I got my space set up for working from home. I moved my work MacBook Pro into the place of my personal MacBook Pro, and I discovered that mine felt off. Upon putting it on a table and watching it wobble, I knew exactly what was wrong.

My late-2018 MacBook Pro, which is under two years old, had a bloated battery.

This shouldn’t happen. Batteries should be able to last far more than two years before they start to bloat! That should take a lifetime! My MacBook never had any damage, it didn’t even see many cycles, it spends most of its time on a charger. What gives?

So here’s what it looks like when you’re still somewhat shiny and new MacBook Pro bites the dust.

Noticing the Symptoms

 

I actually noticed a problem about two weeks ago. I decided to do some writing from my couch so I took my MacBook Pro off my desk. As I closed the lid, I noticed a gap on the right side. I had assumed that, because I use a keyboard cover to keep dust out of the fragile thing, I may have warped the screen shape slightly at some point. I kicked myself for bot being 100% certain that there was clearance.

I should have taken a close look at the keyboard. I would have noticed that the right side was higher than the left side, bowed up around the ‘J’ and ‘K’ keys. If I had been using my computer on my coffee table, I would have noticed that it couldn’t sit flat. Instead, I had it on my lap.

Then it was time to work from home. Once I had my spot cleaned up, I moved my home MacBook over to that space so I could clean up a small shelf on my desk. I was making room for a notebook and other things I’d need for work.

That’s when I noticed my personal MacBook was rocking back and forth. I took some flat objects to prove it, I moved the MacBook to other uncluttered flat surfaces in my apartment (shockingly few of those). Sure enough, it was the MacBook. The battery was swelling so badly that it was bending the aluminum out of its path. I had let this go on too long by not recognizing the signs early on. Now it was a potential fire hazard.

The Trade-In Process and Time Expectations

Immediately I contacted Apple. I had to manually enter that my battery was swollen and request a call or chat, it wasn’t a pre-made option. I suppose that would be bad for optics, if people knew young MacBooks could suffer this fate. I took the call and the service rep quickly helped me schedule an appointment with Apple in just a few hours. There weren’t many questions, it was treated with the urgency it deserves.

I had a busy day. I was working from home due to concerns over the coronavirus, so I packed up my stuff and headed out to the nearest Apple Store. At one point I had a good hill ahead of me, and me, being on my longboard, decided to bomb the hill. I got a chuckle when I realized I was “bombing” a hill with something in my backpack that, if I fell on it, could turn into an actual bomb.

I skated faster.

I got to the Apple Store, cleaned my hands with hand sanitizer as the employee there did the same, and got my MacBook looked at. She immediately noticed the bulge and started booking my appointment. After running diagnostics to make sure the hardware wasn’t damaged, she took my MacBook away. It was shut down, encrypted, and secure, and I wouldn’t lose any data. I’d have my MacBook back in 20 minutes.

… Not!

If Apple still knew how to design consumer-friendly devices, that might have been the case. But this was a Jony Ive special! Thinner, with more parts glued together than screwed together. They’d have to replace not only my battery, but the entire top case of my computer! Keyboard, trackpad, metal casing, all of it!

Now, to be fair, as this had been bulged out by the battery, they likely would have to replace this solely based on the fact that the aluminum was bent. They might have to replace the bottom of the frame as well.

However, I couldn’t help but remember when this happened to my 2006 MacBook over a decade ago. I ordered a new battery, turned the little lock on the bottom with a coin, pulled out the old one, and swapped in the new one. Then I shipped the defective battery back to Apple. Simple! Even on older MacBook Pro models, you’d just have to unscrew the bottom and lift the battery out of its space. Today it’s glued in, and I was stuck waiting.

The Apple employee told me it could be 3-5 days, but they’d try to finish it up by the weekend. They stated that, even if I wanted to swap it in for the new 2019 16-inch model, I should do this to improve my trade-in value. I was stuck with this thing. There was one upside. The new keyboard would be the 2019 model. Not the new (old) scissor switches, unfortunately, but an improved version of the butterfly switch that should last a little longer. It wasn’t a great comfort.

Back to Old Reliable

I’m typing this on what was my graduation present from college, far too many years ago. This is my 2010 MacBook Pro. And yes, I really am typing on it. Because this was before Apple abandoned their surprisingly springy scissor switch keyboards for the awful Butterfly switch keyboards in 2016. Sure, my trackpad is smaller and uses a mechanical press to register clicks, but this keyboard is, in comparison to Apple’s butterfly switches, heavenly. It’s no mechanical keyboard, but it feels far better than the stiff, awkward mess Apple’s peddling today.

I had removed the SSD a while back to use as an external USB-C drive. In fact, my monitor and other accessories are all USB-C now. I’m a bit on my own with this machine. It has an older, smaller 120GB SSD that I installed for just this purpose: using my MacBook Pro long after I abandoned it.

Not too Shabby!

It has its quirks. It’s slower, especially with processing images for articles. That took forever. It doesn’t always wake up from sleep. It has the latest security updates, but I can’t upgrade it past macOS High Sierra (2 versions behind now). That means no dark mode, which is a pain. The screen has visible pixels and a bluish tint. It only has 8GB of RAM, the most I could put in this model. But it’s still surprisingly capable. I keep my tasks on it to a minimum, I don’t store files on it (and even use iCloud for the desktop). I’m using about half of the storage space on the drive to keep the basics running, and it’s surprisingly not half bad. The SSD really helps things move along.

I could live with this, for mild internet use, email, chatting, and writing. Would I want to go back to programming on this? No, Android Studio would use all 8GB of RAM just opening. But can I continue to write for Leaf and Core on this without adding my personal stuff to my work laptop? You bet.

And I get to do it from this half-decent keyboard, the last of its kind. Perhaps the 16-inch MacBook Pro has a keyboard as good as this one. I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t about to go try it out during this outbreak. Ask me again in a few months.