The Year of the Geek

If you own a Mac laptop you know that the adapter has a little light on it; green for charged, amber for charging or bad. The light on my adapter (which is not the original adapter, but a replacement from Apple themselves) stopped working properly a long time ago: the light would not come on in most cases unless I jiggled the cable for a bit and then never touched or moved it again. If I moved, it went out. I thought this was a contact issue on the plug itself, I’ve seen many people have the same issue before. So I thought nothing of it. Not to mention, my battery was fine, 255 cycles after 2 years and I still got 2+ hours on a good day.

Last week this changed when I noticed my laptop spontaneously turning off at random points during use. Even when fully charged it would cut off, and not allow me to start unless I plugged it in, even though there was a 70% charge on the battery. Fed up I decided t was time to bring it in for service, again. The night before I was going to bring it in brought on a whole new issue. After placing my laptop on the table I noticed it was not sitting evenly. I look underneath and notice the battery is sticking out…maybe it’s not plugged in all the way? I pop the battery off and find it to be bulging outward!

MacBook Pro battery with a bulge...

This is a very dangerous thing to happen to a battery. So now I know there is an issue and my battery is not “just old.” I brought it to Tekserve the very next morning and after 2 hours of waiting and checking they determine that not only is the battery bad, the adapter is as well.

Why am I writing about my battery? I’m mainly writing to talk about how Tekserve tested and made sure there really was an issue. The woman who helped me took my laptop to the table behind her and popped in a USB stick with some sort of battery/adapter testing program from Apple. The test came up as both “Good” at first. She retested, both came as “bad”. She retested, one came ad good, one as bad, etc. She did this at least 4 times, and then tested with a known good battery and adapter, and came to the conclusion that “AFTER NUMEROUS TESTS I have deemed that both are broken and need to be replaced.” She found this out after TESTING what I told her to test.

So a few things to keep in mind here:
1. If your battery starts to bulge, please get it replaced and stop using it ASAP. It’s dangerous.
2. It might not be just the battery, get the adapter checked.
3. Tekserve tests their shit…as everyone should.
4. A new battery and adapter make me happy.

Now I have a 1 cycle battery for free:-)

Brand new battery info.