Ask Lemmy

30 year IT Professional here, who has run laptop depots.

Absolutely mandatory in an enterprise environment.

The number of dead batteries I have seen throughout the years is too many to count. Having to dispatch a replacement laptop, instead of just a battery is really irritating. Sure the affected laptop comes back and my techs can take care of it and put it back into inventory. That comes with the cost of needing to keep extra full laptops in the rotation. Not to mention having to cross ship two laptops. Instead of just having much cheaper batteries that I can send off to the user, then they pop it in and drop off the old battery at a local store that accepts used batteries.

More than this, I'd like if they have a law where all laptops need to charge through USB-C

(With an exception if your laptop needs more than 240W, the limit of USB-C)

I dont need them to be clip on and clip off but if I unscrew the back I should be able to easily replace the battery.

For laptops the battery replacements are easy to do usually. Apple is the only one who's devoted their whole brand to making it impossible to repair full sized devices. I've replaced about 15 random dell laptop lithium batteries in the last year.

I own one of these. I have zero issues replacing the cells 😃

Should be mandatory.

I don’t care as long as they’re not glued in.

Outside of the ultra thin devices they’re typically just held in with a couple screws. And most laptops aren’t glued shut either so it’s easy to replace them.

Lenovo briefly had a stint offering laptops with a built in battery and an external one so you could hot swap them. But outside of that I think they’re pointless and I’d much rather one internal bigger battery.

I mostly have old Thinkpads with snap-in batteries. They're nice. They do need replacement now and then. The one I have with an internal battery was still not too bad. Take out some screws, open computer, swap battery. No adhesives or soldering or anything like that. Conclusion: avoid Apple stuff and you'll be ok

I don't care that much, if one is strictly speaking talking about removability, given current battery lifetimes.

But I do care a lot about size.

Batteries that are removable and extend out of the case are amenable to being replaced with larger batteries. Vendors don't do that these days, since batteries are generally internal.

Also, US flight restrictions permit for more than 100Wh batteries in a device if they're removed -- the Toughbook can do this. So one can run 200Wh with a laptop with two 100Wh removable battery slots. Can't do that with fixed batteries.

So there are some very real potential capacity benefits to removable batteries.

What about being able to swap the hard drive and/or RAM in a laptop.

I have an old Lenovo one which I love as it had access slots to remove and swap them easily, not have them under metal strips screwed into plastic casing and the circuit board. Despite buying it in 2013, it goes like a charm with 8gb of RAM and a 2tb hdd.

But there's an old Dell I have that is locked down tighter than a Maga press-pool, so it's time is coming to an end since even Linux ideally wants more than 2gb of RAM these days.

Both of my last two laptops have internal batteries. Both of them are also fairly easy to replace. The Thinkpad is the easiest (as is usually the case), but my old Zenbook is almost as easy (just requires a very tiny torx screwdriver which I already had from my cell phone repair days).

As long as they're not glued in and otherwise a huge PITA to replace (like phones), I'm okay with internal batteries.

I reckon electric cars should have replaceable batteries as well.

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?

Not worth it for a laptop. Making a laptop battery removable means wrapping the whole cell package with enough material that it can't be casually punctured on every single side. Further, you now also have to build into the laptop the mechanical means to hold that removable battery, and lose space to the release mechanism. It adds a measurably large amount of weight and size to the laptop.

Way back in the days when you would have to own multiple batteries (with a swap in between) to have a long enough computing session to be useful it made sense. Today it doesn't make sense. I recently replace the battery on my primary personal laptop, now 7 years old. I had to open the laptop one time to remove the old one and put in the replacement. I'm okay doing that every 7 years and don't need to sacrifice the size, weight, and battery capacity to have a removable one instead.

Luckily some people actually do! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-yzFxpQLgs

They aren't a hassle. Few Philips screws on the bottom, 2-3 holding the battery in and a small ribbon cable in most cases. The painful ones are the consumer garbage peddled in stores like Best buy and Costco. Business laptops are incredibly easy to repair/replace parts. Get a secondhand dell latitude and see for yourself. CPU and fans come off with a couple screws, daughter boards usually very accessible. World of difference, and with the batter not just a clip to remove, it shaves about a quarter inch of thickness from excess plastic and additional mechanisms.

In my 20+ years of using laptops I never ever had issues with laptop batteries that resulted in me wanting to (or having to) change them. It was always other parts that failed first.

I hate buying a new one everyday. So expensive