Apple Refreshes MacBook Pro 17-inch, Decides You Shouldn’t Touch The Battery. Also, Apple Now To Appear At CES ’10

Posted by Daniel Shain in Apple Macbook Laptops

Apple’s larger 17″ MacBook Pro has finally been given the aluminum unibody finish its smaller cousins received three months ago. However, it’s also been given an update they never got – a new high tech battery that is not user-replaceable.

$179. That’s the cost of replacing your battery on the new 17″ MacBook Pro, we hear. Helpless to prevent it, in our heads we moan “ugh, Apple has found a way to get us again.” But we don’t give up hope. We keep reading, scouring the internet for a fellow blogger with enough dedication and love for Macs to present us with a nice thorough case for why this isn’t worse and more expensive, it’s simply Apple leading the way with new designs and improved technology. And before long, we’ve found one

Apple has been known to use Lithium-Polymer its new batteries, which is more pliable and space saving than the Lithium-Ion batteries which are still used in most laptops. In laptops like the MBA this means you can save a lot of space. In laptops as large as the 17″ MBP, this means you can install one heckuva battery, which is why the 17″ MBP battery is rated at a whopping 8 hours. Supposedly, the act of not including “latches and connectors” for swapping the battery left even more space for the battery itself.

Now we all know that laptop batteries wear out over time. But before you can cite this as a reason why swappable batteries are great, know that Apple has also developed a new charging technology, called “Adaptive Charging”, which charges laptops so much better than they expect the lifetime of their battery to be 1000 charges instead of 300. It’s estimated that an average user charges their battery 200 times a year, meaning an average user would need to replace their battery maybe once over the course of their laptop’s life, although heavy users would need to do so more often.

As far as looks go, the new 17″ MBP looks much like the new 15″ MBP, except a little bigger. Same sleek design, still super thin, this laptop now looks just as good as the other redesigned MBPs.

As an aside concerning Apple news, we have also heard that Apple, fresh off announcing the end of its participation in Macworld, will be joining the Microsoft folks at CES ’10 next year. Sources say Apple is mostly doing this because it wants to establish legitimacy, to show that it deserves to be displayed right next to Microsoft where it can properly and boldly show off its superiority. With the way trade shows are going these days, this might be just enough to save CES from cancellation for at least a few more years.