Battery Replacement: Apple vs Dell

// August 30th, 2006 // Technology Bits

In the last few weeks Apple and Dell have both been placed in the inconvenient position of having to recall a pile of bad Sony batteries. Side note: how come Sony laptops haven’t had a similar recall, is their market share too small to justify it, or did they save good batteries for themselves? Back on topic, I have been in the unique position of personally being involved in both recalls. My Dell D810 has one of the bad batteries, I filled out the online form to get it replaced on Tuesday 8/15/06. There is also an Apple Mac Book Pro in my house which was affected, the online form to replace this one was filled out on Sunday 8/27/06.

The Apple replacement arrived yesterday, 8/29/06. This was a turn around of less than 3 days, especially impressive when considering one of those day, the request day, was a Sunday.

My Dell, however, is still patiently waiting for it’s replacement. Today is 16 days past when it was requested, so far that makes it more than 5x slower and counting…

Unrelated but furthering potential arguments, my Dell cost >$2300 and the Mac Book Pro cost <$2300. Both had 3 year warranties with educational discounts. Which computer, warranty, and commitment do you think was worth more?

Update:
Dell support contacted me related to this issue, after hours, because they had read this post. In response they have shipped me a new battery as opposed to the refurbs they are sending others. The support representative said my slow replacement was likely do to our institution being handled as a group. I appreciated this follow up and was able to understand their perspective.

As a quick note to Digg’rs and other people leaving comments, this is just a comparison of my experience with getting batteries replaced by two different companies in a short time period. Clearly experience for others may vary. Those who want to condemn me for speaking positively about Apple and negatively about Dell, realize I have both Macs and PCs represented in my life. I appreciate what both do for me.

apple, battery, battery recall, battery replacement, dell, laptop, mac, recall, sony

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51 Responses to “Battery Replacement: Apple vs Dell”

Anj says:

September 30, 2008 at 9:52 am

I see that most people do not seem to understand that the the nature of the beast (Li-Ion Technology) itself is flawed! They do have their shortcomings, mainly heating up and its weight itself. I recently got a 9 cell battery from notebookbattery.com for my Dell D620 laptop here: http://www.notebookbattery.com/Dell-Latitude-D620/c23_193/index.html

and it did add some more weight to it compared to the 6 cell battery I had. Cannot complain, as I got more battery life out of it, but like Dell, Apple, etc., they too use li-ion cells in their generic replacements. So till another technology comes through, just learn to live with it folks.

No Sheep!