> replacing the battery means replacing half the laptop, app..cough..le

These kind of comments are surprisingly common on HN and annoy me slightly.

Yes, most phones and laptops do not have user replaceable batteries anymore. It's a pity. That does not mean a dead battery is a justification to throw away fine equipment.

Any phone repair shop or computer shop can replace batteries. They usually have all the equipment and spare parts, even more so for popular Apple devices. It usually takes half an hour and costs way less than replacing the whole device.

I always recommend that to friends and family because most of them are not even aware this is possible. They usually thank me later saying how painless and affordable it was to give a second life to their devices.

I did not say it's justification for throwing away old equipment, but at some point, the high cost of replacing a battery (high because it requires a 'repair') offers less value than buying a newer model. This is especially the case with, say, Apple laptops where the official battery replacement means the entire top-case and keyboard has to be replaced.

A good way to keep these devices in use would be with an external battery, and one built into the power adapter would be very convenient. Just an hour of power would be enough to move around to meetings without multiple reboots.

>replacing the battery means replacing half the laptop

And that's assuming you can even find a decent replacement battery.

I just did a battery replacement on a 2017 MBP. While there were a lot of screws needing to be removed and lots of lifting/prying to get to cables, half the laptop did not need to be replaced.

Now, if you said the keyboard...

The keyboard and the whole topcase if you do it the official Apple way.

I can see how someone would call that half the laptop.

> where the internal battery has begun to fail

Assuming the default failure mode of the battery is degraded capacity. Over the years I've had an alarming number of lithium-polymer batteries puff out in consumer devices ranging from my Dell XPS 13 (9343 model, battery was replaced three times) to the Moto Z Play phone (dislocated the screen, replaced twice by Asurion, third time they claimed it was a warranty issue and played support tennis with Verizon) to an iPod Touch (also popped the screen out).