My MacBook Pro Battery Ruptured!

I’ve been working day and night over the holiday weekend on my iphone app. I suppose normally I would just close my laptop lid in between sessions but this weekend I was trying to stay motivated to keep working. So my laptop was left on most all weekend. Two important points: One is that I’ve been using it in this configuration (pictured) with the extra keyboard and mouse.  Second is that I have a cat. And while I hate love her, she is a very annoying cat. Every few minutes she’ll try to either sit on my lap or on the keyboard and even as I write this I have to keep telling her to NOT WALK ACROSS MY KEYBOARD. I think she likes the heat it gives off and many times I’ve come home to find that she’s deleted stuff, moved files around, etc.  (UPDATED 12/2/08)

Earlier in the weekend she did just that and erased an objective-c method or two. That time it was easily fixed with a few undo’s, but to prevent her from totally screwing up my code-in-progress I did this:

The real keyboard is sitting on the macbook’s trackpad with the lid slightly closed. Thus using the monitor to protect both keyboards from the cat’s editing.  However this also left the monitor on and prevented it from going to sleep. At first I only did it when I walked away for a few moments, but it quickly became a habit. Like I said, my MacBook Pro was left fully on, sitting on this desk, for at least 48 hours.

A few minutes ago while working I noticed that the MacBook wasn’t sitting level.  Like something was wedged underneath it.  Lifting it up revealed that the battery wasn’t in right. The battery had exploded. Not in the 4th of July sense, but it got so hot that it expanded and broke open, warping the battery case. Of course it also smells bad. Check out these photos:

I don’t think it was the keyboard inside of lid configuration that made the MacBook Pro too hot. I think it was just being on for 48 hours straight. But either way there shouldn’t be a scenario where using the laptop in a fairly normal way causes what was a serious fire hazard. Luckily, I think the expansion and warpage actually caused the battery to disconnect from it’s power source. Otherwise who knows. I was gone for several hours this morning and feel lucky that this battery just ruptured and didn’t catch fire.

I’m gonna try to get to the apple store this afternoon.  I’ll update later after seeing how the apple genius’ handle this.

UPDATE 12/2/08

This evening I stopped at the Apple Store at Town Square Las Vegas. Even though the Genius Bar was booked I was able to speak to a store manager who replaced the battery with a brand new one. They were out of replacement parts and so he had to give me a new one out of a box. This is clearly a known issue as he called it an “Expanded” battery.