LEDninja said:
Thank God Apple did not own the patents. Otherwise the only place to buy them would be The Apple Store - at triple today's prices!
I dont think so
You can indeed buy a cheaper PC, but not with the same stuff in it. Not everything Apple sells is 3 times the price of anything else. PC manufacturers sell cheap, stripped down models for less than you can buy a mac for. But there are no stripped down Mac models. Not their market. Once you buy a better machine from dell you're paying exactly the same. And for add on stuff like batteries their prices are almost identical to dell replacement batts. We can't say for certain how apple would have enforced a patent on this, but you can look at their previous behavior with hardware stuff, unless it's something that defines their products like the click wheel on the iPod they tend to license at very reasonable rates. I doubt it would have any effect on the price of other laptop batts at all.
Apple could not get them to work in the early days. They had to recall the 1st batch released and replaced the Li-ons with NiMH due to overheating during charging. Dell had been using Li-ons for a couple of years without problems at the time.
Thats not quite true. The laptop model you're referring to was the 5300 and the problem they had with the batteries was in 1995. The batteries never caught fire or overheated for any customers that had bought the book. The only place that there was ever a burning 5300 battery was in Apple's own testing labs. After narrowing it down to defective cells from their supplier (a problem that has periodically plagued apple and all other laptop manufacturers including repeatedly causing dell to recall batts as well) they recalled those potentially dangerous batts and replaced them immediately with NiMH batts. (good thing the charging circuitry in the powerbooks was smart enough to handle both kinds of batteries huh?) By the end of that year they were shipping again with LiIon batts. I dont know what Dell was shipping at the same time, but it wasn't a matter of Apple not being able to handle them, it was a single battery failure in their own lab, no user ever experienced it.
I still remember the infamous Mac Portable and the Lead Acid Batteries. It was actually heavier than the desktops. I remember lugging Mac Pluses and SEs home for the weekend instead of bowworing the portable.
I have a friend who still has one of those, it's hilarious
That was back in the day when you put a handle on it then it was portable! They weighed 15 pounds! But it did have 10 hour battery life. That was in like '88 or '89. Ah memories...
