FYI - Concerns about iFixit Batteries

Sourcing high quality aftermarket Mac laptop batteries has always been a challenge, as many of the manufacturers in China are trying to produce a very inexpensive product catering to emerging markets (South Asia). We looked into several alternative suppliers in the past year, and found their products to be unsatisfactory — and failing to meet the specifications of our current supply chain (which at least provides batteries that match OEM capacity specifications). We have audited our supplier’s testing procedures and found them to be reasonably thorough.

That being said, we have identified particular models that have higher failure rates, and we are regularly providing feedback to our supplier so they can work to reduce those issues. We have been pressing them on quality issues more aggressively in recent months, and I am going to be making another visit to their facility in about a month. To be fully transparent, the models we’ve been seeing the highest rate of issues are:

MacBook Pro 15” Unibody (Early 2011-Mid 2012)

MacBook Pro 17” Unibody (Early 2009-Mid 2010)

MacBook Pro 17” Unibody (Early 2011-Mid 2012)

MacBook Pro 13” Retina (Late 2012-Early 2013)

For a period late last year we were also seeing concerning return rates on the MacBook Air 11” (Mid 2011-Early 2015) battery, but those issues appear to have been resolved — with no significant issues on our most recent 7 shipments.

I have a high degree of confidence in all of our other Mac laptop batteries, and our four bestsellers – the MacBook Pro 13” Unibody (Mid 2009-Mid 2012), MacBook Air 13” (Late 2010-2017), MacBook Pro 15” Retina (Mid 2012-Early 2013), and MacBook Pro 15” Retina (Late 2013-Mid 2014) – all have very low customer return rates.

I am unable to provide a detailed analysis of OWC’s replacement battery offerings. Anecdotally, I have had one of their MacBook Pro 13” Unibody (Mid 2009-Mid 2012) replacement batteries in my work laptop for the past 7-8 months, and I have been unimpressed by the battery life. I only get about an hour and a half off a full charge, while comparable laptops in the office with our own replacement batteries last much longer. But again, this is just one model, and quality does seem to vary considerably across different model batteries. We are familiar with the company that assembles OWC’s batteries, as we considered using them as an alternative supplier for our own. However, we had some reservations about the quality of samples we received from them and decided not to pursue them further.

TL;DR - We have a high level of confidence in the quality of the majority of our Mac laptop battery product line. There is a limited number of models that we have experienced higher rates of customer returns than we consider acceptable (above 5%), and we have been working with our supplier to address the cause of those problems. We obviously stand behind our product in offering the one year warranty. The volume of Mac laptop batteries we have sold has increased markedly over the past year, and the higher frequency of forum posts related to batteries seems to be reflecting that — rather than an increase in the rate of issues with our batteries .

Hope this helps! :)