MacBook Pro 15" & 17" bloated battery failures past and present

You might recall all of the MacBook Pro battery buzz from a few years ago. Our pictures of “bloated” and “swollen” batteries were ALL over the Internet. We still get tons of web hits on the original post about the problem. Here’s some of the coverage our pictures from 2006 generated:
http://www.macobserver.com/
http://arstechnica.com/
http://www.macintouch.com/
On Friday one of our techs brought in his bloated MacBook Pro 17” battery in for us to look at. He noticed his MacBook Pro 17″ was not sitting correctly on the table, so he checked it and sure enough his battery was rapidly expanding due to failure.
See pictures of his battery below:


Keep an eye open for this kind of stuff, as it could turn into a serious issue. One symptom to watch for is a battery that is overly hot. If it’s too hot for you hold your hand on, then it might have an issue. If you are storing your laptop or you are going out of town (and not taking your laptop with you), it’s not a bad idea to just remove your battery from the unit and also unplug your PowerBook, iBook, or MacBook from the wall.
In the original case that you can read about here, our client Bill Sammon, now Vice President of News for Fox News Channel noticed his MacBook Pro trackpad clicker button had stopped working. It took our Macintosh Certified Technicians about one second to see that his battery had “swelled” up and was pressing up on the underside of of the trackpad assembly.