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Made you look.

No, this is not the severed head of a techno-bauhaus muppet, and this object and I do not belong to a secret, bare-knuckle boxing ‘fight club’. You are looking at me holding a battery that was once in my Mac Book Pro 17″.

One afternoon, after a particularly scorching Parallels session, I was moving my MBP to another room when I noticed that the aluminum battery cover was sort of, uh, visibily warped. More accurately, I noticed that the MBP’s underside was hot enough to fry a proverbial egg, but there’s really nothing new about that. Then I noticed the bulge.

Deciding it was time to ‘cool it down’ (or was it cool it now, per New Edition?), I ejected the battery, checked it out, thought ‘huh, that’s funny’ and put it on my desk for later inpection/action.

Some time later, I came back to my office to find the battery as you see it in this picture. I guess as it cooled from ~150 deg f to room temp, it expanded or contracted (or whatever things do when they cool off), and the battery pack sort of popped like a kernel of popcorn. Or something.

Well, better this than a spray of molten battery material to the face. Not that I’m saying that has ever happened with this sort of Apple battery, because that would be slander.

This is probably similar (or identical) to the 15″ MacBook Pro battery bulge/warp issue that Apple has an automated recall page for. AppleCare replaced it with zero argument (thanks Jason).

The moral of the story is: Don’t… um, well. I’m not sure what to tell you not to do. Perhaps: as with breast and testicular cancer, pro-active scanning of odd lumps or bulges in your Apple battery is perhaps the best method to head off any long-term difficulties or mutilating explosions. An ounce of prevention…