My MacBook’s battery has been assaulted

So there I was, all excited to install the two 1GB sticks of RAM I’d just bought. I shut down my MacBook, unplugged it, and popped out the battery. And promptly did a doubletake at what appeared to be a series of small singe marks on the other side of the battery.

I’m not sure exactly what happened here, to tell the truth. My power brick has been somewhat weird in the last couple of months: sometimes it won’t make a firm connection, and it hasn’t fixed the problem I used to have with the old yo-yo adapters where I occasionally get sparks when plugging it in (I started using the included extension cable, which has pretty much fixed the former issue, and drastically reduced the latter).

But the marks on the battery seem to line up with certain features on the inside of the battery compartment (hit the jump to see the connections I’ve drawn). My working theory at the moment is that when Apple fixed my MacBook last year for the random shutdown problem, they put something back together, well, not quite right. I’d noticed since then that my keyboard seemed sort of curved—that is, the keys on the far right and far left seemed to stick up higher than the keys in the middle.

So perhaps even this slight misalignment caused the battery to come into contact with parts of the compartment that it wouldn’t ordinarily—parts which obviously get kind of toasty.

This is all supposition, but I don’t think it’s likely to be a widespread problem. I’ll be heading to the Apple Store tomorrow to get the Genius diagnosis. Meanwhile, I’ve reverted back to my trusty Blue & White desktop, just in case my MacBook decides it wants to, say, explode. Stay tuned.