This is exactly why I converted my notebook to a wind-up system. Plus, I like the danger of having all those tightly coiled springs sitting on my lap.

is AAPL okay?

@jetexas: See now I went with a wind turbine but your way makes much more sense.

Well, we'll just have to replace them with super nano batteries that get 500 runtime hours per charge. Let's do this thing.

@TheCyberBob: Unless you eat a lot of soy. Then the turbine in you lap, while still dangerous, may prove even more efficient

Bullshit, just like oil is $116/barrel because of energy demand from developing China.

@sqeakytoy of the apocalypse: Man, I hate htis Lappy... in *your* lap

Worse? I needed to buy a replacement Sony Vaio battery this weekend and the prices ranged from $200-250 for a laptop that cost me $499.

Didn't this type of thing happen to CRTs back when the city of Kobe got hit by an earthquake?
Doesn't it strike you odd that so many brands of PC use the same source of supply?

Asus, no!
I foresee this delaying the next-gen Eee. Bad news bears.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I always wonder when events like this occur whether it really has anything to do with an 'accident', or whether there were some folks that decided their product could use a price increase.

In any case, right now it seems like most things are going up in price. Why not batteries, too?

@Monty: I second you on that. Seems AWFULLY convenient that a price increase would occur now when the price on everything is going up.

@twoeightnine: $200-250? i find that very hard to believe.

seeing as i have read multiple times that Apple is an ultimate rip-off machine when charging $129 for a battery there is simply no way that Sony could be charging twice that.

if they were... the comments would always be full of people talking about how Sony rips you off based on their brandname or style alone. the word "proprietary" would probably be used too for no reason... even though ALL laptop batteries are proprietary.

That's the correct price. Sony.com sells it for $199. MicroCenter wanted $249. That wasn't even close to the most expensive Sony battery.
[www.sonystyle.com]

I got one off of ebay for $45.

They also want $300 plus to fix my DC jack. Anyone want to buy what is soon going to be an expensive paperweight?

there is a battery factory in my town that just announced they were adding 400 jobs. i wonder if it has anything to do with this?

The Many Different Laptop Batteries
Whenever you get a laptop one of the first things you want to know is how good is the laptop batteries that it has. Well unless you buy a real top-of-the-line laptop, the battery is probably not going to be that great. Of course worry not, because you can buy better laptop batteries online or at stores. I have never had a laptop that had a great battery to start with, but after buying some laptop batteries online I found that this is the way to go. This way you can spend as little or as much as you want on your laptop batteries. Some of the laptop batteries can cost a lot to almost nothing, but remember that you get what you pay for.
Buying laptop batteries is not something that has to be hard, however, it seems like if you buy them online you can get a better deal than you can buying them in stores. I think this is because you can compare prices to other stores online. It is hard to run around town comparing different laptop batteries. Not only are you not going to save very much money, but after all the driving around your savings will be eaten up buy gas prices. Of course, I think that is why I like to buy everything online, and this includes laptop batteries.