Following up with parts 3, 2, and 1 - I finally received my replacement TruePower battery from FastMac.  I can honestly say I probably wouldn’t have this battery by now if it hadn’t been for me E-mailing the utter crap out FastMac.  Let me recap just in case you missed something, or if you’d rather not read all 3 parts.  Back in June of 2009 I had an issue with a MacBook Pro battery from FastMac. The battery lost all of it’s cycles, dropped it’s charge, and then came back to life. When the battery came back to life, several cells died, they became swollen and dead. This resulted in an unbelievable amount of power loss.  I contacted FastMac to get a replacement since I was under warranty.  This was in the last two weeks of June.  They told me there would be a back-order until the beginning of July 2009, roughly three weeks, FastMac informed me. This was fine with me. I was out of town, so two weeks went by. I shipped the package out, they received the package one week after I had shipped it.  This was the cap of the three week waiting period.  So I expected a quick turn around and to have my battery replaced shortly.

Things did not go as planned. I was informed that the batteries were on back-order yet again. The date got pushed back to the middle of July, so I waited.  Middle of July rolls around, nothing, no word, no updates, nothing at all. I inquired about the battery. I was told I shouldn’t expect the battery until the end of July.  To make a long story short, FastMac kept pushing the date back further and further.  I was told the same thing in August. “Batteries will be here at the middle of August”, “The batteries will be here at the end of August”, and then I was told I should expect the batteries within the first week of September 2009.  Guess what.  The date was pushed back, yet again.  This time they left the middle of September out of their charade, they skipped right to the end of September.

By this time, I have had enough.  I sent a very nasty E-mail on September 9th 2009.  I demanded a refund and an answer as to why my E-mails went unanswered and as to why I have been waiting since June / July for a replacement battery.  I received no answer, so a week later I re-sent the E-mail. I sent it a couple times just to make sure FastMac received it.

On September 11th I received a reply to my E-Mail.  Here is the reply.

I have 10 batteries set aside for ‘emergency use’.  Let’s deem you an emergency!

Wow! That answered a lot!  – Within minutes I received another E-mail. This time from Fedex stating that a package had been shipped. That package was shipped by FastMac. I should expect the package on September 15th.   September 15th rolled around, I received the package.  The packaged contained a brand new sealed 2009 FastMac TruePower battery for a 15” MacBook Pro! – I was undoubtedly surprised and excited at the same time.

The thorn in my side was finally out! – I put the battery in the MacBook Pro. The battery had a full charge. I calibrated the battery and all has been good so far. I have noticed I don’t seem to get as much life as I did with the previous FastMac TruePower batteries, but it’s better than no battery at all.  I get about 3 hours and 45 minutes with the brightness at 4 bars, when the brightness is down to 1 bar I get around 4 hours and 25 minutes.  This is pretty good to me.  You can easily get through a movie or two, especially if you don’t have anything else running in the background.

How long with this battery last? I have no clue. I am not holding my breath. No one can truly say how long this battery will last and how long it will be before I have to send this one in for a replacement. I am crossing my fingers in hopes that I won’t have to send this one back.

Moral of the story: Bug the shit out of them until you get service you deserve.  You have all the right in the world to complain about poor service and shoddy replacement programs. Sorry for the profanity, but damn. FastMac has lost one customer. I will not be buying any more of their products.  I would have bailed the 2nd time that I had to replace my batter, but I didn’t feel that I should have to spend more money on an OEM Apple battery when FastMac claims their batteries are better. You know?

I have nothing more to say really.  I have 6 cycles on the battery right now and it seems to be holding a good charge, so we’ll see how things go.  I hope that all of you out there get your replacements. You deserve them!

Also, remember. Sometimes you really do get what you paid for. Next time, you better just pony up the cash and buy an official battery from the manufacturer of your computer.  Don’t cut corners because you’ll just end up with an avalanche of sawdust.

^ here’s an ugly image for a ugly situation.

Following up with part 2 of the battery fiasco.  I have not had any luck contacting FastMac by e-mail.  There have not been any updates about the whereabouts of the replacement battery  since my last post. FastMac hasn’t contacted me since writing part 2.  I called FastMac today to see what’s going on.  They actually answered!  FastMac told me they are expecting a shipment in the first week(s) of September.  The fellow that I spoke with said it could be as early as this week. I, for one, highly doubt it.  We’ll give them the benifit of the doubt though. I know this post really is not anything more than a status update.  I thought I would let you all know the status of the battery as of today.

Technically there’s not really a pt.1 to this post. For the sake of discussion we’ll refer to the review I posted on December 20th 2008 as part 1. I am having yet another issue with the FastMac batteries. In my review I praised FastMac for being very punctual and generally on the ball with everything.

After writing the review, some folks left comments expressing some concern about FastMac’s service. I defended FastMac at first. Sometimes one or two bad transactions happen. Now that I have done more research, my views have changed. The stories from the comments are starting to hit pretty close to home.

If you recall back in December 2008 when I wrote the review I just had a MacBook Pro battery replaced by FastMac because the one I had purchased in October of 2008 mysteriously died after only having it for two weeks. I thought at first the issue was due to me neglecting the battery while it sat on my desk with a 36% charge.  Now I think that was not the case at all. I firmly believe it is due to the batteries being cheaply made.  The reason I have changed my views are because I am currently in the process of replacing yet another FastMac Truepower battery.

After using the newly replaced battery for about 3 and a 1/2 months, things started to go sour again. Capacity started dwindling. I was no longer getting 4-5 hours of  battery life. My running time was around 2.5 hours, if I got lucky.  This was very concerning.  Such a large drop in capacity in such a short time shouldn’t happen with brand new batteries like this! I became a little concerned that maybe I would have to replace the battery soon.   Boy was I right!  Fast forward to June 2009. Two months after I started losing capacity.  The battery completely died on me one night. The battery would not respond to power or even pushing the charge indicator. There seemed to be no hope in bringing the thing back to life. The battery was completely dead for at least two straight days.  I let the battery sit in my MacBook Pro for a day while being plugged in.  The battery finally took charge after about 16 + hours in the MacBook Pro.

I was thoroughly excited! I have a working battery again, I thought. It’s ALIVE!!! ~ I was excited. Then things took yet another turn for the worst. The battery started swelling shortly after coming back to life. One of the cells died. Battery life dropped even more, by this time I was getting 45 – 20 minutes on the battery.  Great, I thought. Another FastMac battery gave it up to the ghost.

Bloated FastMac Battery.

Just like our commenter Neopium stated :

The battery health started to decline very rapidly (I lost 10% per week during a month). I’m now at 48% of battery life. The aluminum cover starts to unstick and the battery seems to inflate a little.

Everything Neopium said in his / her comment is exactly what has happened to my battery.  Great, another dead battery.  What’s the next step? Contact FastMac of course. Since these batteries have a 1 year warranty, I figured it’d be a breeze like last time. Wrong I was, very wrong indeed.  I shot off an e-mail to FastMac on June 20th 09.  I received a reply three days later. Not very fast, especially considering the last time I had an issue I received a response almost immediately.

FastMac told me their batteries were out of stock because they are moving their manufacturing facility from China to the US, they said it would take about three weeks before they recieved a shipment and could ship out my replacement.  I was fine with this information, I was out of town at the time anyways. I told them I would have the battery shipped out in a week.  On July 9th 2009, I shipped the defunct battery to FastMac. I notified them the battery had been shipped.  I didn’t receive any confirmation. After two weeks I contacted FastMac to see if they had received the battery and to see if there were and updates to the repair. I finally received a reply on the 25th of July.  FastMac told me I wouldn’t get my replacement until the end of August! This is of course after they told me 3 weeks wait time, 4 weeks beforehand.

I tried to ask why they  were delayed  and why it was going to be such a long wait. They never responded. I also asked them if I could just get a refund, a used battery, back stock battery, or something, anything at all…. Guess what? You guessed it, no response.  I explained that this was a real inconvenience and that I was told 4.5 weeks prior that I would have to wait for 3 weeks only.  I completely understand delays due to moving facilities, that’s understandable. To be honest though,  I am not buying it. Given their recent track record for screwing their customers over. I firmly believe that this is not an isolated case. The comments on my review speak for themselves, a quick google turns up many more issues with customer support, delays, back orders, etc. Their batteries are always out of stock. Now they won’t reply to e-mails during regular business hours. What gives?  This will be my fourth Truepower battery from FastMac. I am not a happy camper.  The last three have all died, lost cells, and life, shortly after receiving them. Did I mention the battery that I just sent only had 25 cycles on it?

I doubt I will be buying any more products from FastMac.  The batteries are flawed, they live a short life and they do not seem to be as structurally sound as Apples OEM battery. I have had better experience with stock batteries.  I don’t really know why I originally opted to get a battery from FastMac. I guess because they were $29.00 cheaper.  In the long run though, I guess you get what you pay for.

Aside from crap-tastic batteries. These t-shirts do look tempting.

FastMac, if you are reading this. I wear a L or XL – depending on brand of course.

My new rating for this experience is:

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

I will update as things go from here on out. Comment about your experience if you’d like.

inside fabric:

outside fabric:

After picking the fabrics I wanted, I needed to come up with a plan for what I wanted my case to look like. Should it have pockets? Should it have a strap? How should it be kept shut? What should I use to cushion the fabric? How thick should it be? Where would I put the strap(s) if I decided to have any? Should I put something inside to make the bag stiff or should it be floppy? If I use buttons to keep it shut, what buttons should I use? How many? If i use a zipper to keep the bag shut, what kind of zipper? After much deliberation, I decided to keep it simple.

The MacBook is a mere 1 inch thick, so i decided not to go with a strap, fearing that it might rip out. I decided on buttons rather than a zipper to keep the bag shut worrying that the zipper might scratch the edge of my baby. I chose 2 large white buttons from my grandmother’s old button collection to keep the case shut. I found some fusible interfacing that was pretty stiff so I decided to use that along with a few (4) layers of batting.

I decided to make the bag as simple as possible, so I searched through patterns and found one that I liked the idea of and adjusted it to suit my job. The pattern requires 3 pieces for each layer of the bag (inside, outside, and filling). The three pieces are (1)a large piece (13.75″x25.25″) that will become the front, back, and top flap of the back, (2) a narrow strip (1.75″x9.75″)for one side of the bag, and (3) another narrow strip (1.75″x9.75″) for the other side of the bag. I had to cut 2 pieces of fabric for the large strip from the inside fabric because I messed up the first cut and made it impossible to cut a big enough piece from the remaining fabric.

first cut (nonono!!! stop!! wait!!):

After I cut out all the pieces of fabric that I’d be using for the case, I started sewing the inside of the bag (if you’re sewing anything, a good rule to go by is to cut all your pieces before you start sewing. same rule for cooking, assemble all your ingredients before beginning. You don’t want to find out half way through that you don’t have enough flour for your cake…I just thought about who I’m talking to, moving on….) Here are what the inside pieces look like without being sewn together:

After I got them all sewn up, I ironed on the fusible interfacing (the stiff one). After it was attached, the bag looked like this:

I stitched the batting together so it wouldn’t slide around inside the case too much. Next I sewed the side strips of the outside fabric to the large piece of outside fabric. Once this was done, I put the right sides of the inside and outside fabric together and started sewing, making sure the batting was getting picked up along the way. After pulling and stitching and tearing out seams and re-sewing seams, I finally got everything together. It’s very snug (I think it’s a little too snug, ghostshadow thinks it’s perfect), and very soft. Besides the snugness I’m happy with the way it turned out. Here is the final product:

closed from the front:

closed from the side:

finished back:

finished open:

If you have any questions, if something doesn’t make sense (I wouldn’t be surprised), ask away. I did not have to buy any of the materials I used to make this case so it was kind of free. It didn’t require any special skills (besides the 3 month long training course on how to operate the sewing machine), I used plain old scissors, rotary cutter, ruler, cutting mat, straight pins, and didn’t use any fancy stitching. The whole process from nothing to a bag took a few hours, a lot more time consuming than buying a bag, but it’s a good feeling knowing that you made something rather than bought it. That’s all I have for now, thanks for reading this far into the post.

- Bookgopher