Lenovo's hot-swappable batteries made my colleagues nostalgic — but today's USB-C solutions are better

Relegated to specialty laptops

ThinkPads weren't the only laptops with hot-swappable batteries, but they surely popularized the idea. Road warriors could keep their spreadsheets blazing by turning the laptop over, pulling two switches, popping out a battery, and plopping in a new one that would feel like part of the chassis. There were even bigger, extended batteries that jutted out to provide more longevity. A smaller battery inside the laptop would keep running while you performed the swap, so you didn't lose any work.

When Paul says he had three batteries, I know he's telling the truth because I sat next to him at trade shows where he fumbled in his bag for extended cells.

I, too, waxed nostalgic for a bit. Today, these types of batteries are largely limited to rugged laptops, like the Dell Pro Rugged line, Panasonic Toughbooks, or anything from Getac. You know, the types of laptops you'd find on a construction site or in a cop car. Years ago, I may have suggested that this type of battery was important for repairability.

But then, when I plugged in the old T570, I didn't use the ThinkPad's dedicated charger. I didn't look around to see if we had another hot-swappable battery. I used USB Type-C.

USB Type-C has made backup batteries universal

And while the rest of my team might wax nostalgic for these batteries, I don't. At the time, they made a ton of sense, but USB-C has created a ton of affordable external batteries that can be plugged into any laptop.

No, it's not as sleek to have a cable attach a portable battery to a laptop. But that portable battery can charge any laptop because they don't have proprietary shapes to fit into a specific chassis. That means that I can take my external battery and use it across multiple laptops. I can give it to friends, family, or colleagues who use different laptops. And they can charge my phone, too.

I also realized I don't need battery top-offs as often as I used to. In the last few years, chips (especially those based on ARM) have gotten far more efficient, and components like OLED screens that guzzled battery life are a bit more under control. I'll never ding anyone for giving me an option for high-capacity batteries to top off in an emergency or low-power LCD displays. But in the last few years, I've found myself scrambling to plug in less often than I used to.

Internal batteries should still be repairable

That being said, internal battery repair still matters. In fact, if any company wants to bring back the hot-swappable battery bay to thinner laptops, it should be explicitly in that effort. No one should ever have to rely exclusively on external batteries. I long for how easily the battery came out of my early 2008 white plastic MacBook without removing the rest of the case.