New Battery and SSD for a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro 13

I have this MacBook Pro 13 and I needed to replace the battery and add an SSD drive to bring the Mac back to life. It’s a mid 2010 MacBook Pro 13 model A1278 MacBookPro 7,1. The original battery was bad and started to swell.

I bought a new replacement battery from Amazon for $38. Its a 3rd Party battery so I hope it lasts. I didn’t want to spend $90 to $100 for an iFixit or NewerTech battery.

I also wanted to replace the SSD I had in this Mac so I installed a 256GB SSD I pulled from a broken Lenovo laptop I had I originally had replaced the HDD with a new ADATA 256 GB SSD but as this is an eight year old computer I decided to use that drive in a different computer.

I also need to buy a set of HD mounting screws. The computer didn’t have any and I used gaffer’s tape to hold the SSD in place which worked really well but was a hack. The MacBook was missing a foot from the bottom of the case so I bought a set of replacement feet. Finally I lost one of the case screws after I took the old battery out. I bought the HDD screws, the feet, and case screws from eBay off eBay for less that $7.

As this is an older Mac, replacing all these parts was pretty easy. Once I put the Mac back together I installed Mac OS High Sierra and with the SSD it’s pretty fast for an eight year old computer!

Check out my videos of replacing the battery and of the swollen battery below.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *