Ist time Apple let me down - 3 1/2 year-old MBA worthless

[bushbaby]

Long time Apple/Mac user, phones, MBPs, MBAs. Have a mid-2012 MBA I'm using right now, still working great (with a new battery). Using Mojave 10.14.6 on it and on my other MBA bought new in Jan 2020 (2019 13" i5). Recently, it began shutting down on me, half black screen, then off with a whoosh sound. The first genius, very patient, said the battery tested bad, needed to be changed, but that there was something else causing this odd shutdown and very difficult restart. He deleted some of my non-essential programs with my consent, ran malware checks that came up with nothing, and was able to get it to start up in normal mode. Great. I was leaving town so I scheduled a date the following week to return for the new battery install.

In the meantime, it worked fine for 5 days, then the same problem returned. Saw genius #2 who looked at the exterior of my MBA and said he could see the battery was swollen. He said I needed to replace the battery now and that may fix the black screen shutdown issue. When I asked why all my other Mac laptops never had the battery swelling issue (I always use Apple stands), he said that usage now with new programs/online all demand more power but battery manufacturers aren't upgrading/redesigning them.

I paid $159 for the new battery and my MBA worked fine for three weeks. Last night the half-black screen shutdown happened again. And it wouldn't restart in safe mode.

I checked at Apple online to determine what my 3 1/2 year-old MBA that won't start is worth on trade-in and the answer is zero. My questions—has anyone else had this happen? Why did my onscreen battery message not go to the highest level, check the battery now? Thanks for reading.

 

[Yebubbleman]

You ought to be under a 90-day parts warranty from the battery. You might want to check on that. Otherwise, I've experienced a 2019 MacBook Air with a completely shot battery. I don't know that there's necessarily a correlation there. But, the 2018-2020 Intel MacBook Airs were remarkably bad computers that had several issues related to cooling/thermals, poor performance, keyboard issues (for the 2018 and 2019 models), SSD issues (for the 2018 models), and others as well. So, the fact that you're having issues with yours, sadly, isn't remotely surprising.

 

[bushbaby]

You ought to be under a 90-day parts warranty from the battery. You might want to check on that. Otherwise, I've experienced a 2019 MacBook Air with a completely shot battery. I don't know that there's necessarily a correlation there. But, the 2018-2020 Intel MacBook Airs were remarkably bad computers that had several issues related to cooling/thermals, poor performance, keyboard issues (for the 2018 and 2019 models), SSD issues (for the 2018 models), and others as well. So, the fact that you're having issues with yours, sadly, isn't remotely surprising.

Thank you for letting me know about these issues. So even though nothing may be wrong with the new battery itself, but the laptop itself is not restarting, Apple might reimburse me for that battery?