My 17 MBP battery has just succumbed to the widespread problem associated with these batteries - namely that they swell up, expand and split open. If you do any sort of google search you will find a lot of people complaining about this - to the point of the battery actually exploding and catching fire, almost causing a house fire. I know that apple had a product recall on some MBP batteries, and I checked mine to see if it was one of those affected - but it wasn't included in the list of model numbers apple provided. Which would suggest that apple didn't think there was anything wrong with the model number of my battery (A1189). The battery has had 92 cycles only - it is supposed to last 500 cycles.
The amount of complaints about these batteries ia vast across the web, and it seems that apple are not doing enough to address customers honest concerns for what is clearly a manufacturing defect. All we can do as consumers is warn others who may not know this and hope that apple sit up and take notice eventually and actually make sure this matter is fixed.