I like my Macintosh. Maybe a little too much. If you're a PC user, you might know what that means, but if your a Mac user you definitely understand. I lived and breathed by my PowerBook for four years. Before that it was a different PowerBook for 3 years. I've always been very pleased.
When I got the chance to upgrade to an Intel based MacBook, I lept on it. I ordered it whithin a week of the announcement about the 17 inchers.
Oh, and I ordered 8 20inch Intel iMacs for my office too.
You sit down at the machines, and they just grip you because they are so beautiful. Steve has finally managed to extend the RDF into the product, so you just fall in love with them in a matter of seconds.
But there's a dark side. I ordered my MBP and had to wait 6 weeks for it to come in. 3 weeks after getting it, it started just shutting down on it's on. Or not really shutting down, just turning off. No grace required. It usually did it only in really public instances too, like when I was showing a video to a room full of high school kids, or working on a DVD presentation that was supposed to show in a few hours. Oh, and the built in camera stopped working. So I sent it in to apple for repair.
Of the 8 iMacs, 2 failed right out of the box. One was fixed within a week, the other just went back into the shop for the 3rd time in 3 months with the same problem. The airport just goes away (airport is apple's friendly name for wifi). I don't mean it stops communicating, like when the microwave comes on, I mean the hardware disappears from the machine. It's still in the machine, the machine just doesn't believe me. So it says there's no aiport installed.
In the mean time, my MBP came back from apple, all fixed up, they said. It wasn't. It had exactly the same symptoms, and the camera still was not working for more than 8 seconds. So I sent it back to apple again. They still have it. Now I've owned it for 3 months, and it's been in the shop for almost one.
So of 9 Machines I've bought from Apple since June, 3 of them have broken. All three were hardware problems. 33% failure rate. 2 of them were broken out of the box. the other probably was, but it's an intermittent problem so I didn't notice right away. suck. suck. suck. The best apple can do for my MBP is "escalate" it so that the parts that are on back order get installed faster when they arrive.
So i pulled the TiBook out of mothballs, because I really do work out of 3 offices and it's just hard to keep up with a desktop machine. I updated to 10.4.8 on the TiBook yesterday and now it won't boot either (left it running for 9 hours after the reboot and the gray apple screen never went away). So I'm completely hosed.
I'm still drinking the kool-aid, but I'm beginning to think it tastes a little bitter.
6 Comments
Ah, yes… the bitter taste of disappointment. It makes you feel a little older when someone or something doesn't live up to expectations – made even worse when they set the expectation.
Apple has always been on the cutting edge of "cool" so that there is a "gotta have it now" when a new product comes out (remember, you had one of the first digital cameras).
Perhaps your mantra should change from "gotta have it because it's cool" to "gotta have it because it works."
I feel for you. Just a few weeks ago my Macbook took a turn for the worse. Do to a different warrenty other than apples I was able to get t replaced right away. Thank god CompUSA cant work on them. The new one started acting up too. The not too graceful shut down syndrom. Long story short I got a refund from the store. I'll most likely go back to Apple in a year or so but for now a Dell Windows machine is taking its place since none of the software I use is Mac specific. I really hope Apple gets this mess sorted out. So I guess cherry was getting abit old in the flavor. So the god laptop has been replaced replaced by satans.
ewwww, Dell. i feel your pain. but it's true, even though the MacBook and Mac OS X is way cooler than anything from the windows camp, it is completely unusable when it just quits working all by itself occasionally.
I'm glade of one thing though. I still have a pismo in the closet for my iTunes server.
Apple told me today that they would drop ship me a new MacBook Pro 17". It'll probably go out tomorrow and I will probably have it by Monday.
finally.
Now, let's hope this one works.
yes. I received my new MacBook Pro, and it's working fine.
stay tuned to see if it turns into the work horse I've had from my other macs over the years.
On an interesting note, I've had no fewer than 8 PC people say to me something about "see, that's why I don't buy Macs". Interesting. i wonder if they'd say the same thing about Toyotas if my car were a lemon…