Dealing with Apple Support

So that shiny new macbook the SO was so breathlessly waiting for? It lasted a whole 10 minutes before choking on itself. All that anticipation for a slender, eye-catching doorstop.

What exactly happened? I have no idea, I did the dutiful thing and installed Microsoft Office on it for her, then re-packaged it as new so she could revel in the excitement of opening it up herself. (If you think opening a computer is odd, you just don't get Apple!) After going through the glee of unwrapping the computer, and starting it up, and politely showing my mom how a few of her favourite websites look on a mac, the laptop proceeds to beachball, emitting soft, painful clicks from somewhere in the vicinity of the hard drive.

Yikes.

I have a feeling this is exactly how her old computer died, of course that lasted about 4 years before doing so. The old computer (the latest revision of the G4 aluminum powerbook line) was mine for a number of years, and under my watch the top memory bank fried out, sadly after the warranty period. I didn't think much of it, as I was happy enough with 1 GB of RAM for my day to day use. A few months after that, though, the hard drive abruptly died, before I could grab a full backup off of it*.

I promptly put a new hard drive in, only to have it die again within the year. Of course this time I was prepared with a backup, and chalked it up to a bad string of hard drive luck. I purchased an iMac shortly before (which i can attest has run very well, as I'm typing on it as we speak), and decided to put in yet another hard drive into the laptop, and hand it over to the SO as a very cost effective token of my undying gratitude and love. I don't think she saw the gesture the same way, but that's another story.

Although she was sad at not using her old computer (the first revision G4 titanium powerbook, a bit of a tank which lasted through a house fire, and is still ticking today, 8 years later), she was excited about the expanded storage space, as 10 GB just wasn't cutting it, apparently. Long story short, the new hard drive lasted about 8 months before coming to an all too familiar death, and thus, the new macbook.

Suffice to say, I'm no hardware expert, but I'm pretty convinced there's something in that laptop which is destroying hard drives. Perhaps it's a failing logic board, or a tiny invisible evil elf. Anyhow, I'm not really keen on throwing more money into testing that theory. I'm sure though, that you can imagine our collective dismay to watch a brand new, purchased the second Steve Jobs introduced them, macbook suffer an eerily similar fate.

Now I don't know what life is like in Mac stores around the world, but from living in Brisbane, and here in Vancouver, I've never been terribly impressed by the quality of work / personnel at these stores. Most stores seem to be stocked by barely interested sales people/technicians, who range from outright hostility to your presence, to standoffish indifference. It's part of the reason why I almost exclusively shop online for my Apple related products.

So with some trepidation the SO called Apple Support. Happily, they were very understanding and polite, and were not at all against replacing the computer. I was convinced she would need to argue her case, with them insisting on fixing it, but instead agreed to send the new laptop right away, and of course pay for shipping the doorstop back to them, at which point I'm sure it'll find itself a new home in the Apple Refurbished discount bin.

We're still waiting on the new laptop (as this all happened over a rather busy weekend), but I'm hoping that the evil elves will have moved on to other unwitting targets, and give us a few years of computing peace.

* Why didn't I have a previous backup? Probably because I'm sadly much too similar to the architect whose house is always under construction.