Yesterday I headed to the Apple Store with my wife's dead Macbook. Upon arrival I found there were three other people in the store ahead of me, all with Macbooks all with.. can you guess? Yes! Dead hard disks. No, Apple, allow me to point something out. I placed a note on my blog about my wife's head Macbook and two people who I know, all who purchased early Macbooks, had already endured dead hard disks. At the store were four more people, including myself, with the same problem. Call me crazy, but finding six people, without even really trying, all with the same hardware problem seems to indicate something a bit more widespread than an isolated problem with a batch of laptops.
Both my Macbooks are under warranty with Applecare. My wife's laptop had quite a bit of purchased content we are not looking forward to losing not to mention she had a lot of photographs on her laptop that are not replaceable. I'd like efforts made to restore that software once the laptop reaches its final destination.
Also, potentially more troubling for you, is my wife is totally disinterested in purchasing a new Mac (I'm not to that point yet, but am getting there). Allow me to provide a bit of history. I purchased a new G3 iBook back in the day, right when OS X was first released. That iBook went back to the factory twice for repairs. I later purchased my wife a G4 TiBook, a nice laptop really, and that laptop was sent back to the factory once as well (today the G3 iBook is dead and buried, it seems the power connections from the plug to the motherboard came loose at some point and the TiBook limps along at my parent's house on a dead battery, a nonworking optical drive, a dead Ethernet port and 802.11b wireless that doesn't support WPA. Not ideal). So we haven't had the best run of luck with our Macs up until now. The two other Apple devices we purchased, our Apple TV and our 1.5 Ghz G4 mini, have proved to be more robust, at least thus far.
I've always said I loved Apples because "they just work" but they don't work if they won't boot. This really is more than a simple annoyance. Yesterday I was thinking about upgrading my mini to a new Intel mini or an iMac but not I'm just not interested, partly because I no longer trust the Apple hardware to "just work" and partly because of the added cost of upgrading everyone to Leopard ($200 for the family license) and then adding a ton of RAID firewire disk to the mini so the backups can have somewhere to back up to. Time Capsule is a possibility but I don't have the money to spend on another product right now.
So, yeah, Apple, I'm annoyed. I've put up with a lot of hardware errors in your laptop line for a few years now and, quite frankly, it's getting old. Yesterday I looked at the Macbook Air as a possible candidate for my wife as a replacement laptop to be purchased in a year or so but honestly the first thing I thought while looking it over was "what's the first thing to go (break) on this one?" That's not good. You shouldn't be happy with that line of thinking and you shouldn't accept your current hardware failure rates either.
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two people who I know, all who purchased early Macbooks, had already endured dead hard disks
To be specific, I didn't have the hard drive in my early 2006 MacBook die on me, but I did actually replace it with a larger hard drive within a year. The drive that died on us was from my wife's MacBook which is the mid 2007 model. Apparently she has also now reported to me that she sometimes gets the "no keyboard input for a minute or more" problem that Apple just released new firmware for. I've never seen that on my Core Duo MacBook.
But, yeah, I agree that they seem to be having some quality problems.
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