I guess it was inevitable, but after some 20 years with nothing but nice Apple Macs I finally got a really screwed up one. I’ve had a number of machines, starting with the Mac 128 (or maybe Macintosh Plus?) and they have all been nice to me. The power unit in a IIsi went to smoke once, but it was easily repared. So, hardware-vise, it has been a sunshine story. That is, until this MacBook Pro…
I got it as soon as they landed in Sweden, and it immediately showed up the now infamous signs of a too rushed-out product; a horrible whine while running on battery, getting exceedingly hot, bad airport reliability and lousy sound from the speakers. After a few month Apple took it in to fix the bad airport issue, and they also had new logic boards for the whine. Got it back and sure the machine was now silent, but airport has continued to act up, it’s still very hot – so hot that CD/DVD will often fail to burn and I have to wait until the machine is cool to successfully burn a disk. And the speaker sound was still lousy, like someting is lose and starts to resonate and distort.
Two weeks ago Apple took it back for a second repair. This time I asked the technician to call me when working with the machine. So he did, and explained that I must accept that the machine gets so hot that the optical drive sometimes fails. His theory was that I used bad media! Also, I could not expect anything else than the distorted, bad sound. This was a “feature” of these MacBook Pro’s. And the airport issue was also “within specs”! After some argumentation he agreed to at least change the airport card.
The machine arrived this Monday and now I don’t have any connectivity at all in my office. Have tried all sorts of trick, deleting settings here and there but it refuses to connect. Strange thing, it works at home with my visible and non-WEP network, and my colleague that has a slightly newer MacBook Pro has no problems at all, he connects just fine even at the office. Software issue? Have done a complete reinstall of system software, even erased the hard disk.
So now I’m waiting for Apple to call back. Wonder what the verdict will be. My fault? Another repair? A new machine?
UPDATE: Apple called back and agreed to replace the machine with a new one. Please make this one work as expected!
I think this is what the average mbp owner is quietly suffering through. My problems (May mbp, 15″) are the whine and crappy airport behavior, which starts acting up as soon as I take it to an iffy range (areas that were fine on my powerbook g4) and won’t recover without being turned off and on. Apple knows we will tolerate a certain amount of this stuff, which is infuriating. It will hurt the company in the long run, as the brand loses any reputation for quality.
You are so right, Apple has a painful lesson to learn from with this MBP, first edition. I really hope the new ones are better, because Apple has just called me back and agreed to send a brand new machine. But that was after two trips to the workshop, two complete system reinstalls and numerous hours of restoring everything and answering to lots of questions from the support. And after second repair attempt I could not connect to my office’s invisible, WEP-protected network at all, no matter what trick I tried.
As for the whine, Apple will repair your machine if you want to, so don’t sit quiet and let them get away with it! We expect more from Apple, don’t we?