Why my next Mac won't be a notebook

Apple's products are widely hailed as better-built and more reliable than other manufacturers' devices, with greater longevity, better build quality and a lower incidence of device-killing defects. Ask most Mac owners, and they'll tell you their experiences with their machines have been almost completely problem-free.

I wish that I could say the same. My house is where portable Macs go to die.

In mid-2007, my wife bought a white MacBook. In the three years she owned it, the following things went wrong with it:

• Late 2007: Upper case cracked. Known design issue. Replaced with used case.
• Mid 2008: Upper case cracked again, in same spot. Replaced with new case.
• Mid 2009: Logic board failed. Known issue. Replaced.
• Late 2009: MagSafe adapter fails. Known issue. Replaced.
• Late 2009: Graphics failure. Display replaced.
• Early 2010: Logic board fails again. MacBook replaced with a brand new 2009 model.

One lemon machine is bad enough, but at least she got the most positive outcome imaginable: only months before her AppleCare expired, Apple gave her a brand new replacement machine with another three years of AppleCare coverage.

As I write this, I'm using my wife's MacBook because my MacBook Pro is in the shop (again) with a failure related to the logic board (again). For the first couple of years, I had no issues at all with my Early 2008 MacBook Pro, but it started to fall apart at the seams in October of last year. First the battery experienced a fault, losing over 10 percent of its capacity in a week, and getting AppleCare to replace it was an irritating jousting match. A month later, the infamously defective NVIDIA 8600M GT GPU failed, and I got the logic board replaced. Given the history of defects in our equipment, I half-jokingly told my wife that my MacBook Pro was likely to fail again within a couple months of my AppleCare expiring.

Continue reading Why my next Mac won't be a notebook

Why my next Mac won't be a notebook originally appeared on TUAW on Thu, 17 Mar 2011 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments

ARIAN SEMICONDUCTOR EQUIPMENT ARROW ELECTRONICS ASML HOLDING ASUSTEK COMPUTER ATandT