Macbook Random Shutdown

I have a Macbook, black, 2 GHZ, that was less than a year old. One day, the battery unexpectedly and suddenly stopped working. The laptop would still work if it was plugged in, but if the cord came out the computer would just shut down because the battery was not holding any charge at all, it wasn’t even being detected.

I took it to the local Apple Store, and they checked it, took out the old battery, put in a new one, and handed me a receipt for $0.00 as an “Under Warranty Repair”. I have an APP on it, but because it was under a year old, they didn’t even bother looking it up.

I have never had a bad experience with Apple customer support. When my iMac wouldn’t start up, the phone service guided me through reinstalling the OS from a disk, and all my files were preserved. Neither my Macbook nor my iMac have had any major issues since then.

My 15″ Core 2 Duo story was meant to make me cringe from the start. I had purchased a Mac Pro for my video/audio workstation and it was a quality machine and I’ve been extremely happy both with the performance and the service. It was time to upgrade my aging Dell 700m which worked flawlessly for two years as a location editing machine.

I waited, or so I thought, for the bugs to be worked out with the first generation portable hardware.

I ordered my 15″ MacBook Pro from Apple for my business. As an aside here I find it very funny that as a business if I order more than $5000 worth of hardware then I get a business discount which rather closely approximates the educational discount. Odd. Businesses pay more for everything from banking fees to wan connections, you name it chances are a business is paying more for the same thing; or maybe a little less because they’re buying so much of it but in that middle zone of small business it seems the only people Apple is charging full price for is the family user. Wow.

Lost my train of thought there.

Seriously though, my laptop arrived exactly one week later direct from Shanghai, China. I had opted for express shipping. I opened up my MacBook Pro box, pretty as it was, to notice to rather large socket adapters (type G if you check the link). I couldn’t believe it. The item was shipped to Alaska and then direct to Montreal. Why would I need adapters for the UK? Why I ask you?!

Over an hour on the phone and several Apple representatives had to confer as to whether or not I could even use the laptop as it may have shipped with international software which I may not have been allowed to have/use. Great start.

Last week I noticed they had actually shipped me a UK MacBook Pro and not just the plugs when I couldn’t find the “#” sign above the three - although now I know why they call it “pound.”

By the way it took three weeks for the cables with the appropriate socket connection to come. (And four phone calls.)

Then this past weekend (December 17th, 2006) my computer started processing data that continuously failed CRC checks. (IE I was compressing and uncompressing large amounts of data.) Moving the data to another machine worked so something was now wrong with the hardware. I would look into it the next day I thought.

I watched a DVD off the laptop with my wife. Two hours later I went to check my email. Black screen with “please reboot.”

Let me add that I’ve run the CPUs on this laptop at 100% using Apple’s QMaster and Logic Node (although it’s hard to use the latter to push the CPUs to 100%) extensively and I never had a problem.

Here, surfing the web, with no errant processess running, the laptop just shut down. And shut down and, yup, you guessed it shut down. Not only that, but it took over ten minutes to boot up after the first shut down. It then continued to shut down at an increasing pace until the latop could not be on for more than two seconds. Leaving it off for a number of minutes had no effect. Although I got to log in once but it shutdown again and then wouldn’t get past the spinning line thingy (I can’t imagine what Apple-ites call it - but I have some crude suggestions.)

So here I am, about to leave the province for the week following Christmas with a deadline looming and no computer to work on. How I wish I could rent one.

When this happened to Dells purchased for business they had a technician here the next day who fixed the machine on the spot. I won’t have mine back for “at least a week,” which I think is technical for “it’s Christmas and we really couldn’t care about your $2500 laptop and the money you’ll not be earning.”

It’s a sad sad state of affairs.

Even worse, my second call to Apple’s Customer Relations was fruitless. They’re disarmingly pleasant, but refuse to do anything.

I think I’m going to halt my business’ switch to Apple for the time being (since I get to call the shots), even if we’re only talking about a few servers and macbooks. If the MacBook Pro doesn’t come back fixed I’ll try to send it back for a refund. Thank heavens Quebec has some potent consumer-rights legislation so at least I don’t feel helpless.

in an earlier post here i mentioned that my brand new macbook core 2 duo randomly rebooted on sleep. using the 14 return policy, i had it exchanged at the applestore. but surprise surprise the new one does exactly the same thing.

so i called applecare and told them the deal, and mentioned that the problem is all over the internet and i knew that apple was aware of it. i then said i wanted a full refund on the machine. the lady didn’t argue with me at all, and right away gave me a case number to take it back. she told me to take it back to the store and give them the number and they would refund it, even though it is beyond the 14 days.

i found it suspicious how easy it was. i think they know about it and are trying to reduce the damage by not pissing us off.

so if you have a defective macbook, demand a refund!

I was in Chicago today and briefly visited the Apple store on Michigan Avenue. Just like all the Apple stores, it was so crowded, everyone trying out all the cool products Apple has in the store. I sat there and just looked around a while, and then started scoping out the Macbooks. I played with a couple of them and no crashes.

I then just did a test to see how long it would take for an associate to approach me about the Macbooks. In my mind, I was thinking about how widespread this issue of RSS really is in the ‘wild’ so to speak.

Finally, after about 10 minutes, a guy was free and came up to me and asked if I had any questions…oh such a loaded question I thought to myself. I then proceeded to tell him that I thought the new design was great for the Macbooks but I “had read online that sometimes they just ‘randomly shutdown’” - to which he quickly responded, “Yeah, it’s a known issue. There are actually a bunch of customers forming a class action lawsuit about it, which is a little extreme if you ask me”. He then proceeded to say, “the problem is with the heatsink, it was a cheap part that was put into the Macbook and all the kinks weren’t ironed out with it”…”but if you have any problems with your Macbook, just bring it right upstairs and the guys will fix it for you, no problem”

I didn’t tell him who I was or that I started this web site dedicated to the issue but I hadn’t been in an Apple store in a few weeks so I wanted to see what the level of “awareness” was with the whole debacle.

Just wanted to pass this one on for you all to discuss!

Cheers!
Matthew

It has been suggested that we continue to email some of the major news outlets about our ’story’ behind all this Macbook hoopla - I head read about this a few weeks ago, but CNN now has a way where readers can contribute content, stories, etc.

I think we should all do our part and tell CNN about Macbook Random Shutdown and what all is going on - just an idea to get the word out more!

Cheers!
Matthew

With Apple’s refusal to effectively address the RSS/RSD issue, it seems the most viable recourse we have is to contact the media and force this issue into the spotlight. You can find the websites of the local media in your area by going to http://newslink.org/broad.html. And when you email them, don’t forget to include a link to this site.

Macbook RSS Facebook Group
You might want to add a link to this site in profile.

^{Photo by Jonas Thomén}

I sent my MacBook in for repairs over 3 weeks ago now and besides the inconvenience of being without a computer for this long, I’ve been very disappointed with the service. Specially so in the Apple Store through which I sent my repair. I was initially told the repair would take a week but it ended up taking them 24 days! During this time I was mislead/misinformed several times by the Genius at The Apple Store. This lead to extreme disappointment and frustration on my part.

During this time, I also explained that I desperately needed a computer to work and insisted that they loan me a notebook or offered me a replacement/refund for my MacBook but my request was promptly declined each time!

In addition, I also emailed Apple’s PR (Janette Barrios) person for the MacBook explaining my situation, the inconvenience it caused me and why I desperately needed a computer to work on.

If you are interested in the details of my Apple doesn’t Care/Store experience, I have a chronological list of events relating to my repair over at The Apple Files.

Details of my repair including what parts were replaced are also available.

[Cross Post from The Apple Files]

At the suggestion of one of our members, ezra-g, I have created some new categories for our site..here they are:

• I have RSS
• Sent to Apple
• Apple Blew It
• Apple Fixed It
• Still Waiting
• Customer Relations
• Exchanges
• Compensation
• Ridiculous

When posting your story, you can now use the categories to group your entries. Let me know what you think. I hope it will help organize some of the really useful information we have been collecting here over the past month and going forward!

Cheers!
Matthew