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.
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