I Hate My Mac
August 28, 2006 – 2:33 pm(New material at the bottom.)
Another day, another reason to regret buying a Mac. Here are the stats so far:
- Weeks I’ve owned my MacBook Pro: 16
- Average number of times it bluescreens per day: 1.6 (8 in the last 5 days). Note that the screen doesn’t actually turn blue; instead, I get a black rectangle telling me in English, French, German, and Japanese (I think) that my machine needs to restart, could I please press the button.
- Amount of work lost each time this happens: between 5 and 20 minutes.
- Embarrassment factor in having this happen in front of an audience: non-zero. Decidedly non-zero.
- Number of calls to AppleCare: 3
- Average waiting time before giving up: 30 minutes
- Time spent waiting today: 37 minutes
- Time on the phone with the AppleCare representative: 28 minutes
- Number of reboot+diagnostics run: 3
- Number of hardware problems found by the diagnostics: 0
- Number of times I was asked if I was sure I hadn’t installed any hardware myself (i.e., voided my AppleCare plan, so that it wouldn’t be their problem): 4 (maybe 5 — I interrupted her mid-sentence the fifth time)
- Refund Apple will give me at this point if I give them back the computer: 0%.
- Time I’ll be without my computer if I send it in for Apple to look at: 6-8 weeks. (No, they won’t loan me a replacement while I’m waiting.)
- Apple’s advice at this point: re-install the operating system and “see if that fixes anything”.
- Customer satisfaction: low.
- Effect this will have on Apple’s stock price: zilch.
*sigh*
A few weeks later: Alan Hietala pointed out that Apple is finally aknowledging there’s a problem. I had another kernel panic yesterday (in front of an audience, while trying to give a demo), so I called AppleCare again. A very polite young man named Ray told me to take the memory out and re-seat it, “just to make sure”, and to call back if the problem recurred. “If it does, will Apple send me new memory, or let me buy some here and reimburse me?” He wasn’t sure (”A product specialist would have to answer that question”).
7 Responses to “I Hate My Mac”
That sucks.
Have you tried screaming at them? I’ve heard it helps.
By Simon on Aug 28, 2006
Wow. My strategy when buying hardware is to let the product (from apple or not) go through a revision or two to work out any bugs. Very sad.
By liam on Aug 28, 2006
Hrm. My iBook G4 has served me fine for almost a year now. Nary a blue screen (or equivalent) yet. I feel for you though, having flaky tools essential to your work is so frustrating.
By Lee Zamparo on Aug 29, 2006
You almost certainly have bad RAM. The only time I’ve ever seen a Mac go kernel panic on me is with shoddy RAM.
Simplest way to see if this is your problem - try removing your memory sticks and see if your machine crashes. If it doesn’t - it’s your RAM.
I used to get that weird multilingual screen on my iBook, but they went away after I bought some proper Kingston memory. 5 years - no problems.
By Victor Ng on Aug 29, 2006
Victor is right. The PowerBooks were picky about their memory sticks, Kingston memory, seems to be the most reliable option for avoiding this problem. I’m sure that the MacBookPro is susceptible to the same flaw. I have had a couple of 1Gb DIMMs in my G4-1.25GHz machine that cause this same screen to come up, usually after waking from sleep.
By David Crow on Sep 5, 2006
Apple has just announced they are recognizing this issue
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304308
contact applecare now and they should be much more sympathetic.
By Alan Hietala on Sep 7, 2006
I’d have to concure with the original blogger. So far I’m at the 45min mark waiting for Apple to pick up the phone. I bought a MacBook Pro 7 days ago and have had to rebuild 3 times. After the third install the system would not even bring up spotlight. I ran the diag. tools included with my apple care kit only to be told that it is actually a 3rd party tool that they don’t recommed you install.
I know refer to Apple as iBUD - Great Marketing… Shitty Product (Just like Budweiser beer.
I can believe so many still like this company. At least I get to return mine for a refund - the 10% stocking fee.
By Bryce on Sep 16, 2006