David Emery Online

Hi there, I’m David. This is my website. I work in music for Apple. You can find out a bit more about me here. On occasion I’ve been known to write a thing or two. Please drop me a line and say hello. Views mine not my employers.

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MacBook Lemon

23 January 2007

My 7 month old base model MacBook now has the mantle of being both the best and the worst computer I’ve ever owned.

The good points are easy – the MacBook is one of the best computers Apple have ever made. The price is incredibly low for the features it has, like the beautiful 13.3 inch display, built in iSight, MagSafe power connector and more. It’s also amazingly fast for such a cheap computer. It truly is a joy to use.

When it works, that is.

Yesterday it completely died – it wouldn’t boot up. It looked like a classic hard disk failure, as the HD was making an ominous clicking sound and booting from a CD worked ok. Fine. Great. I can just about deal with a dead HD; I’m going to loose some data (I have some backups, but not complete ones) but I have a 80gb drive waiting to go in it so I’ll be up and running quite quickly.

Except I can’t get OS X to install on the new HD. Which means the logic board is probably screwed.

Sigh.

This just rounds off nicely the rather long list of problems that this MacBook has had:

  • The battery completely died about 5 months in, which was replaced by Apple under warranty.
  • It seems to suffer from the common discolouring problem on the palm rests, so it’s now slightly orange.
  • The down arrow doesn’t work all the time – you have to press it quite hard.
  • The track pad button sometimes doesn’t notice when you click.
  • Semi-occasional kernal panics, which I guess are related to this latest problem.

I really do like the MacBook range, and don’t think their are huge problems with them (I know plenty of people with them that haven’t had problems) but it sure sucks to get a lemon.

From: Articles

23 January 2007