I couldn’t ask what exactly they repaired in the MacBook, but it most definitely has a new backlight as the backlight is now much brighter than the old one was. I noticed that when replacing my previous machines as well: Those modern backlights seem to wear out very quickly. The loss of brightness after just a year is quite significant. I used to run the old display light at full brightness in a normal desk work environment and the new one seems too bright at that level and is fine at about two thirds of the maximum.

This seems like a fact worth keeping in mind when questionable (i.e. any) web sites ooh and aah the ‘much improved’ brightness of the new machines they are ‘reviewing’. Perhaps they are just comparing them to old and used displays. Somehow those oohs and aahs never seem to be based on actual measurements, just on side-by-side comparisons made at that moment.

Anyway, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the machine doesn’t show further breakage in the future.

With my current MacBook only having a shitty screen I was relatively happy simply because it didn’t break within a few months. Saving me the hassle of frequenting to our local Mac store and running through the usual procedures. Until last weekend, that is. After my screen backlight turning itself off a few times the week before in a non-reproducible way, that behaviour increased during the weekend, leading to a backlight that always turned itself off when run at full brightness on Saturday, to a backlight turned itself off after a while when run on half brightness on Sunday, to a backlight turning itself off after a second at the lowest level on Monday. I did my bit of Googling and tried all the standard procedures (SMC reset, PRAM reset, boot from install media to be sure it’s not some stray setting, Hardware Test DVD…).

The not-so-fun bit about this being that I got the MacBook in the first half of November last year, suspecting it may just be out of warranty. The local Mac store checked the serial number for me and confirmed my suspicion. It turns out that Apple counts your warranty from the day you place the order, rather than the day it is shipped or received. I placed the order on October 31st and, according the invoice Apple sent me, they shipped it on November 9th. So this was very close, or even ‘just-in’ with either date but outside the area where they could do anything for me in the store. However, they recommended to discuss this with Apple myself.

Given my history with Apple’s (German) phone support, I was extremely reluctant to call them because my past experiences were really bad. I invariably spoke to people who completely failed to understand the problem, failed to care just a bit or lied to me. As in the case of my broken Powerbook G4 I had the ‘pleasure’ of phoning them more than a dozen times, I don’t think that was just a singular ‘unlucky’ case.

But with the costs of a repair (apparently between €100 for a cable and €500 for the whole screen, i.e. potentially more than the value of the year-old machine - the used prices really suffered since the Intel switch…) I really needed to give that a try. And either I was very lucky or Apple improved their German call centre. The first guy I spoke to was quick to pick up the details for my machine, seemed to understand the story and simply believed me that I had done all the standard troubleshooting steps I told him I had done (previously I was forced to do them again while on the phone and it’s time consuming and rather impractical to do things which involve holding four keys at the same time or removing the battery while on the phone…).

The questions he asked made sense and suggested he understood the problem. I was then put through to a more technical person (sounded Eastern European, perhaps that makes people more helpful) who already had most of the details ready and just wanted to confirm some extra information. Finally they OKed the repair because it’s an edge case and the problem likely started within the warranty period, saying I can bring it into the local Mac store within a month and strongly suggesting that I buy AppleCare the next time. (The problem with AppleCare of course being that it does not give you a replacement machine if things go wrong and that its price tag completely destroys the reasonable value a MacBook represents.)

Which leaves me hoping that they can actually solve the problem now at our local store without costing me a fortune. And it also raises hope that Apple are trying to get their act together for the quality of their service in Germany. Which would be a good thing.

I am happy to report that the iMac G4 can now be added to that list as well. Its power supply seems to be broken. At least it doesn’t give the slightest hint of light, sound or movement when you press the power button and you hear a quiet buzzing noise from the machine when it’s plugged into mains power doing nothing.

Now the question is whether there’s any chance to fix the machine. It’s still good for the odd game or so and it has a nice and playful design.

If I read its blinkenlights correctly that is because the battery doesn't charge - despite the device blinking and heating up slightly when connected to the USB port. The battery was perfectly good before it stopped recharging, so here's another mark on the shitty quality scorecard:

Because I like the idea of the first generation iPod shuffle so much, I tried getting another one. And eventually I found one on eBay which I could get for less than €20 (what an outrageous price for two year old used plastic toy with a tiny capacity!) and it does the job - let's hope for more than just a few months. Less agony and boredom at the gym!

What's a bit of a nuisance now is the naming drama. Of course every nameable toy needs a name. Hence my first iPod Shuffle was named 'Spongebob' and I quite like that name! To keep it around I thus re-named the broken iPod Shuffle to 'Bernd das Brot' (another rectangular bit of kiddy-television) and the new one remains Spongebob. Whew!

Anyway, in case you have use for a non-working first generation iPod shuffle called 'Bernd das Brot', send me the postage needed to get it to you and it's yours...

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Who knows. It should be tricky to get an entirely controllable environment for this. I just know that the machine shut itself off on my desk several times the other day just for running on a high load for a while. It’s a real problem for me and I’m facing denial. What is one to do in such a situation? Apple and their minions will ‘helpfully’ suggest blowing another €250 or so up their butts for AppleCare, but I think it’s not too much to expect a machine that just keeps on working, without that.

I was told I could contact AppleCare again and try to get that problem sorted by them. But judging from my past experiences AppleCare Germany is a bunch of idiots/liars, and it will play out like this: Sven explains the problem to them exactly on the phone, indicating when it happens and what he suspects to play a role. They tell Sven to send the machine in. Just to the sure™, Sven puts a written description of the problem inside the pacakge before sending the MacBook off. They neither manage to understand or reproduce the problem. They exchange some random bit of the machine so they can say they did their job. They lose my hard drive on the way. They require weeks of repeated calls to present a family of selected lies about what happened to that hard drive and to finally send me an equivalent replacement. At least that was pretty much the experience I had with my Powerbook a few years ago. And I’m not looking forward to repeating it.

But what to do? Warranty is running out soon and I don’t want to be stuck with a machine that’s both keen on running its fan at high speeds all the time and some overheating. Perhaps the fan just needs some cleaning? Which would be a matter of bad design in the machine but at least a plausible explanation. I guess Apple’s style of Just Works™ high quality design means that I’ll need to find some special tools and take a look myself. I.e. do the things didn’t want to do in the first place.

But that’s not everything. The MacBook’s shitty battery (it’s the second one already I have in this one) yesterday mis-estimated its endurance once again. Which meant I had another shutdown of the machine while it was going to deep sleep at the end of its battery runtime. Usually that problem fixes itself after a while (battery recalibration or whatnot?!) but, again, this is something that should never happen  – and I had it around a dozen times already with the collection of two MacBooks and four batteries I used so far.

Quality Engineering indeed. I think I should start to join the leagues of people lobbying for OS X on non-Apple hardware. Simply so I can have hardware that works reliably.

Let me just recap what I consider good design for a consumer machine like the MacBook: it’s reasonably powerful, it’s quiet and – being a laptop – it doesn’t burn my laps. If the technology Apple use is too inferior to achieve that, I’d still expect the machine to be noisy and hot only in extreme usage situations. Ripping and re-encoding a DVD would be one – where loads of mechanical and CPU resources are used. Playing modern games which stress both the CPU and graphics hardware might be another such situation.

Unfortunately the MacBook’h history is one of poor thermal design. In loads of the first generation machines temperature failure was built-in and they just shut down when heating up too much (while I had a load of defects my first MacBook, I amusingly didn’t have that one – probably because it was too common). With some firmware update Apple reprogrammed the fan of the machines to run at a higher level – I suspect to reduce the number of times that failure showed up, i.e. to reduce their financial cost at the expense of their users’ nerves. When I got my second and current MacBook it was clear that Apple had completely given up on a quiet design. It seems that the fan is always running, and it only takes a short burst of computation to make it clearly audible. I sighed.

For the past months, though, I had the impression that the fan’s noise was becoming stronger and stronger. I was literally hoping for the construction site around the corner to be noise, so I didn’t need to hear the fan while using the machine. I just blamed that on ever cheaper and lower quality components being used for the machine that can’t take a year of usage.

Then I had a shutdown of the machine. I didn’t think much of it at the time, blaming my commong bad luck or immature software instead. But as I saw such shutdowns more frequently and each time in situations where the machine was running hot – when both the CPU and GPU were used, I started being concerned. In some of these situations I was using the machine on a mattress. The vents weren’t blocked but it certainly became a bit hotter that way. In others I wasn’t, the problem just happens more easily on a mattress – and probably even more easily on a cushion.

But to be honest I don’t give a damn. I bought a portable machine, one that can presumably be used pretty much anywhere. In particular it wasn’t advertised as ‘usable on straight table-tops only’ and I’m sure it’s not meant to be usable in that way only as that’d be missing the point. And besides me not giving a damn, the machine can easily be led to exhibit the same problem on the straight and solid surface commonly known as a desk. I’m sure that – however they spin it – that’ll be considered an ‘adequate’ way of using the machine.

So we have an overheating situation: Using the numbers given by iStat Pro (which don’t necessarily represent the correct temperatures but are as good as things get), my machine runs just below 70°C CPU temperature when idle, a bit above 70°C when used a bit, and heads for 80°C when there is a high load. Adding some more stress drives the temperature up to 83°C, 85°C or even 87°C. Somewhere between those numbers the machine usually just shuts down. I can fairly easily reproduce that by running yes along with a Quartz Composition, the machine just needs to heat up itself and the desk it is on for a while.

Yeah, that’s right. Instead of mimicking the behaviour when the battery runs down where you are first warned about a critical situation coming close and the machine is then sent to sleep carefully, Apple carefully ‘crafted’ their hard- and software to simply shut down when things get too hot (thus making all your unsaved data go AWOL, and triggering all the additional nuisances of making sure that your file systems, indices and backups are in a good state). Of course completely shutting down can be a reasonable course of action when the machine heats up by surprise. Say, because you put it on a stove or because the battery just went up in flames. But if the temperature is rising step by step while there is a high load on the system and the FAIL is completely predictable to a human onlooker, that’s not exactly what I’d call a surprise, it’s simply not caring about the users’ data, i.e. not caring for the only reason of the machine’s existence.

I’ll probably learn what is causing the problem tomorrow. To me it sounds a bit like the ventilation isn’t working correctly (to be honest there has never been a direct stream of air coming out of the machine’s back no matter how loud the fan was. Perhaps it’s just blocked. In which case – I was told – it’s not a warranty repair to ‘fix’ it. Because Apple didn’t ship the machine with the blocking stuff in place. They just shipped a faulty design that lets stuff get in and not out again while making it not user cleanable, I suppose… or it’ll be a new mainboard once more. It’s still the first one in this machine.

Anyhow, after explaining the problem, the guy said that it is probably caused by the battery (again). Most likely one of the cells in there stopped working – which apparently leaves you with a battery that thinks it is fully operational but fails to provide enough current or voltage to make the computer do more than its startup chime. A quick test showed that a different battery solved the problem and, voilà, things are working again. I really don’t know what I would do without those people.

So my current count for the last year is two MacBooks with a total of four top cases, four batteries, three main boards, and some other replacement part. Not only should that be quite expensive for Apple, it also makes the eco (energy / CO₂) profile of the MacBook much worse than it is anyway.

In a way I am happy because of this because it means I have a concrete problem that people can fix. On the other hand I’m unhappy because it’s yet another repair trip and yet another machine that starts being a collection of replacement parts.

The curious thing about the problem is that it’s not the battery simply being broken or having no contact with the machine. As you can see in the video, the MacBook can draw power to turn itself on for a moment. And it can do that over and over again. In addition, the machine does ‘see’ the battery and its current charge status.

With no entertainment during the train ride I could eavesdrop on my fellow travellers: Across the aisle there was a middle-aged to elderly couple. It looked as if they had been shopping. For travel entertainment he had gotten a daily newspaper and she read a picture book on Africa which they had just bought. Their conversation went like this.

She: Oh, this is nice!
He: Hmmmm.
She: Did you know that elephants…
He: Hmm.
She: And look at those impalas!
He: Hmmmmmmmm.
She: Mount Kilimanjaro is the highest ‘single’ mountain in the world.
He: Hm.
She: It’s 5892 metres high.
He: Six thousand metres, hmmm.
She:Oh, North Africa!
He: Hmmm.
She: Very pretty.
He: Hmmmm.
[…]

Of course he didn’t even look up from his paper once during this and the only reason why it didn’t continue indefinitely was because he fell asleep at some stage. The odd thing was that the Hmmmm invariably was very clear and loud.

The worst problems are of course those which aren’t easy to reproduce and which ‘just happen’ without leaving any traces. I had some of those in the past, like the screen flicker on the Titanium Powerbook which Apple failed to fix or even acknowledge (they exchanged all other parts of the machine instead for unknown reasons) or the ongoing problem of my MacBook losing its wireless network connection. These issues are particularly frustrating as unlike a keyboard that’s falling apart you can’t show it to the service person. By Murphy’s Law the problem will just not be present at that time. As a consequence you will know that the machine has a problem a few months after getting it but you may not be able to have that fixed before the warranty runs out.

Today, I was using my MacBook on the train. And after about half an hour Bang! the screen turned black. I first assumed that I had accidentally invoked the screensaver, but the machine had just decided to turn itself off. Holy friggin’ shit! While the MacBook’s battery life isn’t anything to write home about, it’s still between two and three hours, so I think I can rule battery problems out. In particular as four of the five battery status indicator lamps lit up when I checked the battery status.

Even worse, when I pressed the power button, it seemed that the screen’s backlight turned itself on, as did the sleep light, the DVD drive made its annoying ‘ejecting’ noise and after another second everything was shut down again. Dead. I repeated this a number of times, always to the same result. Then I went into black magic territory, removed and re-inserted the battery, did the SMC-reset dance [a ‘feature’ of which I think that I shouldn’t know the steps by heart because if the machines were good I never needed it] and none of those steps changed a thing.

After arriving home, having dinner and cheese I thought I’d give it another try. And the MacBook powered up just fine. As if nothing had happened. I hadn’t connected it to the power in the meantime, nothing. And obviously there isn’t a single log because the system just died before it could write any at first and later on it didn’t even come up. So I was left with a few trashed preference files and unsaved documents (although TextEdit’s auto-save feature recovered things quite well). I now know that there’s something fishy with the machine, that this could possibly happen again, but I have no idea how to get it fixed. Which is much more frustrating that the machine simply breaking.

Any hints?

And the impression is that the MacBook keyboard isn’t just mediocre, it’s downright poorly designed. I may be a bit conservative here, but I say that a keyboard serves a sole purpose: pressing keys. Apart from the keys being easy to find and easily pressed, pressing the key should give clear feedback (mechanical and possibly audible) that the key has been pressed. This feedback needs to be reliable and occur exactly at the moment the electronics of the keyboard register the key being pressed. And in a few places the MacBook’s keyboard downright fails to do that.

Those places are two locations on the space bar. If you press the space bar by putting your finger on it at the front of the key either at the location between the ‘C’ and the ‘V’ key or at the location between the ‘N’ and the ‘M’ key, it will frequently happen that you fully press the key, that you get the mechanical feedback of the key having been pressed and that, yet, no pressed space bar is registered by the computer. In short: Shoddy design.

A video of this – after having been strangely letterboxed and pixellated by Google Video can be seen below.

Allegedly they are only hiring friggin’ geniuses at Google. And yet, they insist on converting my nice H.264 video to really crappy quality Flash stuff and to put unescaped ampersands in the string they claim to be HTML for pasting into my web page.

This isn’t a huge issue while typing because I tend to hit the space bar more in the middle then. But the space bar – apart from being the most commonly used key on the keyboard while typing – is used in many applications while not typing as well as it has become the standard keyboard equivalent for scrolling down, going to the next item and possibly selecting – i.e. for doing the next reasonable thing. When using the space bar for those purposes, say for scrolling through a long web page or going through items in an RSS reader, you are not typing. That is, your fingers will not be on the keyboard’s home row but you may just try to tap the space bar with your index finger. As you probably don’t want to fiddle around with the mouse cursor while doing that, you will try to avoid touching the trackpad. — And then you’ll pretty much automatically end up using exactly the spots on the space bar which it poor design chooses to ignore unless you hit the key hard.

I have been told that keyboards and their internal design can vary between MacBook models and even different machines of the same model as they come from different suppliers. So not all of the keyboards are affected. But the two I had in my Core2Duo MacBook certainly have this problem and it’s pretty annoying.

I’m really not that much of a Bauhaus person in terms of aesthetics. But the whole form follows function thing does resonate with me and my idea of what makes good design. In recent years Apple’s focus has often been with form first and function then. This ranges from details like the FireWire port the wrong way round on iBooks, to it even being possible that ejecting a DVD scratches it, to all the hardware problems I had which go from breaks in the plastic on the MacBook to screen hinges breaking on the titanium Powerbook. Design isn’t just about the good looks. It’s also about making things that work and that can actually be manufactured.