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.

Of the problems I had described last month this repair is supposed to fix the overly sensitive trackpad button: The button used to register clicks when you pressed your wrist down on the handrest to the right of it. Which, in some situations was really annoying as it vigorously typing with the machine on your lap could just mean that you inadvertently clicked in some other part of the text while typing, thus re-locating the cursor, inserting what you typed at the wrong place and causing a bit of a mess. A topcase replacement was supposed to fix it and after just a few weeks Apple was able to supply the replacement topcase and I got it exchanged this morning before the christmas shopper frenzy broke into the store. They also tried to resolve the DVD scratching problem while they had the machine open by somehow widening the drive’s slot which wasn’t perfectly straight a little.

My first impression of the repairs is that the DVD drive now works without discs getting stuck and making scratching noises when ejecting discs. So that has definitely been improved. I’m a bit unsure about the topcase, though. While this one isn’t as sensitive to non-clicks as the old one was, the problem is still there. Essentially, pressing the top case firmly a bit to the right of the trackpad button around the height where the trackpad button ends still registers as mouse click. With the new topcase you need to press rather firmly, so this may just be a non-issue in actual use. Still makes me wonder about the design of the thing, though. If you have a MacBook, try this out with yours and let me know the result. It’d be interesting to know whether this is a general issue or whether I’m just the king of wonky topcases.

Unfortunately – but expectedly – the main issue I am having with the machine, the intermittent Airport connection problems remain. I am still convinced that there is some kind of hardware issue involved in this as occasionally the problem can be ‘turned on and off’ by doing things like slapping the machine or changing its angle on my lap. Unfortunately this happens quasi randomly and I couldn’t demonstrate the problem to the people capable of fixing it yet. With the christmas rush they didn’t have time to do further tests now, so this has to wait until next year. Hopefully it will be fixed then.

Let me note that I’d still prefer a machine that ‘just works’.

Battery

The first problem I had with the machine was related to the battery. Just like the previous machine’s its battery wasn’t doing well. In particular I had at least three instances where the machine died when running out of battery power. Rather than first warning me about that and then storing its precious RAM contents to the hard drive, that is.

I was very annoyed by this as it completely ruins any trust you could have in the battery. And what’s really odd is that Apple did change their hard- and software a few years back to include ‘safe’ sleep which actually stores stuff to the hard drive rather than just keeping it in RAM and running a real danger of losing data when battery power runs out. But my impression is that this has been a step back.

Despite being in a more more risky state, I never lost data because of power running out on my PowerBook G4. This was because the machine did go to sleep early enough and because very little power was needed to keep the RAM contents alive, thus making even a lengthy period of sleep before recharging feasible.

Compare that to the current Intel line up. Not only did Apple switch to less reliable batteries, the speed at which the battery is drained when the machines are sleeping also suggests that they absolutely need a safe sleep mode because you couldn’t hope the machines to buffer their memory for another day on whatever charge may be left in the battery. But with the new, disk-based, ‘safe-sleep’ mode sometimes failing to kick in before the battery runs out, all this is worthless.

For me, in this case, it took a while before the repair guy at the local was back from his holidays and somehow the problem had resolved itself by then. You’ll hear people mumbling about ‘battery calibration’ in such situations. But I really think What the fuck?! If Apple (or anybody else for that matter) can’t calibrate or whatever their batteries well enough to keep the machine powered long enough to do its job, then perhaps they should not ship them.

Second Mouse Button

From time to time I was irritated because text I typed ended up in a completely different part of the editor than the one I had been typing it. Usually I suspected that I inadvertently touched the MacBook’s trackpad and ‘clicked’ somewhere, thus moving the cursor. And thus it took me a while to figure out what was really going on there:

Apparently my MacBook’s trackpad button developed a secret twin. Pressing the hand rest a few centimetres to the right of the trackpad will cause a mouse click to happen. Hence, just pressing on the handrest will trigger clicks. And from time to time that just happens when you’re typing.

I showed the problem to the local dealer and he said the top case will need to be replaced. That should happen soon. Let’s just say that for the three MacBooks our family owned we’ll have used six top cases then…

Scratching

A more serious problem is the DVD drive. It started scratching disks when ejecting them. The noise of that is slightly unpleasant and the disc will not come out as far as it should after such an ejection.

Of course this is totally unacceptable. I haven’t really lost a DVD to this so far, but let’s say I was less than amused when my X.5 install DVD came out with a long straight scratch after the installation. Reading the disk in another DVD drive after that failed, but after some polishing I managed to copy it to a disk partition in case I need it again (duplicating OS X bootable volumes seems to require some magic chants from what I’ve seen; and it requires double layer writable DVDs which I don’t have)

I had my local dealer look at it and they spotted that the upper edge of the drive’s slot is bent downward slightly. And by that I mean slightly. A millimetre at most. And apparently that presses the disc down which causes it to be pushed out over some part inside the machine. As the plastic of the case above the DVD slot is a bit wobbly, I don’t really think that the tolerances can be that low for that part of the MacBook. Perhaps the DVD drive moved a little as well.

Anyway, our local experts promised to look at it when they exchange the top case. Perhaps the problems are even related by some part having become dislocated inside the machine and putting pressure on the wrong parts? We’ll see.

Airport

I mentioned my ongoing Airport problem before. Essentially the connection almost dies from time to time and is either completely lost or has ping times measured in seconds or minutes rather than in milliseconds. As I had this problem on both my MacBooks, I always thought it was buggy software. But recently I started suspecting that the problem may be a hardware one instead. Perhaps some broken contact, wobbly wire, anaemic antenna or so.

But recently I had the problem more and more after moving the machine. Which somehow suggests that it may be related to some hardware aspect if it only occurs after I carried the machine around or at least moved it somehow. I investigated this a little and discovered that sometimes just slapping the machine a little tends to improve the situation.

I.e. I am doing this: When the network is broken, I start a ping command to google.com (I used to use apple.com for that because obviously Apple should assist in analysing problems with their products but somehow they’re blocking those now so Google have to take their typical role of reliable internet infrastructure provider). Usually this should return in 100-200 milliseconds. And – given that DNS resolving works – in such situations I’ll have ping times which could be a whole second, or even fifteen.

The thing I noticed was that starting to slap the computer in that situation would temporarily reduce the ping times back to their normal lengths. And stopping to slap it usually makes them go up again. This is so absurd, I had to film it (video is best with sound to hear the knocking):

[Ho-hum, Google managed to compress everything interesting in the video to oblivion. You are supposed to see how the ping times in the Terminal window on screen vary with the hitting. Just send an e-mail if you want a better quality of that]

After this experience, I strongly started to suspect that this is a hardware problem after all. I’ll just need drive that message home to the people who can fix it. Unfortunately the quick look that our local dealer had didn’t reveal any obvious problems like loose wires or semi-broken contacts. So I’m expecting the worst in terms of annoyance.

Conclusion

No, I’m not feeling lucky about this MacBook either. It’s not reliable and it’s causing too many problems. And I haven’t mentioned how annoying its constant fan spinning is yet…

Not the biggest issue in my day to day usage of the machine, but obviously it hurt me when DJing, so I wanted it fixed. The bad thing about it is that you need to get a new mainboard to resolve this problem as the audio ports are soldered right onto it. Which technically makes this quite a big fix. To complicate things even further, Apple didn’t seem to have the correct mainboards in stock and it took a few weeks or so for the replacement to arrive. But today it finally was there and could be replaced.

I still have to double check the audio ouput’s quality but on first listen this one seems to be all right. Unfortunately it seems that something must have gone wrong when the MacBook was reassembled: The charger does its job properly but its green/red light remains off now. And the sensor for the magnet which invokes the sleep mode must have been dislocated. At least the MacBook doesn’t go to sleep when the lid is closed. Argh! Looks like I’ll be off to the Mac dealer yet again.

A treat I really like about having the machine fixed is that the procedure includes a cleaning of the screen (I’ll have to ask what is a good way to do that as I’m always scared to damage the screen when doing it myself). Another treat was that replacing the mainboard also meant replacing the machine’s fan(s). The fan had become annoyingly loud recently and the dealer told me that there was plenty of dust blocking the air’s passage which he removed. How can the dust even get in there when the fan is blowing air out all the time? And how can you build machines which easily accumulate dust that affects their performance in a place where it cannot be easily removed?

A non-treat about this repair is that the MacBook is a completely new computer now. I won’t be able to use it on the departmental network right away because of the different MAC address. A number of OS X’s preferences (like my turning off the Caps Lock key or the asking for a password when waking from sleep(!)) seem to be bound to the MAC address (that ByHost business, I suppose) or something and were re-set when starting the machine again. And, most annoyingly, I lost (another) iTMS registration this way as iTunes isn’t smart enough to realise this is the same machine. Now supposedly iTunes lets me revoke all prior registrations and everybody’d be happy. But the help on this is really sparse and the location where I’d expect to find the button for this (on my iTMS account page next to the number of authorised machines) is empty. (Hints?)

I started a site with a number of the all the great and not-so-great-working products I am using. People keep saying that I am overly negative about their quality. While I think I’m entirely reasonable to expect that expensive machines I buy work and keep working for more than a few months. Judge for yourself.