After having grown weary of the four major repairs which my first MacBook needed, I was tempted to replace it by a new one once the end of the one year warranty came near. While our local Mac shop does a great job at servicing the machines, I didn't want to end up arguing with people about whether or not whatever would break next would be the machine's fault or mine.
In addition to that with the university discount and the comfortable prices people pay for used Macs on eBay, it turned out that my loss in this would be around €200. Which for a year of computer usage is rather low – and would in fact make that first MacBook pretty much the cheapest computer I had since my Atari ST if you look at its cost per day. Besides, I somewhat doubt that the machine would have survived more than four years without falling apart which it would need to do to keep that low price stamp.
So, hooray, an all new MacBook sitting on my desk. With its slightly increased clock speed and its Core2Duo processor it is supposedly a bit faster than the one I had before and it can do 64bit stuff as well. But so far I didn't notice any difference. I quite like that. The machine just looks the same and behaves the same.
In fact, thanks to the MacBook's user-friendly design when it comes to replacing RAM and hard drives, my time to ‘migrate’ to the new machine was less than five minutes as I just had to pop out the battery, open three screws and swap the memory chips and hard drives of both machines.
The screen is a bit brighter than the old MacBook's. But its colours look a tiny bit colder to me. While according to what I saw on the web both the old and this new MacBook are affected by the 18bit screen problem, I think the problem can actually be seen on this machine while I couldn't spot it on the old one.
Fingers crossed that this MacBook will cause me less trouble than its predecessor…
Well that didn't help. Half a year later and I have a number of problems to report about this machine by now. [related blog post]
The first problem I had came from the battery. The computer died on me a few times rather than shutting itself down in ‘safe sleep’ mode a few times. Somehow the battery sorted itself out before I could have it replaced. But it left a bad taste in terms of reliability. Machines should never just lose power and all the data in their memory just because engineering is too weak. This problem was never really understood or resolved. But as the battery broke a few months later, I got a new one anyway.
The second problem is an oddity with the trackpad button: Pressing my wrist on the case a few centimetres to the right of the button will cause a click to happen. Obviously that's not as intended and it's really annoying when you’re typing and all of the sudden the text appears in a totally wrong place because you unknowingly clicked there. Replacing the topcase was supposed to fix this problem and my local Mac dealer did just that after giving Apple a few weeks to come up with the spare part. Interestingly, the new topcase seems to have just the same problem in a weaker fashion. I.e. pressing the topcase strongly right of the mouse button will still cause a click. Hopefully the level of force needed for this remains high enough for it not to be a real problem when using the machine. The issue does make me wonder, however, whether the button’s design is all that clever.
The third one, however, is much worse: The DVD drive has a tendency to scratch discs when ejecting them. The drive itself works just fine, but when ejecting discs it sometimes makes an unhealthy noise and the disc isn't ejected as far as it should be. After pulling the disc from the drive, there’ll be a straight scratch on the bottom in the direction of pulling it out. Needless to say that this is completely unacceptable as it makes inserting discs of any value in the drive a somewhat risky affair. I got my OS X.5 DVD scratched by this (which I could luckily get to work again after polishing it a bit), but this left a really bad feeling. When working on the trackpad button problem, the dealer also tried to somehow fix this by straightening or widening the drive’s slot. That seems to have done the trick. ✓
The fourth problem is unclear: My network connection keeps breaking down. Apple didn’t offer any hint to this being a software problem with their OS and asking the local Mac experts suggets that the router we have is generally known to be a good player with Macs. So I started suspecting that this could be some sort of hardware problem in the MacBook. Particularly as knocking the case left of the keyboard while the problem occurs does improve connectivity. Unfortunately our local dealer couldn't spot any visible problems with that, so it remains unclear what exactly it is and how it can be fixed. [See a video on this and an explanation of it]. ✗
A bit later a fifth problem occurred: The MacBook simply shut down while I was using it on the train. A day later, any attempt to use it without the charger attached led to the machine dying. [See a video of this.] Yet a day later, our local Mac dealer needed a few seconds to see that there must be a problem with the machine's battery. We replaced it and things are working fine again, battery-wise. ✓
While I’m not optimistic, I still hope that I’ll get all of these problems fixed. But it’s much more effort than I wanted to make.
After a while, new problems were added.
Problem six is that the machine just shut down when being used heavily. While my local dealer couldn't reproduce that, I could. And I had the machine turn itself off (thus destroying all unsaved data and state) both in my office and at home while running high loads such a video encoding or 3D graphics. ✗
Problem seven is that the top case cracked in the typical place just as my first MacBook’s did, because of Apple's poor design / choice of plastic for it. Let's hope I can still get this fixed even though the machine is out of warranty because the top case was only replaced last December and is significantly younger than a year. Plus, it's obviously a design flaw. I have seen six of these cracks in friends’ and family’s MacBooks already and the internet knows about plenty of those as well.
Next: iPod (3G)