Three bad Apples in five: it's 'gloves off' with Stevie wonder-boy
Published August 10, 2003
This is a last shot across the bows of Apple France and their paymasters across the Atlantic. My first and final one in public. Twice privately warned, they privately said "so sorry"!
Why, in the name of all the gods they worship in Cupertino, should buying a very expensive new Mac be like playing a non-fatal game of Russian roulette?
My daughter's PowerBook G4 is the second Mac in four I have bought partly dead straight out of the box, the tape and all the foam.
"Don't expect a rapid repair," one technician warned. "I'm not allowed to mend it. There are no 'special dispensations' except for VIPs. Apple's very fond of VIPs, but for the likes of ordinary people like you and me..."
If you count the Indigo iMac that a dealer took back in May 2001 because it wouldn't even start up, that makes three rotten Apples out of five in seven years. Had the first one not been completely dead, there'd have been no instant replacement.
Must we tolerate a 60 percent failure rate?
The PowerBook, sleek and gorgeous, refuses to spit out Apple's very own disk, which went in when I installed the Mac OS X 10.2.3 operating system. And this model comes with no emergency CD release mechanism of the kind you trigger with a unbent paper clip, once part of the toolbox.
The defect's mechanical, all right.
I know my way around Macs. Apple assistance got me nowhere, apart from a list of authorized fixers in Paris. That was after trying what the support guy "talked me through", just to be obliging. I'd done all but one of those five things already.
The DVD will unmount — that's to say, its icon vanishes from the desktop after noisy efforts to eject it from the innards — but it returns on deciding "I'm stuck".
So my daughter will be disappointed.
It's far from the end of the world; the PowerBook otherwise works fine. She's got the internet and most of her personal stuff shifted via ethernet this morning.
But I can run neither Apple's Hardware Test nor Alsoft's admirable Disk Warrior 3, which arrived in a packet from the United States last week after a wait of more than a month.
Checking a new Mac with DW is part of my maintenance rites.
Oh, and she can't play games.
I'm leaving her the choice between parting company with the machine for the days a repair will take or using what it can do for the weeks left before she goes back to school.
I suspect she'll opt for the repair.
As a budding teen, you want to display your toys. And you're dead if they don't play with style.
- Three bad Apples in five: it's 'gloves off' with Stevie wonder-boy
- Published: August 10, 2003
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- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Culture: Administrative
- Writer: Nick Barrett
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I haven't been as lucky as Jim. However, out of the more than a dozen Macs I've owned, I've had significant problems with only two. Apple was kind enough to replace one of my PowerBook G4s after a negligent Airborne delivery man left it out in the pouring rain so it was soaked through. They sent me a new TiBook which was an upgrade from the damaged one.
Sometimes I've had to ask to speak with a supervisor to get real action, but eventually Apple usually comes through. I have never received an Apple product that was dead on delivery.
As for the stuck disc, I've heard you can get them out by hitting the eject key (on F12) while starting up from scratch. If that doesn't work, send the computer in for service. In my experience, a repair by Apple is often back in less than a week of being sent.
Though my experiences with PowerBooks has not been absolutely perfect, I endorse them without reservation. They are the best laptops I've ever owned.
The bad Macs came from the same (small specialist) place, but the dealer's not at fault here, Jim.
Regarding very flash toilets, I'd not have known what you meant before that fuss over the iLoo (which, as we know, was not a hoax but saw the plug pulled after Rebecca B. called it the "WWW.C"). Also I have a friend who has a friend who collects/takes photos of lavatories around the globe. This is true. So if you know of any particularly striking ones in that small plot of yours squeezed in between America and Alaska...
But I digress. My piece was a rant and should be read as such, though my intent is perfectly serious. People at (Mac free help site) TechSurvivors get tetchy if I don't get out the AK-47 from time to time.
What really pisses us off in old Europe is being treated, in more respects than I care to detail, as second-class customers; furthermore Macs are damned expensive, though the high VAT is not Apple's fault.
As to the Diva, such service would almost incline me to want to live in the US. I wouldn't quarrel with anybody who says a good Mac is like a Rolls-Royce, once it's working.
There's good comment on the secrecy that irritates we hacks in this
'Why I Have to Write about Apple column in a special report. Does Stevie have any scatological schemes?
Bottom line: being an multi-billion dollar empire I love to hate doesn't exempt Apple from an obligation to explain itself sometimes.
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(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/7487)
I've not lived in the Europe. However, I do live in the Canadian protectorate where Apple is in name only. I've owned nine Macs and never had a serious problem. And this is coming from dealing with buying a Plus at $5K with a hard drive which arrived a couple of weeks later.
I had friends of mine who lived in the UK who were told modems were business tools, so I can conjecture your problems are the result of the business you are dealing with, not Apple.
Since they only got flush toilets in Europe a couple of years ago, this might be just a side-effect.