Thank you Apple. I have had my Powerbook for 15 months now and I'd like to give you an update on it...
The impish nature of your product fist came to light when the power adaptor stopped working just a few months from new. Oh the fun I had trying to get a new one while in Mongolia as even with Applecare (costing a few hundred quid) you couldn't find a way to send one out to me. Surfing your support forum I felt a warm glow that I had joined a select group of Apple users - actually not that select, there were loads of them, and I was only admitted as a junior (it was my first power-adaptor to go kaput, not my 3rd, 4th, 5th...)
I think next was the DVD burner - what you so amusingly call a 'super'-drive. One day it just point-blank refused to burn DVDs anymore. The entertainment of buying a new type of DVD every time I went to a computer shop and then the suspense of seeing if it would work or not continued for months. My coaster collection is now the envy of my friends and I’ve even had to start giving them away to the local taxi drivers so they can dangle them from the rear-view mirror and blind-themselves with reflections at hilariously critical moments. My DVD drive problem entitled me to join another not-so-select group on the apple support forum who had all had 'super'-drives; I think you should rename that branch the “Coaster Club” in honor or all the people who didn’t know they were beta-testers.
Moving along a couple of months and I was now in Kazakhstan. Yep, the land of Borat and copper-line modem dial-ups. Ho, ho, ho (well it is Christmas), the joyous time I spent trying to connect to a local ISP was increased ten-fold due to the speaker on the laptop's modem not working. Was the line engaged, was my ISP not answering, had I got a crossed line with Borislav as he discussed this year’s water mellon harvest with the Central Committee? I guess I’ll just never know and will miss out on corning the Kazak mellon-futures, at least for this year.
And finally, to seal 2006, you gave me the best present at all. Did you know I had time on my hands and was rapidly running out of books to read? Trying to recover the data from my hard-drive has been a most enjoyable challenge, I must thank you all for giving me a puzzle that was so complicated it took several days to solve. Not including any software in the OS that could deal with the failure was a brilliant step as it took me several extra hours to find, download and run a program that would recover the data.
However, despite all the fun I’ve had with my Mac I think it’s time we took a break from one another for a while (this will probably be enforced by the amount of time I hear Applecare takes to turn around repairs). When the laptop does come back I think it will be time to grow-up and get a serious computer. One that has parts that aren’t cutting-edge but will, hopefully, work for at least a couple of years before they give up the ghost.
Thankfully I still have my trusty work laptop. It’s a Prostar, not very common as you get them put together to spec rather than off the shelf. It weights a ton, the fans wail like a banshee, and it’s made of a very boring grey plastic. It has traveled with me for over 10,000 km off-road in Mongolia and for at least 200 hrs of vibrating around in the back of a Mi8 helicopter. It’s been used at +35 Celcius and stored at -30 C. It’s a year older than my Powerbook but it still works. Every single bit of it (right, back-up now just in case…).
Happy Christmas.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Nomad, here I am in Mongolia with my iBook G4 burnt out... and nowhere to go. You were lucky that you could get service from AppleCare -- even if they couldn't send you the part! I can't even find out who I should contact!
Apple's China Service Centre tells me that they can't accept a laptop sent in from abroad for servicing. If I pop over the border to China, of course, no problem! Oh Apple, Apple! Why hast thou forsaken me?
(By the way, I don't have the gripes you do about the product. Even if they can't repair my Mac, I'll buy another one. No way will I switch to a Windows machine!)
Hmmm, guess you’re in a tight spot… Do you know what exactly the problem is? Is it a grey-screen-of-death-on-boot-up problem or something else?
Is your iBook covered by AppleCare? If so phone them up in the country where you registered it and get a file number for your problem, then if your applecare runs out before you can get the laptop back to them it should still be covered.
I have a copy of the Disk-Warrior CD in UB that #may# be able to boot up your laptop to recover files from a kaput HDD. If you want to try that then leave me another message here with a e-mail or phone I can contact you on, but I won’t be back in UB until next week.
If you are interested, my Powerbook G4 could be up for sale for the right price (100Gb, 2Gb Ram, 15 inch, superdrive, iSight camera). It’s hardly been used since Apple replaced the HDD in Bangkok at Christmas.
I can’t believe how bad AppleCare service is if you aren’t in a city with an Apple service centre. When my power-supply failed they couldn’t send me a new one unless it was to my UK address where I’d registered the AppleCare.
Post a Comment