The Best Laid Plans...

I amâ??or wasâ??the proud owner of an iBook G4.  I still have the thing sitting on my dresser gathering dust, a little lighter from a serious gutting.  My anger over the whole situation that Iâ??m about to lay out for you is still fresh and strong, and I have yet to truly think of the MacBook Iâ??ve bought to replace my iBook as my ownâ?¦my preciousssss.  Perhaps itâ??s because of the fact that Iâ??ve already had to take it in once because of a malfunctioning hard drive.  But I get ahead of myself.  Please travel back with me to the year 2005.

My Dell took a nosedive that blissful summer.  I still have it in the closet next to my collectible Army of Darkness figurine that my wife will (smartly) not allow me to display in the house, and I really don’t know why I have not yet thrown it away.  Perhaps it’s because in the back of my mind I need a little reminder every once in a while that, as low-cost as Dell computers are, you’ll pay for your purchase in time wasted restarting programs that crash because you decided to open them and customer service that makes you want to slit your eyeballs open with even more ferocity than most customer service support lines.  And that’s saying something.  I was in graduate school at the University of Idaho and had an office across from a Mac user.  Off and on I had wandered over to her office, peeking over her shoulder as she worked.  She offered to show me the basics and I quickly learned just how much effort Apple had put into making their computers easier to use.  Previous to this experience I had only used Mac’s Classic operating system, which basically amounts to a crappy version of Windows without any usability (I know there are some Classic fans out there that are probably crying tears of blood right now, but they know deep down in their hearts that I am right).  She introduced me to Mac OS X, and the rest is history.

I ordered my iBook over the phone and spent the next three years raving about how much better my Mac was than any PC (Yeah, I was one of these people).  Imagine my surprise when, about 10 months ago, my laptop started doing crazy things like shutting off when I disconnected the power cord.  So much for my “portable” device.  Now, I had heard in the past that Mac was notorious for making crappy batteries, or to be more exact, that battery technology in general wasn’t really that good, and that it was a good idea to replace any laptop battery ever year and a half or so.  I had no idea that the result of ignoring these warnings would be a fried motherboard and deeply entrenched sadness.  I was at a crossroads, to use an epic phrase completely unnecessary for this particular situation.  The computer was almost four years old.  Buying a new motherboard and replacing it would be about one half to three quarters of the cost of a new laptop.  And there was no guarantee that when I fixed the motherboard something else wouldn’t crap out within a week.  So I bought a new MacBook.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this post Iâ??ve had one problem, and it has prevented me from fully enjoying my new piece of equipment.  Perhaps â??enjoyingâ? is not the right word, but it has prevented me from relaxing even for a moment and has made me more cautious than I think one needs to be regarding information stored on a computer.

About three days after I purchased this MacBook I ran into what one might call a “glitch.”  My computer had been sitting dormant for several hours in sleep mode with the screen closed.  When I approached my laptop I noticed that, instead of a pulsating sleep light, which is what you traditionally see, the light was solid.  I had not paid attention enough before this point to know whether this was a new feature so I thought nothing of it.  When I opened the screen nothing happened.  I closed it and opened it again, and nothing happened.  I did a hard restart and got a picture of a folder and a question mark.  Of course, I immediately felt my bowels loosen.  I loaded the install CD to reinstall OS X.  I thought, since I had only just started to transfer information to my new computer I really didn’t have anything to lose by wiping it all and starting again.  When I attempted to run the diagnostic on the install disk I realized what was wrong.  It didn’t recognize that there was a hard drive in the computer.  Let me repeat that.  It didn’t recognize, on a brand new computer, that there was a hard drive.

There were several possibilities.  The hard drive could have somehow gotten corrupted.  Of course, I thought this completely unlikely due to the fact that nothing had happened to the computer, physically or otherwise, since it had been working just hours before.  There could have been a communication problem between the motherboard and the hard drive, or the processer and the hard drive, but again, there had been no physical shock delivered to the system, so anything like that seemed unlikely.  After changing my shorts, I took the laptop back to Best Buy (yes, I bought it at Best Buy, and I know, I know, I know, I’m stupid) and had the “Geek Squad” take a look at it.  Never have a group of individuals been so aptly named, and never have I been more irritated at a corporate behemoth for using so kitschy a phrase to build a bridge to their customers.  They opened my laptop and I told them what I knew.  They looked at me like I had come in wearing a leather loincloth, dragging a large club by one hand and a recently bludgeoned cave girl by the other, speaking in monosyllabic grunts and farts.  Of course, I was betrayed by that goddamned machine and it immediately started working.  They reinstalled OS X and I left with a fully operational laptop.  Now because the MacBook worked when they started it up, they never had a chance to troubleshoot and figure out what caused the problem…

After I finished that last paragraph I closed my computer to have dinner.  I opened it and had the same problem once again.  Folder, question mark.  Luckily I had backed up all of my files and music on an external hard drive, including this article, and was able to recover all of it and install it on this new MacBook, which they traded out for my other new MacBook that wasnâ??t over two weeks old.  I had to upgrade to the MacBook with a 250 gigabyte hard drive and a faster processor because they were almost a month behind on shipments from Mac because of the weather in Seattle.  They also have a policy that they cannot order products from other Best Buy stores because of problems with theft.  All of this meant that I had to spend another $400 on top of the exchange in order to upgrade, and it also means that I will probably never buy anything expensive from Best Buy again.  Itâ??s not that itâ??s their fault, itâ??s just that they were less than helpful until I started cursing.

I still love my Mac.  I had the chance to buy another brand and I didnâ??t.  All that being said I now know that, no matter how gimmicky Macs get, they are still just regular computers with some bells and whistles thrown in.  They are definitely more resilient, and they definitely impress where it counts, but at the end of the day I think that, given my recent experience, I would be much less likely to switch if I was a PC user knowing what I know now.  Like most things, this is a love-hate relationship, and right now thereâ??s just a little more hate than love.  Hopefully the scales will turn soon.