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The curse of the early adopter

Oh boy. I am so tired of computer problems. I am writing this blog entry from my wife’s MacBook, as I am currently without a working computer. Blogging about my computer problems is a bit cathartic. You may remember my entry from early October entitled, “My four-day ordeal with 10.4.8.” I spent 28 hours over a period of four days recovering from a system upgrade failure. Well, November easily tops October for computer pain. My MacBook Pro gets fixed by Apple not once, not twice, but three times in one month. Read on…

NOTE: If you have sent me an email in the past month or so and are still waiting for a response, it’s likely due to the fact that time I would normally spend responding to emails has been spent dealing with computer problems.

I purchased the first generation of the MacBook Pro in February, and over the course of the past nine or so months, I knew that I would need to send this computer in for repair. This was Apple’s first experience with the Intel chip in a portable enclosure and problems were likely. There were lots of little problems - flaking keyboard paint, a blown speaker, and a problem waking from sleep from time to time. None of these problems were serious enough to limit my productivity, and as an AppleCare subscriber, I had three years to address these problems.

When I was in New York City in early November, I started having a problem where the computer would lock up for 5-10 minutes during which the cursor would turn into the infamous beach ball and there would be a correspondingly loud sound below the keyboard that sounded like hard drive access. This would happen sometimes 2-3 times in one hour, making it impossible to get any work done. When I returned home from New York City, I copied all my data to my kids’ iMac and prepared to send the computer in for repair. It took almost two days to copy the data off the MacBook Pro due to intermittent disk copy failure and corrupted files. Not fun.

For four days, I worked off the iMac in the kids’ bedroom. This worked mostly ok, it was just a pain not to be mobile and not have the ability to work from my office. I guess I could have moved the iMac to the office - it just would have limited my ability to work at night, as well. Apple replaced the logic board, the keyboard, and the blown speaker. I spent six to eight hours copying the data back to the MacBook Pro from the iMac. I was back online. Unfortunately, after just a day of use, the problem with the hanging system came back.

So, here I go again - I copied all of the data that changed over the past 24 hours back to the iMac, and dropped the computer off at the Apple Store. At this point, I believed the problem to be a bad hard drive. What else could it be? The logic board had already been replaced, and this would have been the most likely culprit. I could not replicate the problem at the Apple Store, but I was able to kill disk activity after running the CPU at 100% for more than 15 minutes while copying 10GB of data. This was the Thursday before Thanksgiving and I was off to Albuquerque on Sunday for a nine-day trip. I asked Apple to send the computer to Albuquerque. In the meantime, I copied my data from the iMac over to a portable hard drive so I could work off my wife’s MacBook during our trip.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I noticed that the status of my repair on the Apple website had changed to “need more information.” I called Apple to resolve the situation. It seems that the Apple repair depot in Houston, Texas, could not replicate the system hang or the disk access failure problems. Apple could not confirm that the hard drive was having problems. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with Apple trying to convince them that what I needed was a new hard drive - what else could it be? On Wednesday, the computer was shipped to Albuquerque, and I received it on Friday. Apple replaced the hard drive, and replaced the logic board…again…a logic board that I had for only one day.

I spent Friday copying files back to the MacBook Pro. The insanity was over, or so I thought. This evening while preparing to upload some new photos to Flickr, I put the computer to sleep to carry the computer into the kitchen at my in-laws house. When waking from sleep, the screen was blank. I rebooted - it froze on the bootup screen the white Apple logo. I rebooted again - the screen went grey for a minute and then the much dreaded flashing folder with the question mark appeared accompanied by strange licking sounds from the hard drive. Every trick failed - booting from the repair disk, attempting to reinstall the OS, mounting the drive in target disk mode, zapping the PRAM, resetting the power management unit. Nothing. The disk is dead. Tomorrow morning, I am headed to the Apple Store in Albuquerque to drop off my computer for the third time this month. Ack!

I don’t even know how many hours I have spent on this in November - diagnosing problems, copying files, visiting the Apple Store, etc. It may be more than 100 hours in November. It has had a toll on both my personal and work responsibilities this month. This latest hard drive failure will likely result in the loss of 20 or 30 irreplaceable photos and about 4-6 hours of work. I probably won’t get my computer back until Thursday or Friday.

What amazes me about this experience is that Apple just replaced the faulty hard drive and here it fails. My first thought was that Apple didn’t replace the drive at all, but not only was the drive clean, but I believe the drive manufacturer changed when looking in the Apple System Profiler.

I remain an Apple fan, but I am starting to be persuaded that purchasing the first generation of an Apple product is probably a bad idea (I say this and then I look forward to purchasing an Apple phone, if it comes to pass). This is not my only bad experience as an early adopter.

UPDATE 1: 11/27/06: The Albuquerque Apple Store did not have a 120GB replacement drive in stock for an in-store repair, so my computer is off to the repair depot in Houston, Texas. I expect to get it back on Thursday or Friday. *sigh*

UPDATE 2: 11/30/06: My repaired MacBook Pro was delivered by DHL this morning…with a new hard drive. Another 4+ hours expected on data transfer, updates, etc.

UPDATE 3: 01/03/07: Everyone - it died again this weekend, on the way to a funeral sadly enough. The one-month old hard drive is clicking and I get the flashing question mark again. I did not make a backup since my last hard drive replacement and have lost a month of work, vacation photos, and email. I’m going to send the drive off to a data recovery service. I’m on the phone with Apple now trying to get this resolved. This situation is absurd. I’ll post a blog entry about this later.

I’m sad to hear about all the issues you’ve had. I think I will wait until the second generation of Macbooks come out…*sigh* but I woudl really like a new laptop now. Good luck!

Thanks - I am copying my files back now….let’s hope this is the last time for awhile.

Over the years of buying tech gadgets, the more ‘bleeding edge’ I bought, the more bleeding they were. I’ve since learned my lesson, however I feel your pain with regards to apple repairs. You are lucky that you deal direct with apple in the US, here in Australia we have to deal with 3rd party repairers which is not only difficult, but have extremely slow turn arounds. Hope that gives you some comfort in some way.

cheers mate!

if you continue to have issues after this last repair, let me know so i can help out.

Everything is working great, so far. Thank you for the offer!

Wow this sounds very familiar. I purchased my Macbook Pro in April and have been battling with the beach ball hang and clicking hard drive. It has not gone to Apple yet because I need my computer for work. But it seems to get progresively worse and will hang every hour or so. The last time it got this bad I erased the hard drive and it seemed to work alright for another month. Now I am back to the one hour of productivity before restart. I’m on my way to the apple store today.

You should have bought a PC. Just joking. The problem with your Macbook is not just an Apple Computer problem. Anytime there is a new software program or new piece of computer hardware there is bound to be bugs. The design should improve with time, it just sounds like you were a guinea pig. Luckily for you the hardware was probably still under warranty and not costly as far as having to buy new equipment. I’m sure it would stink to loose data on your drive though.

[...] late November 2006, I posted a blog entry entitled “The curse of the early adopter.” Unfortunately, this story did not end in November, as I had hoped. Since my posting, [...]

My Imac’s hard drive is failing. It didn’t fail so far. I can back up my data, but still it suck. Almost 3 grand premium computer and only 9 months of light use and it is already failing on me. I have 4 year old sharp laptop and still it runs like a beast.