Apple Finally Fixed My MacBook Problems
This week we pick up where I left off about two weeks ago regarding my MacBook lemon situation. I took it to the Apple store in Houston (during my spring break) where they claimed they would be able to do the following in-house without the need to ship it off: replace the discolored case (2nd discoloring), replace the backlight inverter that kept failing as well as the LCD bezel which kept falling out, in addition to the keyboard housing which had a hairline crack all throughout. Notice: this is a long, mostly meaningless post - scroll down to the bottom for a summary.
Near the end of my spring break, I got a call from the Apple store telling me they would not be able to repair it in-house as they lacked the parts, which they told me they had ordered the day I dropped it off. Regardless, I didn’t have much of a choice left but to let them ship it off to their repair depot, leaving me without a laptop for the flight home and the entire next week. When I dropped it off for repair initially I had mentioned how the first time my MacBook was sent to a repair depot, the new case housing they had replaced was horribly fitted. The Apple store genius agreed with me without hesitation saying the repair depot quality of work wasn’t exactly top-notch, and there I was later that week telling them it was okay to send it off to the repair depot.
Yesterday the MacBook arrived in my inbox at school and I went to pick it up after my visual design class, expecting a pristine and functional MacBook. Upon opening it I was greeted with a massive 3-inch long, 1/2-inch wide scratch right in front of the Apple logo on the display lid. In addition, there were the remnants of a torn off sticker.. like when you remove a non-vinyl sticker and the paper junk stays behind - yeah, all over a 4-inch diameter region of the laptop. They didn’t even put effort into taking the sticker off, half of it was still there. I flipped it over to find another equally massive scratch extending from the battery to the case.
I didn’t even turn it on before I was on my way to the Apple store, with a smile on my face. I knew that this was my third incident. Apple has a company rule that (not sure if it’s a “written” rule though) that they will replace your Mac on the third problem where the previous solutions were repairs and not replacements. However, I think there might be some restrictions to this rule and that your problems must be substantial, etc etc.
Unfortunately, the store was crowded and I had to tolerate signing up for a Genius bar appointment that wasn’t for another three hours. Luckily, I was able to pull an employee aside and ask them to point out the manager to me. The manager was ultra cool and after I started to say “third inci..” he was pretty much in a “say no more” stance and set everything up for replacement.
I spent my time waiting in the Apple store by helping other customers:
- informing a guy that iPods can’t crossfade music and that crossfade is limited to iTunes software at the moment
- convincing another guy to wait a few weeks for CS3 to come out and correcting the Apple store employee who stated that the CS3 Web Premium Bundle costs $999 when in really costs $1599
- telling an interested Apple TV onlooker that the little media device could be hacked to do pretty much anything
- informing another Apple employee making friendly discourse with a customer that the iPhone will not sport 3G WWAN in its June release but will in the next revision
- sharing the joys of WebKit nightlies with a MacBook Pro tinkerer who was checking his Facebook account
And if you read this blog, you’ve probably done the same at one time or another whether you’ve enlightened Best Buy customers about NewEgg or fiddled with regedit on demo PCs at CompUSA.
After another hour or so, they had filed all the paper work and given me the RAM I upgraded from my old MacBook. They didn’t even care that I still had the original 2×256MB RAM sticks somewhere at home. Also, by some other fluke the MacBook they gave me came with a gigabyte of RAM. Before leaving I asked them what they did with the old MacBook as I still had a few entries in Keychain that I wasn’t sure I had wiped clean. They said they don’t become refurb machines and that the hard drive gets wiped before sent out.
The replacement machine sitting in front of me is a newer, less-egg-cooking Core 2 Duo model. The Core 2 Duo MacBooks are supposed to run considerably cooler than the Core Duo MacBooks - a claim I’ll have to test on my own.
Or, if you would like this entire post in under 140 characters:
Moral of the story: either avoid first generation products in general or take advantage of Apple’s rule of three. Over the entire life of my LemonBook, Apple has had it at their repair depot for about 6-7 weeks. I can’t even begin to imagine what that would have been like, had the MacBook been my only computer. Hopefully this will be the last post you’ll ever read about my MacBook.
Yeah, I’m in the same boat as you are. I’ll be making the 3 1/2 hour drive to the nearest Apple Store here pretty soon to see if I can get them to replace my discolored LemonBook again (second time for discoloration, 3rd visit to repair depot all together - see previous comment for the run down lol).
I think your advice of not buying a first generation product is a good one. But, if you do decide to take your chances on one, be sure to get AppleCare. It’s paid for itself more than once for me already.
That’s really cool of Apple to hand you over a newer model, pity you had to go through months of trouble to get things sorted out.
Congrats Paul, I’m almost to my one year anniversary with my BlackBook, and the only problem I’ve had is a wonky trackpad which was quickly replaced with a new top case, but other than that my 1st Rev MacBook is perfect :).
Awesome news Paul. If I can add my tip regarding Apple retail. Get to know the staff, I don’t mean stalk them and such. Yet build up a rapport with one or two of them. Swap tips with them, wind them up about Apple rumours, suggest hacks to solve common problems - in my case I showed a couple of staff members the magic noise killer (When it still worked on the first gen mac book pros)
The number of people I’ve taken to my Apple store to buy their first mac as a switcher is getting crazy, as such when I just pop in to have a mooch round, I’m usually greeted by name and when I had problems with my laptop they didn’t hesitate to replace it. Even though they were of the opinion at that point it was very hit and miss to get a none whistling Gen 1 macbook pro, and they were correct the replacement still whined - but they still put the effort in for me.
That kind of customer service is invaluable and to some extent can actually help them secure sales, whether it is from your friends or from other customers who you get waved at as an example of a successful switcher.
That truly is a horror story, but I’m glad you found a solution. The MacBooks seem to me to have had their fair share of problems. I’m happy with my PowerBook for now, even though I can surely cook eggs on it too!
Congratulations! I don’t know how I’d cope a week without my Macbook (used daily for nearly a year now).
But I will have to take it in for repair soon too. I’m having flickering backlight and discoloration issues. And it slid off my lap last week and the left hinge got knocked out of socket., which I’m sure I could fix, but I’m not opening it up to void my warranty.
Glad to hear you got a shiny new MacBook for your troubles. :D
*ouch*
I’m so glad that I’m not aware of any problems with my Macbook (ignorance can definitely be bliss) as I don’t even have the opportunity here in Vancouver to go to an Apple store. I’d have to go around “naked” (you know that feeling that you have when you don’t wear a watch?) while I ship it off to be fixed.
I guess Apple didn’t drop a legal agreement of some sort preventing you from sharing that they replaced your machine? I know *cough* someone who had their 1st gen ailing MacBook replaced with a MacBook Pro but Apple requested that the individual not share news of the trade.
Regardless, great news that you have a new machine. To be honest, your 1st gen was looking a little ghetto. What with the loose lcd frame and all.
Good to hear you got it back. Any chance you could knock up an idiots guide to fiddling with nightly webkits? I always get worried when it says ‘build it yourself’, but no one ever seems to want to suggest ‘how’ exactly…
Glad you got that sorted Paul, what a nightmare!
I’m waiting to make the switch to Mac when Leopard comes out, but on hearing faint rumours of a possible new iMac, I’m not sure if I will want to get caught up in any first gen Apple-product-nightmares myself after having read about your catalogue of problems with the MacBook.
Oh well, when June comes, it’s going to be the age old Apple question: To buy, or not to buy (when will the next model be out?) :/
Visiting the Apple store is sort of hell. It’s frustrating how much misinformation the “geniuses” dish out to customers. Sometimes I wish I worked there but I would probably get fired for telling people how to hack their hardware. :)
@Adam: You don’t have to build it if you don’t want to just download the latest dmg: http://nightly.webkit.org/
Building it is generally for those that want to tinker with the source and compile it themselves.
You inspired me to visit the Apple Store again today. I have had my top case replaced 4 times I think, I’ve lost count.
My tip regarding working with Applecare/Apple is to go to an independent Mac store. I went to one here in St. Louis, MacHQ (www.machq.com) and they ordered the topcase part and called me when it was in, and fixed it while I waited in the show room. Way better than dealing with the folks at the apple store at the mall.
In my experience(s), the staff at the Apple Store have been great. The geniuses especially. Quickdrops ahoy! :)
My MacBook Pro has not acted properly since I got it:
- dead fan
- random program crashes
- random OS X crashes
- full reinstall does not correct the above
- dead battery
That said, every time something goes wrong with it I have to take it into a local repair centre (no Apple Stores in the province) so they can try to fix the problem or “verify the problem”. Each time I take it in it takes at least a week and a half for them to get around to it, up to three weeks (two different places). And then after being there for three weeks, they tell me nothing is wrong. Before I can even drive home the issue has occured once more and it goes back to the repair centre for another week long visit. AppleCare is total shit if there’s no Apple Store nearby.
I wish they’d just send me a new one so, yanno, I actually get to use my $2300 (CDN) laptop?. Isn’t that more than three things? :/
It’s a first generation 1.83GHz MacBook Pro. BAD choice on my part.
I love that you were helping customers, and correcting employees. There’s nothing worse than an apple employee who doesn’t know anything.
I love how you helped people while you were waiting. You should have handed out business cards too. “Excuse me, do you know who I am? I write a trendy blog on tech and stuff.”
Replaced my top case again…this is the 5th time now. We’ll see how it goes.
Good work using the 3 times rule with Apple. I have a MacBook Pro, having similar problems and hoping for such an outcome.
Back in the day, I sent my iBook in to be repaired, and it came back with a fairly scary type of hair on the keyboard (you know what I’m getting at)
Anyways, they didn’t even fix the keyboard as requested, I called Apple and told them about it and got a replacement.
I had a busted iMac once which spent about 2 months at the repair shop. They kept ordering replacement parts because when they’d fix one part, only then would they find out that another part was broken. In the end, they ended up replacing my entire logicboard. It’s fine now, but I still wish they had replaced it with a new one just like yours. Oh well…
On a sidenote, I think the Apple store should have payed you for your brief stint helping other customers out. :)
Hmm, I was quite annoyed that Apple released the Core2Duo, and I only have a Core Duo, black macbook. I’ve been there once with a keyboard issue, and another with my magsafe charger fraying and melting, but if this breaks again I hope they’ll let me replace it. Maybe those issues aren’t big enough, or they didn’t do anything wrong (e.g. break the screen, scratch it or something)
Good to read, nice story.
PS: Does the Core2Duo seem a bit faster to you? Or can you multitask better?
Oh, this may seem dumb, but I’m posting again so I stay notified. Sorry.
Hi Paul,
My MacBook appears to have similar problem had it repaired once already, was also given a new power adaptor as the previous one was fault and last night it made a loud clicking noise and shut down.
Getting a grey screen now every-time I turn on, worrying!
Time to call Apple quickly, 12 month warranty expires on May 18. Does anyone know if the warranty is extended after each fix?
Just off the phone from Apple I was worried Apple Europe might not have the same 3 strikes policy as the USA, but luckily they do. But once I explained that this was the fourth time a problem has occurred he mentioned the policy and hey presto!
So once the problem is confirmed by their engineers they will supply a new MacBook. Lucky enough though as warranty expires in 17 days!
only bummer is that many of my documents will be lost as been a few weeks since most recent backup. but apple said they may be able to recover this data.
http://www.petitiononline.com/flicker/petition.html
Hello. I just went through 3 hours of reading forums on macbooks by googling “apple defects” and “apple problems”. I am on the verge of buying my first Mac. But the forums have been scary.
It has been more than a year since the first Macbooks were released. Have Apple manufactured better MacBooks since then?
Or should I just forego buying a MacBook?
Hi, so okay, I have to admit, I have never seen this site before, I found a link to it on “ask.com”…I was just browsing because I have a mac laptop, umm I think it’s an osx or something. I bought it about 2 years ago,used, and about 6 months ago, It broke. I can turn it on, but it won’t do a damn thing! No light, but you can hear the humming coming from it. Although after I’ve turned it on, it won’t turn back off until the battery dies. . . Does anyone know what I should do? I’m a little hesitant to take it to the Mac store (only 5 minutes away), seeing how the guy there ripped me off last time I went in there. I’m a little stuck in the mud seeing how I need all the files on it though ( pics of my daughter ) …If ANYONE has any suggestions, I’d love to hear from you….My email adress is emma116@aim.com.
Thanks in advance,
Emma
The LCD of my MACBOOK has a crack,where can i bring it aside from the power MAC?