I have had four MacBook Pros and even more power supplies for MacBook Pros since the top-of-the-range Apple laptops launched in March. I love the machines, but hot damn has my experience of them been unusual. Let’s start with the pins inside the MagSafe plug deciding not to extrude:
The only solution here was getting the damn thing replaced. I wouldn’t have minded had not the same thing happened to Matt Biddulph less than a week later.
Then the machine started to act really weirdly. It would get extraordinarily hot, had a weird and unresponsive trackpad that drove me insane and a mouse button that had a strange grinding touch to it and the whole thing sounded like a vacuum cleaner when it was running. There was clearly something wrong with it, but they couldn’t fix it without taking it away and I couldn’t be without a machine for a couple of weeks while they fixed it, so I bought myself another one so I could get the first one repaired and then sell it on ebay. Two days after I bought the new one, the battery on the old one just stopped charging completely.
The new one had an exciting feature wherein every so often it would decide that although it was not in num lock mode, keys on the right hand side of the keyboard should only produce numbers no matter what I asked of the machine. Ones on the left continued to produce letters. I took that one back within a week, and got my current MacBook Pro, which I love.
And then today I noticed that the weird MacBook Pro that had been causing me all the trouble with the trackpad and where the battery had completely stopped charging had miraculously gone even more peculiar. I’d not got around to taking it in to be repaired because I’d been travelling so much, but I think spontaneously changing shape counts as a significant flaw:
I’d take it back today, except I tried to book a session at the genius bar at 1am this morning and apparently they’d already run out of appointments for the day. It’s pretty extraordinary to me that I’m still using Apple products after the last six months. All I can say is that when they work, they work very well and make me genuinely happy. It’s just a shame that recently they’ve not been quite as reliable as my previous experiences would have led me to expect…
