Apple Sux
Ok, so they don’t always suck – they can design kick-ass products, but they’re quality and support need some work. I’ve had several problems recently with both my new macbook pro and my ipod video, and i need to vent a bit.
I took a chance and bought the new intel-based macbook pro. I’ve had it a few weeks now, and for the most part its the same as the powerbook. The main 2 things that are different are the intel chip (vs PowerPC chip in powerbook), and the RAM access (twice as fast on macbook). For the few apps that are compiled as a universal binary (like camino browser), macbook rocks. But most apps are not, and performance is about the same as the powerbook.
Specifically, i was using firefox (powerpc binary) a week ago when my laptop froze up. The mouse would still work, but nothing else would. I let it sit for a while (10 mins), came back, and it was still frozen, so i hard-rebooted. After this, it would not ever boot up again – It would go to the screen where it says “Mac OS X” in small white square window with solid blue background, and then just be completely solid blue, and stay forever. I kept hard-rebooting (by holding down power button till it turns off) and repeating this process for several days. Unable to find any info help online, I went to the “genius bar” at the local apple store. They would not accept drop-offs, and the wait to talk to anyone 1-1.5 hours. Sigh. I had to goto work, so i skipped it. Later I tried a few more things on my own, including the firewire target disk mode (press-T-on-bootup), but nothing worked till i wiped the drive and did a fresh install. So i lost all my data, but at least my laptop works again. I’m not sure exactly what happened, i’m guessing there were bad sectors on the harddrive that could not be read on bootup so it hung .. but not sure. I should prolly run some exhaustive drive checks …
The other problem i have is with my ipod video. I have the 60GB one, bought last december, and 3 times now it has frozen up on me. The screen is lit up, usually during mp3 playback, but the entire unit becomes unresponsive. Normally you can power on/off a device or computer if it freezes up, worst case remove batteries/power and reboot. But ipod video does not have that option. I had to wait till batteries were drained and it powered off. Then i plugged it in and it would reboot. Not annoying enough for me to get rid of if and by a new mp3 player, but annoying enough to piss me off and blog about it. Heh.
Update: Check out the comments for ways to fix..