It appears that my wife purchased a MacBook with the dreaded random shutoff problem. The other night, I was trying to figure out why Safari mis-renders the heading of this blog (the i and Morphous should appear on the same line, but don’t in Safari), when suddenly, the MacBook just turned off. I quickly checked the Magsafe connector and the battery. Connected, and the battery showed a full charge (via the nifty little battery test button on the bottom of the laptop). My heart sank. I gulped, and pressed the power button to restart the Mac, but to no avail. The computer spun up the hard disk but before it could power on the screen, it shut itself off. There I was holding a useless MacBook that wouldn’t turn on, just after I had posted an article on how Apple was one of few manufacturers that could compete with IBM’s Thinkpad in terms of quality and that I was going to switch. After reading posts by other users with this problem, I feared that my wife would be without her machine for weeks. Would Apple and Apple Support let us down like it had the others who posted their stories online?

The morning after the MacBook first started shutting down, I decided to see if the problem could be fixed at home. I googled around for some help and found that resetting the PMU might fix the problem. Unfortunately this also failed. I wanted to also reset the PRAM but the machine wouldn’t stay on long enough to allow me to do so. I finally did discover that holding the power button down for a while would allow the computer to boot after a long beep. So, at least the machine wasn’t a paper weight.

Since my attempts at a home remedy had failed, it was time to call Apple Support. Here was the first (and only, so far) strike for Apple Support. They had me on hold for over 25 minutes. While I was listening to the hold music, I thought back to a week earlier when my wife had come back to a machine that was mysteriously off even though she had only put it to sleep the night before. While strange, I didn’t think much of it. Was that the first of the random power downs? I was jarred back to the present by two DTMF tones, and then a ring. Finally, I thought, I was through, but I was simply put on hold again, this time with a female voice saying, “We’re sorry, all representatives are busy now…” instead of the previous male voice.

After finally getting through to a representative, I explained the problem and what I had done. The rep on the phone was very polite and friendly and asked if could hold again for 5 minutes. Ugh. This time, though, the hold was only five minutes, and he came back with some suggestions. The first was to do a PMU reset, but then he said to skip that since I’d already tried it. Next, he wanted me to re-seat the RAM. Embarrassingly, I didn’t have a screw driver small enough to remove the cover for the hard disk and RAM, and communicated this to the rep. He promptly stated that that was fine, and that I should take the machine in to an Apple store if possible, since the next step, if the memory re-seat failed, was to test with a new battery and power supply. So, I made an appointment to go to the Apple Store where we bought the computer for that same afternoon.

Upon arriving at the store, we had to wait ten minutes because they were a bit swamped at the Genius Bar. (Who the heck calls tech support people geniuses, anyway? Seriously, their official title is Genius. It said so on their t-shirts. My experience with other companies’ technical support suggests that the name is a bit of a misnomer for tech support folk. In Apple’s defense, the support folks were very knowledgeable, though we didn’t interact enough for me to decide if they were really geniuses.) Anyway, after we spoke to someone, they quickly looked up the purchase of the machine, noted that it was only 18 days old, and immediately decided to replace the machine with a brand new one. They even swapped the hard-drive for us. So, after a few hours, my wife had a working MacBook. I’d asked what they would have done if the machine was older, to which the Genius responded that they would have let us hold on to the MacBook until a logic board arrived for replacement, which usually takes a few days. In any case, the in-store replacement was awesome. 5 hours from store open to working laptop. That’s hard to beat.

Overall, I was extremely happy with Apple Support, except for the hold time issue. At no time did anyone make me go through a ridiculous set of irrelevant steps. The reps/Geniuses seemed happy to skip a test that I said I’d already done, and when all else failed, they promptly replaced the machine. The only thing more I could ask for is that the machine never failed in the first place. But hey, every company has their disasters. (Though every rev A Apple seems to have more than its fair share of problems, but that is for a different article.) There was a time when all 7 Thinkpads in the research group I was working for had to have the hard drive replaced. And even IBM’s customer service tried to jerk me around when they were unable to get a replacement drive for my laptop because they were back-ordered on the 60GB model. After waiting two weeks for a replacement to come in, I had to spend a day on the phone with them until they finally agreed to upgrade me to an 80GB drive which they did have in stock. So no one is perfect. If you have to use the support, it doesn’t get better than the experience I had with Apple. The only thing left to see is if they properly update the AppleCare contract with the new MacBook’s serial number.

Postscript
The really disturbing thing, which I can’t blame on Apple Support, but do blame on Apple, is not knowing if the new laptop will actually fix the problem. Is there a new logic board for the MacBook that fixes this problem or do they just roll the dice and hope the new boards/machines don’t have the problem? It seems to be the latter but I haven’t been able to find out. More importantly, when there is a revision (if there isn’t one already) that fixes the problem, can users that do not currently experience the problem get the upgrade? A company should not deny a fix to a user for an issue that turns the machine into a useless brick, even if the user isn’t currently experiencing the problem but might in the future.