stay in the shallow end

I now officially declare my MacBook Pro as the crappiest piece of hardware I’ve ever purchased from Apple. In fact, I could go as far as saying it’s one of the crappiest pieces of hardware I’ve ever purchased, especially in the $1500+ price range. I don’t even know where to start:

• The Whine – The whine is well documented by pretty much every Mac site on the net. It’s dependent on CPU usage, so leaving certain applications open, like Photo Booth, eliminates it, at the expense of battery life, performance, and memory usage. When I’m in the library, I’m pretty much forced to leave the machine asleep as the whine is deafening in complete silence.

• Intermittent Airport – I haven’t seen this one recently, but I haven’t been at school nearly as much lately either. Sometimes when I try to connect to cavalier, my airport icon starts flickering, and it’s unable to maintain a connection. It’s possible it’s been fixed recently, but I’ll go ahead and list it here.

• The Heat – Again, this is not an isolated problem. Extended periods of typing leave my palms sweaty and uncomfortable. I can forgive the bottom of the case heating up, as the heat has to go somewhere. The keyboard, however, should not be used as a heat sink. It was kind of nice in February and March, but now that summer is here, it’s way too much.

• Warped Casing – I noticed that my battery wasn’t sitting flush a few days ago. It looked like whatever adhesive they used had loosened (probably due to the heat) and now the aluminum cover over it was bowing out. On further inspection, it turns out the battery itself has developed a prominent bulge, which is pulling the cover off. Now that I think about it, I should probably get this machine off my lap, as the battery might explode and spill battery acid all over highly sensitive and valuable regions of my body.

• Useless Battery Indicator – Most of the time, my battery indicator just says “Calculating”. The time remaining is completely meaningless, and it never gets to fully charged. In fact, when I plug it into the wall, my little MagSafe connector flashes between green and orange. Of course there’s nothing mentioned in the print or on Apple’s support site as to what that means. And yes, I’ve recalibrated the battery many times.

• Random Shutdowns – This may have to do with the bulging battery or the battery indicator, but I can just be using the machine on battery and it randomly shuts down. Not going to sleep, but a full fledged shutdown. The battery is obviously dead, cause if I try to restart it, it starts for a second and shuts down again. Only reconnecting it to power fixes it. No warnings and no sleep, I just lose all my work since my last save and have to wait for a reboot and all my Applications to start up.

Back when my problems were just the whine, heat, and Airport, I was going to wait until I’d seen in the Apple Forums that the problems were resolved before contacting Apple. Now that the battery is having issues, I’ll be calling them in the morning. I really can’t undergo any downtime right now, but I guess I have no choice.

Here’s to hoping Apple will be good to me…