Yeah, brand new laptop bought in June; all hi-end; maxed memory, maxed drive size & speed, etc… its now on its 2nd hard drive. This drive is just over 1 month old. I ain’t holding my breath with it either.

I have no expectations of quality from Apple anymore, but I hate MS enough to not go back to them.

Suck It Apple!

But even if I could make this work, Office 2008 is just crap. Excel 2008 i extremely slow and not to speak of Entourage 2008…. the user interface is so much worse than Outlook (and Im using OL 2003 normally). Yesterday I gave up. Migrated back to my old T61 thinkpad and left the mac completely.

No, they don’t use the same components throughout. Hard disk yes. The motherboard is designed by Apple and IBM hardware enginners. So is the battery. So is the LCD and a few other things.

I work for a well known technology company with thousands of these laptops and no one has heard of this issue. It is also not on Apple support boards or anywhere else I can find.

Something is weird with OM’s backups. Imagine if you had this issue with Dell, HP, etc. You sure wouldn’t get a new laptop let alone any other help.

You lost data? Definelty somethng wrong with your backup strategy.

Pulling the battery makes no sense. This isn’t Windows. use Onyx and then Diskwarrior to check everything.

But the big battle was over the “bulging battery”. After owning my machine for some 9 mos. + (and no one contacted me to inform) on a user forum page the there was a recall for the batteries in Macbook Pro 17″ machines, as they ran too hot, would tend to bulge out of the actual metallic frame.

I had noticed over time, that my laptop no longer closed and latched shut as it should – that is, the top panel and the keyboard didn’t meet seamlessly. I took it as my treatment, as I was transporting between work and home. Once I read the user forum, and found out about the recall of batteries, contacted tech support who denied even knowing of the problem. . .

After loosing my display inch-by-inch (the warping was actually affecting the screen connections) I fought my way to upper technical support mgt, where they informed me that, because I had a ding on the laptop frame (near the CD/DVD drive – a small dent that in no way affected the optical drive performance), that this was the reason for the entire display to fail. . .

Fifteen years of PC and MAC procurement for gov agencies told me that this was absolute misinformation (read BS) and I had to pay for the $600 optical drive in order to rehab the $3,000 laptop. How absurd!

Finally, after I had paid for repair, argued w/multiple levels of mgt, and given up. . . I was awarded two free MacBookPro batteries. . . like pullin teeth!

RC

As to the original thread in this conversation, When I lost the display for the MacBookPro laptop, I slaved it via firewire to a IMac, and it recognized the drive, even though the machine could not recognize itself. . .
Odd, but may help ya.

Cheers and good luck

Have you gone back to Windows permanently? I occasionally use Win7 on a Lenovo X61 tablet as a novelty, but invariably have been droven back to OSX and my MBP.

If not, when would you pull the trigger?

Hard drives die sometimes. I had two die within a month of each other a few years ago, and wasn’t fully backed up (this was before Time Machine came out) and it was terrible. But I didn’t blame Apple. They were both Toshiba drives, so I blamed Toshiba.

If a bad lot of drives made it through Toshiba’s (or whoever’s) manufacturing process, and that lot just happened to be purchased by Apple, then Apple ends up with a bunch of dying laptops. I know contractually Apple is responsible for your computer, but they’re not at fault in any deeper way. It really does come down to chance.

And tell me again why I should pay more for the same hardware?

Maybe Apple should stop spending money on the “Mac vs. PC” ads and start investing in better hardware.