Rotten Apples
Posted on November 22, 2008 by admin
As you know I got two Macs – an iMac 20′ C2D and a MacBook white. I have been quite happy with both of them and I find the Mac OS X very user-friendly, no need to mention the stability, safety and so on. Both machines look great but there is a scratch on that picture.
About 3 weeks ago I was busy burning the dvds with the film from the wedding of my wife’s cousin. I had to burn about 10 copies using the internal iMac Super Drive. After the end of the burning process of the 7th disc, it stuck inside the drive. My iMac went crazy trying to eject it. I tried all methods of force eject (during the reboot, and using terminal) but without any success. I would have stand the disc stuck in the drive if it had been mounted permanently, but my computer tried to eject it every time I turned it on. I had to use a piece of cardboard to push the disc inside to stop the ejecting madness and to force the iMac to mount it. I have even tried to use the tweezers both the ones for the stamps and the hand made ones, made of the piece of aluminium from the old 3,5′ floppy disc… without success.
All of my machines are under warranty, so I called the premium Apple reseller in Poland – SAD (orchard in Polish), where I found out that the new corporate is in charge of all Apple equipment warranties – iSource. Nevertheless, before I call them I found out that replacement of the Super Drive in iMac is a process of about 1 or 2 hours. So I asked the man in charge of warranties in iSource, how long it takes. He replied – 2 weeks, he suggested me to contact via e-mail the man in charge of repairs. I asked once again – is it possible to replace Super Drive in couple of hours if I bring my iMac to Warsaw? His answer was – of course – no. The repair (or replacement) will take 2 weeks. I started to think. What if my iMac had been my only one computer and I had no external hard drive? I wouldn’t be able to back up my files (roughly 150 GBs). No one at iSource could assure me that my files won’t be viewed. I have no porn or abusive material on the HD, but I have some personal documents that are private in sens of viewing by the people I don’t know. Computer is a private files storage and they couldn’t guarantee that it would remain not viewed. The only way was to stay with my iMac for 2 weeks at the iSource workshop. This situation forces the customer to spend additional money for the external hard drive device, so the warranty of free of charge repair is not really true in such case. I was also wondering, why such a simply procedure had to take 2 weeks? I cought a rumour that there is only one person in charge of repairs of Macs at the iSource (premium resseler). I am not sure of that, but from the other hand – Macs are a marginal or a drop in the ocean of PCs that is a computer market in Poland. I don’t know if there is so many Macs that brake and the guy has so much work to do. I said to myself that I was not going to left my machine with my files without my supervision and decided to ask someone to help me with getting the DVD disc out of the drive. Finally we made it, but I am not going to use internal Super Drive any more. I decided to buy an external DVD DL USB powered drive and it suits me fine.
I have almost forgotten about that story described above, when I have discovered the crack of the top case of my MacBook in a place where the inset of the screen frame touches the top case. This time I am going to send it for replacement (of a top case). It seems that both of my expensive Macs are far from perfect from the mechanical point of view.
I am going to be very busy and out of the office (my place) for the next month and first weeks of January (trip to Ireland) so I will wait till the mid January. Also, I am going to by new alu MacBook during my visit in Ireland. They are much cheaper than in Poland.
