TheVille

Sure comedy of errors, but it's not all that funny.

Mrs. SU is a great wedding photographer. She also does all the photoshop work &c. required.

She uses a MacBook Pro, which replaced her older desktop model PowerMac (it was the quadd processor model... woot).

Anyway, she has had problems with this machine on and off. Typically minor graphics problems and occasional lockups.

As I am her technical support, I bought an external hard drive to back up everything for her using time machine... hooray for me.

So, about a month ago, total lock up. She took it in to the Apple Store, and they said that one of the memory chips had come unseated, leading to sporadic problems. That very night... it locked up again. Back to the shop. It was in for over a week and came back with a new processor.

The first day she used it, she taught a photoshop class, and that night, it would not boot. I tried everything, single user mode, reset PRAM/NVRAM. Everything. I went to check the RAM.. and noticed a giant dent in the bottom of the case that wasn't there before!!

I did a giant write up and brought it back to the store.... again. New lower case and hard drive, and I picked it up this evening.

I brought it home, ready to restore from her Time Machine backup... and THE STORE PUT THE WRONG OS ON THE MACHINE.

I brought the machine with 10.5 on it, and got it back with 10.4. I am actually going to have to take it back to the store and tell them they put the wrong OS on.

Now, objectively, not a big deal. Someone just threw the wrongly imaged drive in or whatever, but what a pain in the patella. I needed to vent as I sit here with my fancy firewire drive attached and unable to do anything.

We have a number of Apple products, and have gotten great service from them. All of the above has been covered by Apple Care warranty, but man it stinks that her laptop has been down almost a month.

Just a rant...


SU

That sucks. I don't really have any advice, but these types of stories make me glad I've never used a Mac...

i used macs all through college.. and i've learned to hate them even more. nothing a mac does that a similarly priced pc won't do.

I've never used a Mac, but I've heard good things about them.

Sorry to hear about your issues, hang in there SU.

never owned, but worked on a couple. I hate to hear about your whoas... but PCs can have their fair share of problems too. Why is she on a mac anyway? Convert her!

nah, it's not really that I hate the whole Mac thing. I only have two windows machines in the house, because of Steam, to tell you the truth.

Any other problems I have had have been handled well by Apple, and I give a lot of credit to their customer service.

This has just been a horrific combination of issues. Really, it's just that they misdiagnosed the problem the first time and made a couple of mistakes.

Today, they gave my wife a free year of pro care which basically puts her in a higher service tier so anything that goes wrong will get handled faster.

The laptop I am using now is a G4 iBook that I have had for about 5 years, and only had one trip to the ship in addition to a battery replacement.

In contrast, both of my windows machines were either modified or built by me; if anything goes wrong with those, I am buying and installing parts myself. Despite my woes with this MacBook Pro, I have not spent a penny on it since I bought it thanks to Apple Care

I find that people get their attachments to computers (or consoles, to be sure), and then have nothing but bad things to say about the opposition.

I like both, but I'm just not really gonna try to play TF2 on my mac mini

[quote="So Uncivilized";p="111245"]
I brought it home, ready to restore from her Time Machine backup... and THE STORE PUT THE WRONG OS ON THE MACHINE.

I brought the machine with 10.5 on it, and got it back with 10.4. I am actually going to have to take it back to the store and tell them they put the wrong OS on.

Now, objectively, not a big deal. Someone just threw the wrongly imaged drive in or whatever, but what a pain in the patella. I needed to vent as I sit here with my fancy firewire drive attached and unable to do anything.[/quote]

Why do you have to take it back to the store? You should have a 10.5 install DVD around the house, no? (Probably a family pack at that IIRC the number of Macs you have in your household)

There are install disks that come with the computer. I couldn't find them My fault.


All is now well. She was, in fact, able to get her photos all edited before the weekend which is good news.

ALmost all of my machines run 10.4 because I am cheap and will not buy the OS.

[quote="So Uncivilized";p="111868"]
There are install disks that come with the computer. I couldn't find them My fault.


All is now well. She was, in fact, able to get her photos all edited before the weekend which is good news.

ALmost all of my machines run 10.4 because I am cheap and will not buy the OS.
[/quote]

borrow someones

And hoenstly Ive never heard of so many "bad" if you will, things "happen" to a mac.

What makes a Mac so much better than a PC is dependability. This... is the far extreme though.

A pc hicups weekly monthly daily.... just pick one. A Mac? maybe... maybe once a year.

I still wanna get one...

lol, macs.

Have used them back in primary school days.

The bad thing about them is you cannot play many games and customise them.


Otherwise i would own a mac as well coz of my degree.

Wouldnt have been cheaper f you bought a new 1 SU?

MACs are the bomb for graphics and video editing. best allocation of memory for these sorts of programs and the user interface is very intuitive. However, when trying to work on the bones of a MAC, like the system settings and "control panel" I was always lost. they are great machines I love the sleek look of their laptops; gorgeous pieces of technology, but I won't be purchasing one for many of the same reasons you all have mentioned. I like my gaming too much and I guess I have stuck myself in a rut by building and installing PCs rather than MACs. oh well, i surely won't be loosing any sleep over it. Thank goodness all has panned out for your wife SU!

<devil's advocate>
Can't windows pcs do everything that OSX pcs can, except final cut?

IIRC windows has the only 64bit photoshop too.

I used to use apples in grade school, but that was a long time ago. Other than OSX, which you can load into a kit-built pc, is there any real reason to use macs?
</devil's advocate>

She likes the macs for photo editing. She uses Photoshop and a bunch of plug ins as well as Aperture.

My net surfing/email laptop is mac, and my mac mini makes a fantastic media server for the whole house (check out 360connect... or is it connect360?).

Anyway, yeah, we have had a great experience so far over about 5 years or so; this was such an exceptionally bad experience that I had to complain.

On the flip side, when I dropped my G4 iBook, they replaced $900 worth of parts for free even though my warranty (AppleCare) was out a month before!