re: Why is nothing I do with this company going smoothly?
i feel your pain. my situation is different from yours, but this is also my first Mac, and we have the same machine. to put it nicely, my introduction to the world of Apple has not been a pleasant one.
during the month of February i sent my 12" PB (Rev B) back to Apple 3 times. on the first return, they replaced the hard drive, which was clicking and beeping and readying itself for failure. no problem, it's not Apple's fault that Hitachi or whoever had a bad batch of drives. however, the repairmen scratched up the lid and the bottom of the case pretty bad. i returned it for the scratches, and they replaced the bottom and underside, but scratched the LCD in the process. so i sent it back a third time. no scratches on the LCD, but now it won't go to sleep half the time and there's a clicking noise when i open the lid. something is clicking inside the hinge... i suspect that it's pinching the video cable. sometimes the LCD will not come on when it's awakened from sleep... sometimes it won't even to go sleep unless i put it to sleep through the GUI. the edges of the LCD are also yellow, on all four sides.
on top of all this, the lid is warped and the latch doesn't engage properly. each time i've returned the computer, i also requested that the lid and latch be repaired... it never happened. i've heard suggestions about bending the lid after warming up the computer - i shouldn't have to do that to a $2000+ computer. (by the way, Apple now says that warped lids are normal:
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/warpedlids.html)
the people i've talked to at Apple are nice and have told me that this is "not the experience we want you to have"... but their techs botched it up three times in one month, and i had little confidence that it would come back without another problem. after checking out the machine for a few minutes, the local Genius said that i was probably due for a replacement.
so i called again last night and explained the problems. the first guy i talked to was friendly, as usual, and reviewed my cases. i told him i wanted a replacement, that my machine had been "Frankensteined," and that i'm worried that it will develop new issues in the future thanks to the number of parts that have been replaced. (they replaced the HDD each time i sent it in, replaced the logic board the third time, replaced the lid/display housing twice, the LCD once, and the bottom housing twice.) he agreed, and escalated my call to a senior tech. great guy. he said that he's not even sure what they would fix this time since almost all the parts are new.
so i'm getting a NEW machine. lucky for me, they didn't have any old stock in that matched the specs - my original machine was BTO. i'm eager to see if it has Panther and iLife on it (i was two days away from getting the 19.95 upgrade last year - argh).
between the stories about heat death, rubber feet falling off, latches not catching, wobbling on perfectly flat tabletops, keys melting, etc... i should have been smarter than to think that i would somehow avoid all the problems and get a perfect computer. i thought i would be spared if i waited until the Rev B came out, but it seems like they solved some problems and created new ones.
if i had to do it over again, i would not get a PowerBook of any size. i would also not recommend a PowerBook to anyone i know. i 'sold' two 17" iMacs before i got my PowerBook, and if my friends and family had bought something with as many problems as my PowerBook has had, i would be getting a lot of flack about my ill-fated recommendations. fortunately, both iMacs are totally flawless and the owners like them a lot. i'm actually considering selling the new PowerBook and buying a flat-panel iMac of my own. i'd love to trade up to a G5 but there seem to be all sorts of issues with G5s as well... whether those problems represent a minority of all G5s out there or not, i'm not going to convince myself (again) that i won't be the person who gets a lemon instead of an Apple.
people generally don't like to hear these horror stories. a lot of people out there can either accept that their machines are flawed and move on, or wil comment to say that i'm in the minority... i disagree. some machines might be better than others, but the whole Powerbook line seems fraught with problems. and don't even get me started on OS X's UI... i'll let Jef Raskin take care of that:
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~frank/BerkeleyGroks_Raskin.htm