A year with the Macbook Pro

[spaceballl]

What annoys me is that soon the warrenty is going to be over and if it happens again (as history suggests it will), I will need to pay for a replacement.

You can extend applecare for another two years before your current year expires. If you think it's worth it, i'd do it soon.

Apple RAM is expensive. The default 512 MB RAM I had was barely enough to keep Tiger happy.

Simple lesson that frequen mac buyers learn. Buy the minimum amount that Apple lets you buy when getting a computer. Then go to a reliable place like OWC and max out the memory, and sell what you pull out of your computer on eBay. Done.

Optical Disk Woes. My optical disk drive recently decided to become tempermental.

This sucks - if you think it might die soon, might be worth extending the warranty.

 

[mashinhead]

i've had mine for almost a year now, and it is in excellent shape. as good as when it got. The one thing that stood out to me is the ram issue. I think all macs should come with 4gb of ram, especially the imac. I mean the concept of the computer is everything all in one, out of the box. I think maxing out the ram fits with that concept. but that's just me so don't bite my head off about it

 

[geoSol]

Thanks to all those that are suggesting I buy apple care, but I've weighed the cost-to-benefit ratio and unless faulty parts are routinely replaced with higher end parts (e.g. 80GB HDD -> 160GB HDD) its actually cheaper and more advantageous to get third party components and do it yourself.

 

[heatmiser]

Thanks to all those that are suggesting I buy apple care, but I've weighed the cost-to-benefit ratio and unless faulty parts are routinely replaced with higher end parts (e.g. 80GB HDD -> 160GB HDD) its actually cheaper and more advantageous to get third party components and do it yourself.

Don't waste money with apple care. The same people telling you Macs are "so much more reliable" than PCs will be first in line to deign apple care an essential purchase for your Mac. Save your cash and fix what you need to fix yourself, the way you'd do with any other PC (which is essentially what a Mac is).

 

[DocSmitty]

Thanks to all those that are suggesting I buy apple care, but I've weighed the cost-to-benefit ratio and unless faulty parts are routinely replaced with higher end parts (e.g. 80GB HDD -> 160GB HDD) its actually cheaper and more advantageous to get third party components and do it yourself.

I absolutely agree when it comes to user replaceable parts, but there's plenty of other things that can go wrong with a laptop other than HDD, RAM, even the optical drive. I wouldn't want to foot the bill for a new logic board.. Anyway, personal choice of course but given that you have had to take advantage of warranty work several times in the first year, wouldn't that indicate that maybe you will be wanting it again?

 

[bijou]

Good review, OP.

Mine has been slaving away for right at one year as well. The hard drive went bad last November, which Apple quickly replaced within a day. Other than that hiccup, not one single problem aside from a few issues with Leopard which simply are non-existent any longer.

 

[geoSol]

Just an update - it seems like all of the work is warrentable, and also for some strange reason its showing up in the system as having a three year warrenty. I've looked around the threads and I think it has something to do with the fact that I've bought mine at the Apple education store. Interesting.

 

[geoSol]

Okay guys, this is messed up.

I just called the service centre today to check on the repair status and they said that they would be replacing:

1. the topcase
2. the logicboard
3. the HDD
4. the optical drive

Pretty much the whole machine, right? Its just waiting for parts. So I asked them if I could just get a new machine and get on with my work and they told me to contact applecare directly.

I called applecare, and this is when the sh*t hit the fan. Appearently there is a problem with the warrenty, even though I have a service invoice here that states that its warrented until 29.03.09. If it doesn't check out (no further details were given) they would stop work on the machine. So now I'm waiting for the applecare people to call me back to see if the warrenty is valid or not.

This is really messed up. I don't see how I should be penalised because the store people were the ones that checked with the warrenty details and told me everything was warrentable in the first place. (its every explicit on that, I asked them multiple times)