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Lemme list out the major point of this post : I wanted to love my Macbook Pro (2007), but it never loved me back and never has. While the overall experience of Mac OSX is beautifully streamlined and clean-cut, for me, I have had major crashes throughout using my Macbook Pro for the last 2 years. Amazingly, while the experience on my Windows box was mediocre with - not major crashes - but just overall sluggishness and slowness, my Windows machine never crashed or got infected by viruses. The point of this post is to ask, who has had not only bad experiences, but amazingly horrible experiences with their Macs? I actually thought about it for a while, and I don't know anyone who hasn't had a major problem that necessitated going to the Apple Store (big problems like hard drive failure). Macs shouldn't be like this right? But, I don't believe that I am the only one, and we seem to be drowned under the entire slogan of "It just works".
Problems I have Experienced:
-When it was brand new, it had 1 hour of battery life.
-"Never waking up again" after sleeping even with a hard shutdown
-Random beachball hangs that require hard shutdown
-Random kernel panics that require hard shutdown
-Windows, in Bootcamp, hangs that require hard shutdown
And today,
-Can't get past log-in screen
...Continuing reading if you want to hear an interesting story...
I bought my Macbook Pro in 2007 as part of the school deal because I am a college student. It was my first Mac, and first laptop. On a full charge, I would have 1 hour of battery life. But, because it was my first laptop I never knew this was not normal until my warranty expired.
I went through an amazing headache (but ultimately worthwhile, I...guess) of a learning curve that lasted about 5 months. By the end of this learning experience, I felt like I was sorta a power user. I was touting the Mac OSX experience as superior to the Windows experience (and I still believe it is...if it worked all the time) and my friends would jokingly call me an Apple fanboy. I found this site, AppleInsider, and followed Apple news daily - all this from someone who was originally not a "tech geek". Knowing this, I hope you don't dismiss me as a Windows fanboy bashing Apple.
Then, came the day my Mac decided not to wake up after shutting the lid. Literally a few days after the warranty expired too. Despite a hard shut down, my Mac's display was completely blank and black. Sending it to get it fixed at the Apple store was $1500 - "motherboard issue" - which hurts because that was right when the new 2008 Macbooks came out. (Sidenote: My insurance company promised me they would pay me back the money, so that's why I opted to get it fixed, but they ultimately denied my claim, so sucks to be me).
After this, I upgraded to Leopard doing a clean install. The thing is, while as a general whole, the experience is great, spinning beachballs maybe once ever week always required me to do a hard shutdown. It was this overall feeling of unreliability that I really didn't like. I actually learned about a "hard shutdown" only when I got a Mac; I never needed to do a hard shutdown on a Windows computer.
Then from spinning beachballs came random kernel panics. And while spinning beachballs would be from a really intensive flash website on Firefox or opening up Photo Booth (at this point, I'm almost "afraid" to use my Mac, especially Photo Booth), random kernel panics would happen at completely non-intensive intervals - ie, iTunes and some word processing. And would again necessitate a hard shutdown and make me lose data.
Bootcamp, which booted into XP was also a bad experience. Again, the theme of "the general thing was okay, but it would just majorly crash at random occasional times" is still here. My Windows side would randomly hang at some random, non-intensive, time - the sound would just start looping. And, it would never shutdown all the way either and would hang at that last screen. All necessitating a hard shutdown. These are probably driver issues, and someone may make the claim that the Windows partition has nothing to do with the Mac partition, but taken as an emotional experience, this computer has really given me headaches.
And then came yesterday's crash. I went into Bootcamp to work on some stuff for a while (I use Mac OSX most of the time BTW, and my Windows partition is only 8 GB). It, of course, hung at the last shutdown screen, and I hard shutdown-ed. After booting back up into Mac OSX, I realized I could not get beyond the aqua blue screen that flashes for a second before going into the log-in menu. I tried everything I knew - safe booting, repairing the disk and repairing the disk permissions using the original install disk, and resetting the P-RAM. I am now getting ready to archive and install again because my Time Machine backup is maybe a few days old and I have some files on there I need to save. This is the second "major", "you-will-tell-me-to-go-to-the-Apple-Store" event I have had, along with the random hangs and crashes. And, I am not a person afraid to start with a blank slate and do a clean install. I have clean installed maybe every 3 months, in some weird hope that "this time" my computer will work.
If you reached here, thanks for reading...
I am now considering a Windows laptop (maybe its just the post-crash anger speaking) despite really falling in love with the (if it worked) Mac OSX experience that is much more streamlined, polished, and clean. This post was essentially to vent out my frustration, but I really wanted to ask if anyone out there has also had not just a "weird-crash-maybe-every-6-months" kinda deal, but a horrible experience.
Lemme list out the major point of this post : I wanted to love my Macbook Pro (2007), but it never loved me back and never has. While the overall experience of Mac OSX is beautifully streamlined and clean-cut, for me, I have had major crashes throughout using my Macbook Pro for the last 2 years. Amazingly, while the experience on my Windows box was mediocre with - not major crashes - but just overall sluggishness and slowness, my Windows machine never crashed or got infected by viruses. The point of this post is to ask, who has had not only bad experiences, but amazingly horrible experiences with their Macs? I actually thought about it for a while, and I don't know anyone who hasn't had a major problem that necessitated going to the Apple Store (big problems like hard drive failure). Macs shouldn't be like this right? But, I don't believe that I am the only one, and we seem to be drowned under the entire slogan of "It just works".
Problems I have Experienced:
-When it was brand new, it had 1 hour of battery life.
-"Never waking up again" after sleeping even with a hard shutdown
-Random beachball hangs that require hard shutdown
-Random kernel panics that require hard shutdown
-Windows, in Bootcamp, hangs that require hard shutdown
And today,
-Can't get past log-in screen
...Continuing reading if you want to hear an interesting story...
I bought my Macbook Pro in 2007 as part of the school deal because I am a college student. It was my first Mac, and first laptop. On a full charge, I would have 1 hour of battery life. But, because it was my first laptop I never knew this was not normal until my warranty expired.
I went through an amazing headache (but ultimately worthwhile, I...guess) of a learning curve that lasted about 5 months. By the end of this learning experience, I felt like I was sorta a power user. I was touting the Mac OSX experience as superior to the Windows experience (and I still believe it is...if it worked all the time) and my friends would jokingly call me an Apple fanboy. I found this site, AppleInsider, and followed Apple news daily - all this from someone who was originally not a "tech geek". Knowing this, I hope you don't dismiss me as a Windows fanboy bashing Apple.
Then, came the day my Mac decided not to wake up after shutting the lid. Literally a few days after the warranty expired too. Despite a hard shut down, my Mac's display was completely blank and black. Sending it to get it fixed at the Apple store was $1500 - "motherboard issue" - which hurts because that was right when the new 2008 Macbooks came out. (Sidenote: My insurance company promised me they would pay me back the money, so that's why I opted to get it fixed, but they ultimately denied my claim, so sucks to be me).
After this, I upgraded to Leopard doing a clean install. The thing is, while as a general whole, the experience is great, spinning beachballs maybe once ever week always required me to do a hard shutdown. It was this overall feeling of unreliability that I really didn't like. I actually learned about a "hard shutdown" only when I got a Mac; I never needed to do a hard shutdown on a Windows computer.
Then from spinning beachballs came random kernel panics. And while spinning beachballs would be from a really intensive flash website on Firefox or opening up Photo Booth (at this point, I'm almost "afraid" to use my Mac, especially Photo Booth), random kernel panics would happen at completely non-intensive intervals - ie, iTunes and some word processing. And would again necessitate a hard shutdown and make me lose data.
Bootcamp, which booted into XP was also a bad experience. Again, the theme of "the general thing was okay, but it would just majorly crash at random occasional times" is still here. My Windows side would randomly hang at some random, non-intensive, time - the sound would just start looping. And, it would never shutdown all the way either and would hang at that last screen. All necessitating a hard shutdown. These are probably driver issues, and someone may make the claim that the Windows partition has nothing to do with the Mac partition, but taken as an emotional experience, this computer has really given me headaches.
And then came yesterday's crash. I went into Bootcamp to work on some stuff for a while (I use Mac OSX most of the time BTW, and my Windows partition is only 8 GB). It, of course, hung at the last shutdown screen, and I hard shutdown-ed. After booting back up into Mac OSX, I realized I could not get beyond the aqua blue screen that flashes for a second before going into the log-in menu. I tried everything I knew - safe booting, repairing the disk and repairing the disk permissions using the original install disk, and resetting the P-RAM. I am now getting ready to archive and install again because my Time Machine backup is maybe a few days old and I have some files on there I need to save. This is the second "major", "you-will-tell-me-to-go-to-the-Apple-Store" event I have had, along with the random hangs and crashes. And, I am not a person afraid to start with a blank slate and do a clean install. I have clean installed maybe every 3 months, in some weird hope that "this time" my computer will work.
If you reached here, thanks for reading...
I am now considering a Windows laptop (maybe its just the post-crash anger speaking) despite really falling in love with the (if it worked) Mac OSX experience that is much more streamlined, polished, and clean. This post was essentially to vent out my frustration, but I really wanted to ask if anyone out there has also had not just a "weird-crash-maybe-every-6-months" kinda deal, but a horrible experience.
