Scrutinizing your Apple product

[ortuno2k]

I have purchased many, many electronic things in the past, and had never scrutinized a purchase as much as I'm doing this 15" PB.
I feel paranoid about it, and possibly try to find defects where there are none.
Are we Apple users that picky? I've owned other Apple products before including 2 iPods and an iMac and never been so thorough about them as much as this PowerBook.
I hate reading junk posted on boards.
I never knew about the horizontal lines - until I read about it here. Now I see them in my PB, and in my girlfriend's Dell laptop! I had never seen them there!
Now I have a dead pixel and I think my optical drive makes a weird noise when I turn on the computer.
It completely kills the feeling of happiness of any new product and creates an illusion that there's something wrong with whatever you just purchased.
Why? 🙁
Have you ever scrutinized any purchased this much?
We'll never be happy about anything if we can't settle for what we've got.

 

[goodtimes5]

Ignorance is bliss. Stop reading and educating yourself.

 

[randas]

I think my optical drive makes a weird noise when I turn on the computer.

I think thats normal; all my macs' optical drives make a noise on startup.

 

[aquajet]

My CD drive makes noise whenever I boot my Powerbook too. Seems to be a normal thing.

Generally I'm happy with my 12" Powerbook. Although I hate how it gets so hot when I'm using it for simple tasks such as posting on MR or using iChat, causing the fan to cycle on and off. Quite annoying. My 14" iBook never did that.

 

[ortuno2k]

Ignorance is bliss. Stop reading and educating yourself.

I find that these forums are of a high level of addiction.
Kind of hard to leave now, isn't it? 😀

 

[Megatron]

Now I have a dead pixel and I think my optical drive makes a weird noise when I turn on the computer.
It completely kills the feeling of happiness of any new product and creates an illusion that there's something wrong with whatever you just purchased.

Sorry to say it, but a dead pixel IS something wrong.

I had a stuck one on the first ibook I bought, and i brought it back within an hour or two and asked for a new machine. The apple store employee was nice and exchanged the ibook for a new one without much of a hassle at all.

If your powerbook is within warranty I would try to talk to apple about the optical drive noise and the dead pixel and see if there is anything they can do.

 

[GimmeSlack12]

I've had a lot of Macs so perhaps I don't really care as much as a new user (I could be wrong). But unless there is something obviously wrong, I really don't mind.

 

[bigboy99]

We'll never be happy about anything if we can't settle for what we've got.[/QUOTE]

Exactly

 

[Deepdale]

Apple's historical price premium does contribute to the added level of scrutiny and desire for the closest thing to perfection. Nothing is worth becoming so obsessive over, but people associate the cost with what they feel the standards of the final product should be.

 

[BENJMNS]

laptop should be perfect out of the box. if i scratch it or *** it up, ok. but out of the box it shouldn't have any cosmetic defects, performance issues

horizontal lines bugged me enough to exchange for a 17incher. i was worried more about the resaleability of it than the lines itself cuz honestly, it didn't bug me that much

 

[sk3pt1c]

i've got the 17" powerbook for about three weeks now and it ROCKS!
the only thing i've noticed so far is that the lid is barely not horizontal when it closes(meaning that there's more space between the screen and the powerbook when it's closed on one side than the other-1mm max)but it doesn't affect it closing or anything else.i've done video editing working with hundreds of megabytes and no crash.and my only crash was with itunes when i was burning a cd into mp3.killed it through unix and everything was fine,reopened in two seconds.
i also think they should be perfect out of the box as they promote it as the best laptop out there and the price is high enough for us to scrutinise.
on another note though,i think that apple will die out eventually so if you buy before macworld it will be your last true apple purchase.integrating with intel,giving the the motherboard and all that ***** is just a way to make more money for me and i think that they will go away from robustness and so on and turn out to be just prettier pcs with the same bugs.
that's why i got my powerbook now and that's why i won't buy another one till i am definately sure that it is what it says it is.
for me apple and the way they construct their systems rocks but as usual money talks...

 

[Deepdale]

... on another note though,i think that apple will die out eventually so if you buy before macworld it will be your last true apple purchase.

A case can be made for the eventual demise of any product or business, but multi-billion dollar companies with the type of extremely loyal support base that Apple has enjoyed for years do not fade away easily. I am hardly a fanatical Apple flagwaver, but they do deserve praise for consistent innovation and imagination.

Many corporate concerns display signs of arrogance as their popularity takes root and grows dramatically, and this is something that has affected both Apple and more recently Google. Apple should remain healthy for a good time to come but the public is notoriously fickle and certain missteps can lead to a reversal of fortune.