Death Of A MacBook
Enormous magnifying glass for screen sold separately.
Being my personal computer is not an easy job. I spend most
of my day on the computer, either scouring the Internet for funny gifs or
occasionally writing, and my response to even the slightest slowdown in service
is to start yelling obscenities at my screen. I guess it’s because of this
high-pressure Swimming With Sharks-style
atmosphere that my MacBooks have been committing suicide like clockwork every
two years.
I officially became an Apple customer six years ago, when my
father bought me a MacBook for college. Like me, it was both pearly white and
slow to wake up from sleep mode, and I loved it very dearly. Perhaps the
feeling wasn’t mutual, because late in my sophomore year, nearly two years
after I’d received the computer, the hard drive made the sort of record
scratching sound you hear on TV when somebody says something risqué at a party,
and then about a quarter of my data and all of my music was gone forever.
That summer, as I began the slow recovery from the hard
drive crash, my father sat me down at the dinner table for a very blunt, man to
man talk about the facts of life.
“Truman,” he said
to me. “I tend to be of the opinion that
laptops really only have an effective lifespan of three to four years.
“Yeah, I saw that article
you emailed me.” I said.
“Also, I need a
laptop. So I’m going to keep your MacBook and buy you a MacBook Pro, and that’s the last damn laptop I’m buying
you.”
And so, in August of 2009, my MacBook Pro arrived. Like the
spaceship in Independence Day it was
both technologically advanced beyond my comprehension and also made completely
out of metal. As I turned it on, filling my lungs with that new hard drive
smell, I felt pretty good about the idea of keeping this tank of a machine
running for the next several years.
Two years later I had just arrived back at my Culver City
apartment from a Christmas trip to Portland when I pulled out my MacBook Pro
and turned it on only to see a blank white screen, the outline of a file
folder, and a big old question mark. This is not the sort of thing you want to
see on the machine where you keep every single piece of writing you’ve done in
your adult life.
A trip to the Apple Store and a new hard drive fixed that
problem, and then it was smooth sailing for approximately two years until July,
when my MacBook Pro developed some sort of advanced stage computer-based
Alzheimer’s.
Ever since downloading the latest Apple operating system, my
MacBook has literally begun to forget how to be a computer. I have to reboot
several times a day now because every few hours virtually every app on my
computer spontaneously shits the bed in its own special way – iTunes won’t
play, Firefox won’t open, and worst of all, nothing in Word or FinalDraft will
save. This would be great if I used computers as part of some Zen exercise
where after every day of writing the slate was wiped completely clean, but
unfortunately I’m kind of a stickler about being able to have access to my data
from one day to the next.
Like the last two times this sort of thing has happened, I
contacted Apple support. And, after two phone calls with Apple tech support,
three trips to the Apple Store Genius Bar, and a consultation with an Apple
support specialist who gave me his personal number and extension, here’s what
I’ve found out: My MacBook Pro is dying in a way that no Apple product has ever
died before.
Every time I explain my computer’s symptoms to a new tech
support professional, their response is a long, helpless pause, followed by a
few logical solutions I’ve already tried (“Have
you turned the computer on and off?”) and a few House-style Hail Marys once there’s nothing left to offer. (“Have you tried painting it blue?” “No.”
“Try painting your laptop blue. “Will that help?” “I mean, it might. Worst case
scenario, you have a blue MacBook Pro that still doesn’t work very well.”) Whatever
my MacBook has is the laptop equivalent of AIDS in 1983.
This is pretty frustrating for me. A functional computer is
about the only piece of equipment I need in order to make money, and on basic
principle I think it’s kind of shady that a top of the line computer made out
of aircraft-grade aluminum has the same lifespan as an American-made car.
On the other hand, though, I always knew this day would come.
My MacBooks have done this to me twice already, and my Dad made it pretty clear
that laptops only last a few years. I knew that sooner or later I was going to
have to get a new laptop, but having already squeezed two consecutive free ones
out of the old man I wanted to try and postpone this day for as long as
possible – or at least until I was filthy rich.
What really sucks is that I’m just going to replace this
defective MacBook with a new MacBook, which, if history is any guide, will
probably become defective by 2015. If any other product had let me down this
consistently I would’ve started buying from the competition long ago, but with
laptops I don’t really have any choice.
ChromeBooks are useless to me for a variety of reasons that
aren’t terribly amusing, and from what I’ve heard I’m probably better off with
my defective, half dead, four year old laptop than I would be with anything
running Windows 8. When it comes to computers, my only viable option is to keep
buying from the people who have been screwing me for six years.
So when you see me out and about with my MacBook Air in the
coming months, don’t call me an Apple fanboy. I’m really more of a hostage.