Sour Apples

Eighteen months old. That's the age of my wife's laptop - the MacBook Pro that we were going to bring with us on vacation. Turns out the day before we leave, all video output ceases. Kaput.

Interestingly, one of the symptoms (we've been told) of this NVidia processor is the computer randomly shutting down. We had that happen a couple of months ago. Something Apple did (or maybe it was just pure luck on their part) made the random shutdowns occur so infrequently (it only happened twice after getting it back) that we felt it was worth the occasional trouble compared to the hassle of the Apple store and their "genius" bar.

I have a feeling that unless you press the issue (and you know you're affected - see the KB article) that they will try to delay it in hopes that they don't have to pay for the repairs that they already publicly admitted the need for.

So we're out a laptop for this trip. Maybe that's for the best. More time with friends and family - less time blogging and flickring. I'll still use my iPhone for tweets, though.

-- UPDATE --

Apple accepted full responsibility for the defective manufacturing and repaired the laptop's motherboard. They even replaced the DVD drive that had been acting wonky since we got the laptop! Because of the problems we had experienced with the laptop and because it has been essentially replaced we offered to buy the extended apple warranty. They refused, saying that if we didn't buy it before the one-year deadline then we can't buy it at all. Too bad. They could have made some extra money.