As (bad) luck would have it, barely two days after writing my year-end notes of 2014, the MacBook Pro Retina – my daily-use computer at work – started failing spectacularly.
The machine is just a shade under 2.5 years old, and had previously gone through a major repair job when the notebook failed barely just a year after purchase. In that instance, the unit required a motherboard replacement, a job that typically costs more than a thousand moola in repair and replacement charges. As the notebook then was barely just out of its one year warranty – after some begging/pleading, Apple consented to replace the motherboard out of goodwill and without charge.
Skip ahead by another year and a half, and the machine is failing again. I’ve lost count of the number of times the MacBook simply refused to start, or just flat-lined BSODed (blue-screen-of-death for the non-tech persons). After a lot of fault-finding involving disk wipes, re-installation of operating system, different driver versions, many visits to Boot Camp, my educated guess was that the fault laid in the failing graphics processing unit component. Basically, the notebook runs fine, but the component providing graphics acceleration is kaput.
Now, that might not seem like a serious thing; but failure of that component not only means no graphics acceleration (i.e. anything on the web using video acceleration, Youtube videos, runs like a dog now) and Windows display refreshes are maddeningly slow – all disabilities I can live with. But the one I couldn’t go without was the corresponding loss of external video projection – something that’s integral at work. Basically, the MacBook Pro cannot project onto an external screen.
To be fair, as lovely as the exterior chassis and the build of the MacBook Pros are, my particular unit has had numerous oddities. The screen display as I found out was from a particular batch of monitors that suffered from temporary screen ghosting. And for some reason, the notebook often ran hot even when doing routine work. And I’d neglected to purchase Apple’s Complete Care package.
In comparison; the more than 4 year old Dell XPS 16 is still for the most part working fine. Who would have believed it!
In summary; no more MacBook Pros for me, or at least not without also forking out the additional money for Complete Care. More in the next post!
I have to admit, the reason I’ve yet to purchase an Apple notebook is because of your spectacularly bad luck with (what I would consider) premature failures. Given how well you take care of your electronic devices, it’s pretty remarkable.
Yeah. The Apple enthusiasts would often have you believe that their MBPs rarely/do not fail, but in my experience, they are no more reliable than the other notebook manufacturers out there. The takeaway for me though is that these things are a hit-and-miss, and the only thing one can really do is to have subscribed to the appropriate support and care packages!