My little clamshell

Love's a bitch, ain't it, especially when the object of your affection is an inanimate object. When it comes to Apple, I'm willing to endure its considerable deficiencies: sucky battery life, shoddy hardware, quirky software. Apple screwed up with the MobileMe debacle, but even Steve Jobs confessed that Apple wasn't ready for that kind of commitment. And yes, Apple lovers were promised shiny apps and better communication on the iPhone 3G, only to find themselves standing in long lines to get therapy. And for some people the hatred runs deep.

We can't have it good all the time, but when it's good, it's very, very good.
Readers of the blog will recall the lemon of an iBook I got 3 years ago. Three hard drives and four logic boards were replaced (under warranty, thankfully) before they gave me a shiny new MacBook about a year ago. I felt a little like a Stepford husband, trading up to a better model, but the MacBook was so everything I always wanted my iBook to be.

About 6 months ago I noticed that some pixels in the raster started flickering. At first the flickering was confined to a small area, but over a few weeks it had spread to form a neat vertical band about 2 inches from the left side of the screen, not enough to make the display unusable, but enough to have to constantly resize windows so I could read the screen. I was working on a Webcast at work using Keynote at the time, and I couldn't part with the machine until it was done. I went to the Apple Store in SoHo and the Genius there said they'd have to send it in for repair. I kept putting it off and putting it off, until I decided I'd have to suck it up and go without my MacBook for a week. Although I'd had always had fairly good service from AppleCare, there was one servicing of my iBook that took 3 weeks, so I was a little reticent about sending it in.

But this past Tuesday I finally called AppleCare. I got a dude on the phone who sounded pleasant enough but didn't sound like he'd been through a whole lot of customer service training. He had a hard time understanding my pixel issue, which, I admit, could have been the way I explained it ("deteriorating horizontal lines of pixels forming a vertical band about 2 inches from the left of the screen"), but at least the next day I got a shipping box in the mail. The box was dropped off at DHL that day. Apple received it the next morning, did the repair, and shipped it out all on the same day. Yesterday when I came home from work my little clamshell was there waiting for me. The plastic surgery did wonders. Apple does care.