Well, the hard drive in my 5 month old MacBook Pro started developing bad sectors this week. On Tuesday, I tried to reboot and it pretty much refused to come up. Neither Linux nor OSX would boot up. The OSX fsck reported unrepairable volume corruption. A badblocks disk scan from linux revealed several bad blocks. Luckily, enough of the Linux partition was readable and the filesystem was ok enough to copy most of the data off.
Today, I headed to the Apple store to see what they would do. Result: they take my computer for 5-8 days for diagnostics and repair. From my perspective, that really really sucks. Dell is MUCH MUCH better if service and support is important to you. Whenever I bought a Dell, I always paid for the next day, at home service. Use it once and it’s worth it. When my screen developed a “line” in it, a Dell guy was standing on my door step the next morning with a new one. When my dell hard drive failed, DHL delivered a new one by 10am the next day with a return slip for the old one. That is called service.
What Apple provides is an annoyance, not service. In retrospect, probably should have bought a new harddrive from the internet someplace, had it overnighted, and replaced it myself. Would be faster and less annoying.
Luckily, I hadn’t given away my old computer yet so I’m not completely stuck for a week.
Update: Fred Dushin claims it’s due to “bad karma” for installing Linux on the Mac. Not sure I buy that.
This is HUGE reason that refuse to buy Apple. Their hardware fails a lot and their support sucks.
Dell is the best! I am using Dell Inspiron.