1 Sep
2008
22716
hits
hits
A sad sad story
A few days ago, my brand new MacBook Pro broke down after a month of really light use. Believe me, really light use - I did not even move it from the office desk.
I have to admit that I did read a few articles about the hard drive issues that the Mac Book Pros have, although I thought it was just either FUD or a guy with really bad luck and a blog. So I just ignored them.. what a mistake.
The first thing I did when I listened the hard drive making weird noises was to turn the laptop down and bring it to a data recovery company. I knew what was going on, and the longest the disk is spinning the fewer opportunity you have to recover the data.
After 20 days, the data recovery company has got back to me today - it seems that they needed to order some pieces to Russia, that's why it took them so long. They told me that there is no way on Earth someone could read that HD. Basically it seems that the hard disk platters are screwed up and there is nothing they can do about it.
Well, and if that wasn't enough, I called one of the official Apple support centers in Spain - and here it comes the best part: they told me that it won't take less than 3 weeks to get my laptop back with a new hard drive. For god shake! It takes Dell a single business day to fix a 'cheap' laptop, but I will have to wait three weeks for getting a disk replaced by Apple?!? That IS madness.
So, now that I have lost a bunch of information is when a few questions come to my mind. Was it worth paying twice the price for a MacBook Pro? Did I do the right thing by keeping OS X on it?
By the way, one of the things I have had to do after the hard drive crashed was to restore my mail from a backup, which ended up not being as easy as it was supposed to be. I had the mail stored in Mail.App format (the OS X mail client) and I had to restore it on Thunderbird, so I had to write a tiny script to convert a emlx mail directory into a mbox file. I paste it here in case it might be useful for someone:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
for f in sys.argv[1:]:
tmp = open(f, "r").read().split('\n',1)
raw = tmp[1][:int(tmp[0])]
print "From - Sat Jan 3 01:05:34 1996\n" + raw
Posted by Alvaro Lopez Ortega
Comments
W. Wayne Liauh on Mon Sep 1 20:10:38 2008
900
Yes, this is a very sad sad story, but I am speaking from a very different perspective. While some of us, who have nothing to do with Sun, are so proud of our OpenSolaris notebooks, it is sad, sad, sad, to hear that there are so many Sun employees worshiping Mac, and totally unwilling to try something that the mouth-feeder Sun has become so dependent upon for its success ("survival" is too big a word--for now anyway). Had we had more Sun employees willing to immerse themselves into the OpenSolaris OS, the powersaving/STR features would have been implemented long long time ago. Dr. James Gosselin made this emphatic plea a couple of months ago, after he, unlike many Sun's employees, installed os 2008.05 on his notebook (I am talking about bare metal, not VBox). I guess no one pays attention to the father of Java any more, especially inside the Sun confine. Yes, this is a sad, very sad, story. Indeed!
John A on Mon Sep 1 20:02:04 2008
899
Wait, if the information on the harddrive (mail etc) is very importat, why store it on a 2,5" sata drive on a laptop? Atlease set up a system with raid 5 running a mailserver and a cvs server for you.
Henrique on Mon Sep 1 19:34:51 2008
898
I wonder if the "high quality hardware" perception of Apple comes only from the design and the trendy ads. It's not the first case I see of Apple products with hardware failures short after bought (see the explosive MacBooks, the trashed LCD MacBooks, etc.). People say a lot of good things from Apple products, but I always tought it was just perception from buying something that sells itself as elitist.
Todd M on Mon Sep 1 18:38:02 2008
897
I work in IT and I have seen a handful of Macbook Pros have their HD's die. In my case, there is an Apple store a mile from where I work. The Macbooks that were under warranty I brought there. They didn't have the replacement HD in stock, so it took a week for everything to be complete. The other HD's I replaced my self. Opening a MB Pro is minor surgery.
Alos on Sat Sep 13 20:36:08 2008
923
I've used Macs since I was 10 years old. My first computer (a Performa 630CD) still works. So does my iMac, a Macbook and my Powerbook G4. These things (especialy HD failures) have nothing to do with Apple. "OpenSolaris notebooks, it is sad, sad, sad, to hear that there are so many Sun employees worshiping Mac..." I didn't know they sold their souls to their company XD "Macs are mere toys compared to the multi-processor monsters in my home..." You are comparing a desktop computers to a laptop? Yes, the 8 core MacPros are for kids... "The OS itself is built for idiots... almost like windows.... it is a simple machine...." And here I thought that ease of use was the goal of the OS. You mean to tell me that the harder to use, the better? Are you a SW developer? If yes, tell me what do you work on to NOT use it.
Alvaro Lopez Ortega on Mon Sep 1 18:34:49 2008
896
Hub, you are right, indeed. The thing it that I had already my Linux desktop, to having a laptop running OS X was useful for developing (testing whether a release worked alright on OS X, for instance).
Hub on Mon Sep 1 18:28:15 2008
895
You should have gotten a ThinkPad and run Linux on it. I guess the first mistake was to buy a Mac, and the second to keep MacOS X on it. (read from p.g.o.)
xyz on Mon Sep 1 21:21:47 2008
901
Some time ago, my friend ordered RAM upgrade for mini - he had to wait for one month! apple service = assrape
qwerty on Mon Sep 1 23:41:57 2008
902
Macs are mere toys compared to the multi-processor monsters in my home. The laptops look pretty and have a glossy os, and sexy packaging. But that's all there is to it: Eyecandy. The OS itself is built for idiots... almost like windows. There is no way to customize anything on a Mac. The system itself is unstable (safari froze my entire system, when I had a mac). I would get a mac for my grandmother or aunt, because it is a simple machine made for simple users. However, as a software developer, and computer scientist I use OpenSolaris 2008.05 on my new thinkpad and custom tower, Solaris 10 on my server, a compiled build of the ON sources for testing, and archlinux for my old laptop. What is sad to me, is that many clueless people (fanatics, rather) go out and buy apple products and then they believe that they've acquired the best computing product in the world. My friend fancies himself a 1337 hacker and computer wizard, yet when I asked him if he ever used linux or solaris or bsd, he gave me a look of disgust and said that they couldn't do *nearly* as much as a mac can. In fact, he claimed, they were worse than windows. Many of these macusers are completely clueless as to how inferior their system of choice is in terms of hardware platform and operating system compared to the truly powerful and open unixes (solaris, bsd, linux, etc). I know that Mac is based on FreeBSD, but the apple has fallen far from the tree imho. Mac OS X is just another piece of proprietary trash that only looks better than the alternatives. And for the record, I don't think that the prices apple charges for Mac computers are justifiable in any passible way. Yes, it is pretty. But it is more important, imho, to have a solid, stable, reliable laptop, computer, etc rather than a pretty looking peice of garbage. I don't need my computer to match my drapes, I need it to be customizable and adaptable to *me*. Not the other way around.
Stan on Tue Sep 2 02:34:16 2008
903
Time Machine. Easiest backup system ever. You should use it.
Stan on Tue Sep 2 02:52:23 2008
904
(To be less flippant about it) Who do you think makes the hard drives in Apple laptops? Hitatchi, Seagate, Western Digital, etc. Apple doesn't make them. These sorts of failures happen to all laptops, although I'm sure you'll hear people swear that their favorite manufacturer doesn't have this problem. :) The lesson here is that laptop hard drives (and hard drives in general) are prone to failure, especially when they are new. The standard term for this is "infant mortality." I frequently upgrade the hard drives in my laptops to larger/faster models. Out of 6 laptop drives I've purchased through the years, 3 have failed. Two of them failed in the first month of purchase, and the third failed after 3 years. This is pretty much normal for drives, and you should plan for it. Protecting your data is not about buying "higher quality" hardware, since evaluating such a thing is impossible in today's market. No one has the sample size (except the manufacturers, and they aren't talking) required to compare the failure rates of different models. Even if you could gather such statistics from end-users in an unbiased way, the drive model in question would probably be going obsolete by the time you could make the measurement. The solution is to diversify and keep your important data in multiple places. Then you get to square the failure probability, which is vastly better than trying to find a drive which is 50% more reliable. But seriously, Time Machine is your friend. Buy an external drive and plug it in whenever you are leaving your laptop on the desk for a while.
Saimon Moore on Tue Sep 2 10:04:13 2008
905
Same thing happened to me with my Macbook. After a month, it died and, yes they didn't haven any hd in stock so it took 3 weeks to get a replacement. Then exact same thing happened to my partner. Then his keyboard started to crack where the lid grooves touch it. A month later same thing happened to my macbook.
Phil on Tue Sep 2 10:30:13 2008
906
yes, you paid too much for a macbook pro, whilst osx is good, it does not compare to bsd, solaris. i bought a macbook (which i feel is only priced slightly higher than a reasonable price) for my girlfriend from john lewis in the uk which offered 2 years warranty compared to the apple shops 1 year warranty. She had a problem with the keyboard and I called John Lewis and they directed me to apple care even though i did not buy it from apple. service was 10 out of 10 and they replaced the keyboard on the spot at my nearest apple store while i waited. i think apples are the best for non-tech users but are over-priced. granted if you are developing you need a mac to test ported software on so it may be un-avoidable to spunk out so much cash. However, more strongly I agree with W. Wayne Liauh, why do a lot of sun developers use apple? Mr Simon Phipps, Head of OSS at Sun uses a powerbook (oops... could be wrong but if memory serves correctly i'm not), this seems absurd. sun's oss ombudsman supporting a notorious oss parasite . hope things work out well with hdd replacement
me on Wed Sep 3 00:15:06 2008
907
Was it worth paying twice the price for a MacBook Pro? Did I do the right thing by keeping OS X on it? Or was it just my own fault not making backups of this important data, and would no other operating system have made these backups for me?
Bruce on Wed Sep 3 03:23:44 2008
908
Sad but true... Apple breaks new ground with their designs, very often putting components in environments they were never designed to operate in. The first Mac, the *original* 128K Macintosh, was notorious for melting if anything was placed on top of the flat surface... Apple didn't want fans and put a CRT + computer in a plastic box with minimal ventillation because it seemed cooler. My original Mac never failed because I was extremely careful with it, but my Mac Mini similarly runs way too hot and needs careful attention to space around it (at least it has a fan!). Lots of G5 iMacs pretty much melted... Breaking new ground is "cool" but often dangerous... I generally prefer PCs that are cheaper, more easily upgradeable, easier to run any Solaris/Linux/... OS I want. Of course laptops of all types have heat problems, but I do suspect Apple's use of the aluminum "heat sink" case might mean another of their famed under-ventillation situations (perhaps assuming a certain ambient temperature hence thermal transfer through the case itself and not just the air ducts)
CFB on Wed Sep 3 18:37:05 2008
909
You can't really blame Apple for HD failures-- they're just using off-the-shelf parts from Fujistu, Hitachi etc. Re backups--if you'd just done nightly clones of your hard drive using the excellent SuperDuper, you could have booted right up from your latest backup, and carried on working with only a few hours data loss. Then at least you could have stayed productive until Apple's new hard drive arrived in stock and you had to send it away for repair.
Amy on Thu Oct 2 21:28:12 2008
951
This really isn't an OS issue at all. All hardware might fail, eventually all hardware WILL fail. There is one thing that could have helped you. A good backup. Or two. NO computer failure is a sad sad tale if you have a backup.
