I am planning on buying a Mac book Pro . I have never used a mac before and this will be my first mac. There seems to be some problems with the mac book pro machines as per this and this . Do you know of some one who has bought this ?. Any suggestions ?
Macbook Pro
triv on 2006-12-19T00:29:45
I've had one for about 6 months now and haven't had any problems with it. Nice and fast, and dual booting is quite handy.
MacBooks
n1vux on 2006-12-19T05:36:39
The Intel Macs are very new, so either wait for the next rev or accept that you MAY have some early-adopter hassles, but you might not.
The local indie Mac repair guy who did a great job on a screen replacement for me recently (not warranty
... NBK error, elbow failure) told me that
* due to extra miniaturization, and no 2nd source, parts & labor on Mac repairs will be higher than on Mac's than other (non-Vaio-class) laptops; parts are not forward depot'd, are short-supply, and pricy; and there aren't many shops outside Apple central repair to choose from. He still managed to under-bid Apple for the repair, and finish faster, and I'm supporting a local, I'm happy.
* due to early adopter issues he's seeing (heat?), *he's* holding off buying a personal duocore MacBook Pro until next board rev at least, until they get the bugs out. This was reported in October, so I don't think it's ripe yet, maybe soon?
I'm not regretting buying a macbook for my local highschool student, as it should last into college without upgrade. But the Pro is edgier, riskier.
I didn't want another Windows notebook, and the Linux laptops aren't really ready for non-geeks.
Price/Performance Sweetspot in the lineup to my mind is the White Macbook package identical to the Black macbook (DVD++, mem++, Disk++) but without the "busines black" color surcharge, so it still looks like a Mac.
Used to be Macs could charge extra for being white, but now they can charge extra for being white at the low end and again for being black at the high end, what a racket.
Bill
No problems here
Fox on 2006-12-19T16:32:47
First off, good decision. You will love it. You really will.
I've had my 15" MBP C2D for around a month now and have had absolutely zero problems. It's perfect. In fact, I like this machine so much, I actually go through the hassle of taking it to work each and every day so I can use it as my work machine.
:-)
There's always a potential for issues with hardware. However, it's comparatively/relatively rare and Apple has a good warranty and support.
I'd go get one now. You almost certainly won't have any problems, but if you do, it'll be easy to solve. Enjoy!
Failures
james on 2006-12-19T18:14:23
I'd actually not had any problems with my MacBook Pro, and was very happy with it. I was referring in the linked blog post to overall failure rates of Apple machines in our office. Of course, two days later the hard drive failed in my own MacBook Pro. All of these things are solved by virtue of Applecare, but there is a significant time overhead.
As a company it hurts us especially, because we have to negotiate our way through the high level tech support ("have you tried rebooting the machine") when we have already diagnosed the problem for ourselves.
Apple really needs to provide us with a business level support rather than consumer support. I would conservatively estimate that we are spending 1 man-day a week talking to Apple tech support (which is significant in a company of ~30 people), and we do literally have a pile of broken down PowerBooks, MacBook Pros, and iBooks.
4 years ago when we started buying Apple machines we didn't have this problem. We moved from an alternate hardware vendor where we had 1 in 4 machines fail to Apple, where it was closer to 1 in 10. Over time the build quality of Apple's hardware has steadily gotten worse and worse.
While most of us love OS X we are starting to loathe the hardware.
This is what put me off Apple just recently
Ron Savage on 2007-02-14T10:00:20
Read a few articles and be sickened:
http://radsoft.net/news/http://rixstep.com/2/
