The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
My Apple fanboyness died a small death last week. I love my Apple stuff, I really do, but I was more than disappointed (read: angry) when the week prior I had to order a new laptop to replace one that died after I only had it for 14 months. Laptops are notorious for having a short life span. This is one reason that tech companies are not sad to see their sales rising with each and every quarter. After some investigation, I found a few stats that put the chances of your laptop failing in the first two years of service to be roughly 50 per cent. Most of these troubles are caused by either loss or theft or damage caused by dropping them. My laptops work hard. I donÕt own a desktop machine and my laptop needs its own frequent flyer card. It also never gets shut off (Never. It gets put to sleep at night, but unless the battery dies on it or it needs to restart after some sort of failure, it is always running) and needs to basically do everything from editing videos, audio and photos and often all at the same time. Still, 14 months between shelling out several thousand dollars for a high-end laptop and having to do it again seems all too short in my books. I had never thought of buying a Mac before I moved to a laptop. But when I did go looking for my first laptop about five years ago, I found that Apple machines had a great battery life, they had good screens and most of all at the time for my kids who wanted to watch movies in the van when we traveled, they had a DVD player, something few machines had then. But in the first 16 months that I had a Mac, I went through four of them. Like clockwork, every four months I needed a hard drive or a motherboard replaced. Apple was good about it, never charging me a cent and eventually, offering me a new machine when the repairs got to be too many. But it was still inconvenient to have to ship my computer off for a week or two every few months. Still, when I looked for another laptop, and then a third, I bought another Mac. The same goes for the two my wife has owned, the last desktop computer we had, the three iPods and all of the wireless equipment we own. This is what Apple does to people. Once you begin using their products, you find they are so powerful and easy to use that you simply donÕt want to go back to using anything else. This is what they count on of course. You keep pouring money into their company. But my fanboyness died a bit last week when I had to press the ÒComplete PurchaseÓ button on their website for the second time in 14 months. My MacBook Pro had been acting up for a month or two. When I went to Shanghai in September I was worried about it dying in the middle of giving a presentation. Thankfully it never happened and it actually seemed to be fixing itself somehow, getting better each day as I crossed my fingers in hope that whatever was up with it was now over. It was too good to be true, of course, and one day, with a small popping sound, the screen simply turned black and that was that. The smell of fried electronics was strong in the air for a few seconds. I was so mad that I even spent a few minutes at the Dell website flipping through their machines and wondering about the wisdom of heading back to Apple. But back I went. IÕm pathetic, I know. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
