I was very excited when I was soon to get a new MacBook. In the past I've gone though a PowerBook 1400, a Blueberry iBook, and a white iBook G3, and this only accounts for the laptops I've owned. Each of these systems worked very well for me in their time, and I was quite pleased to be getting a new current generation laptop...

That excitement at this point has quickly diminished. You see, though each of my prevous machines had their problems (primarily my iBook G3 which needed around 3 logic board replacements in it's AppleCare life span), I could rely on them & use them. Now at this point, I'm finding myself wondering how long it will be until the next hardware glitch has an immediate effect on me...

I just got my MacBook back a little over a week ago, after having been repaired for the random shutdown issue. Since then my MacBook has already shutdown randomly twice, so I'm assuming in a few more weeks I'm going to loose it again for another two weeks, bringing the total time the MacBook has been out of my hands to a month within the 4 months that I've owned it now...

But there are also other annoying issues that also have been occuring, but that I can only get the run around on when I try to report a problem. You see, my monitor on occasion will noticably flicker brightness. This, as far as I know, is still an unacknowledged issue by apple but has been documented by others. A quick search on youtube shows a handful of videos documenting the very issue: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=macbook+flicker

Then there's the problem where I end up needing to zap my PRAM every time I reboot due to the Black Screen 'O Death that almost always comes up durring boot...

I also have to constantly make an effor to check to see weather or not my MacBook has lost connection with my AirPort Base Station. Not only that but I also had to disable the hiding of the Base Station ID because for some reason my MacBook would keep getting errors saying it could not join the network. All the wile my old iBook G3 has zero issues connecting to the same base station.

The most ironic thing came when I brought my MacBook in due to the random shutdown error though. The guy at the Apple Store told me that these machines cannot be used heavily, otherwise they will have problems. What does that mean? I now have to limit how often I use my new MacBook? I've never had to do anything like that before, and now I'm supposed to somehow ration my usage? I can still sit down with my old G3 iBook (nearly 4 years old at this point) and use it all day long with zero issues... Only problem is, that laptop now belongs to my wife who gets to use it as often as she'd like with no headaches... In a way, I envy her at this point.

In short this MacBook is the first new Mac I've purchased in over 3 years & is the 7th Mac I've owned. It's also the first Mac I've ever owned where I constantly have both a perpetual fear of a likely hardware failure, and a fear that in another year (even with an extended AppleCare warranty) the thing will no longer be the least bit usable.

I feel like I've effectively put the $1500 which took me so long to save up into a garbage bin, and in the end I'll end up having to take my iBook G3 back from my wife in order to have a computer that acutally works until the day comes that I once again can afford to buy one...

Although we empathize with the customer in such situations, as
moderators we simply do not posses adequate resources to provide
assistance to customers on an individual basis. Our advice is to have
the customer follow the due escalation path that is available for them
in specific channels, such as Technical Support, Customer Relations,
Education Sales, etc.