MTBF≈0

Tuesday morning came with cold rain and a grim discovery.

The beloved 13" macbook, barely 9 months old, had become cold and unresponsive.

We poked it. We prodded it. We held down the power button for an eternity. We unplugged it. We plugged it back in. We gently shook it. We opened it. We closed it. We held our breath, closed our eyes, and chanted "Shift-Control-Option-Power!" to appease the SMC grigri. Of course, nothing happened. The LED on the magsafe connector gave a deathly green dim glow. The coffee table queen was no longer with us.

We could have bought a box full of cheap-o laptops for the expense of that piece of aluminum. I threw up my hands in disgust and swore blue ("Pomme de Terre! Pomme de Terre!!").

There being something like 29 months of warranty left, I took it to the Apple store to let them deal with it.

The friendly guy (lets face it, Apple store employees seem like friendly people...), who got it to diagnose did the same poke-prod-plug-chant thing. No luck for him either. Swaping the magsafe adapter showed it was fine. Focus was on the computer. He took it in back to pop the lid and see if something was wrong. After about 20 minutes, he came back to say that we was able to reset the SMC after unplugging the battery. He ran the apple hardware tests (side note: the hardware test interface still uses the System 9 UI. Slick. I still miss the old mac GUI.) The battery tests showed something like 14 discharge/recharge cycles and 102% of design capacity. The system temperature s were great. Nothing was wrong. Still brand new, really.

It was some condolence that a couple of other macbooks in the service area appeared to have similiar afflictions, though I wasn't if the root cause was the same. I wonder if there's a Firmware patch in the works?

We had a quick, but fruitless discussion about possible causes. He said the SMC will put the computer into a failsafe mode if it thinks something is trying to kill the battery by drawing too much current. Sadly, from our perspective, we turned off the computer and it just wouldn't come back on. There was no apparent cause, and the SMC doesn't have a log function (that I know of). To be super thorough, he nuked the PRAM (side note: we've been doing this to macs for eons now... I didn't know that still worked on Intel macs), and reset the SMC one more time. Brainwashing the grigri.

We shook hands, and I pushed through the crowd (did I mention the place was full?) took the glowing aluminum slab back home.

My feelings about this whole experience are mixed. I've had a few friends have Mac and Macbooks conk out over the years, although my experience with the G4 has been excellent, it having exceeded it's design life by four years and the years I expected to use it by two. I'm beginning to suspect that the G4 is somehow an outlier. I really like it, that partially drove the purchase of the Macbook, but having it turn up stone cold dead one morning is pretty disheartening. I don't think it really required a trip to the apple store, but fiddling with the internal battery seems like a warranty voiding maneuver. At the same time, we live really close to the Apple Store, so it's nearly painless to let someone else do what I could do myself. I also recognize that our various devices are getting harder to work on as their integration escalates. At some scary point, it won't be possible to open. What then?