I'll believe it when I see it.
It Just Works. Except when it doesn't.
I've had my MacBook for just over five months now. (More details start here.) It's seen what I would consider light use; web surfing, iTunes, note taking. A few chapters of my novel. I don't use it every day, not by a long shot.
I got the dreaded Spinning Beach Ball of Death.
All in all things were going well. There were some adjustments to make. For one thing Mac users have a very different relationship with their keyboards than I do. I'd pretty much gotten to the point where I was comfortable enough to start migrating things off of my existing desktop which needs an upgrade (and was destined for server-hood) anyway. I'd even bought a new hard drive and cables for the upgrade.
And then my MacBook stopped working. I put it to sleep on Friday morning and took it with me on a trip to Lorton. I spent much less time on the customer site than I expected to so the MacBook stayed in my laptop bag the whole time. That afternoon I took it out of the laptop bag and put it on my desk. I opened it up and it woke up from sleep without a hitch. That was the last normal thing it did.
I tried to launch Open Office. I don't even remember why. Probably to print some labels or something. OO got about 2/3rds of the way through it's startup (handy having that progress bar on the splash screen) and hung there. Instead of my OO document opening I got the dreaded Spinning Beach Ball of Death. (Those of you who have never had the pleasure should take a look here.) I was able to "Force Quit" Open Office. My first thought was that I needed to check my disk. I opened a new Finder window so I could locate Disk Utility and... nothing happened. Finder also went all SBBoD on me. And that is very, very bad.
Boot. Chime. Blue Screen. Nothing.
I tried to reboot it several times and got nothing. Chime -- good sign. Blue screen -- good sign. Then nothing. No Apple logo, no "I can't find the system folder so here's a flashing '?' icon." Nothing. It couldn't find the hard drive. At all.
I'm not exactly going great guns on writing my novel. I tend to write in bursts, a couple thousand words at a time. (And those bursts are few and far between.) About the only time I ever have the chance to do anything with it is on the weekend. As in Friday and/or Saturday. As in the next 24-48 hours.
If you do have a backup you'll still be sorry but you'll be able to do something about it.
Your hard drive will fail. If you don't backup your computer you will be sorry. If you do have a backup you'll still be sorry but you'll be able to do something about it. I've done weekly backups of all my systems ever since the time in January of 2001 when one of my machines got hacked while I was away for the weekend. I didn't lose much data but it was a pain in the behind.
Since then I've done weekly backups. I created some scripts that run on Sunday morning and backup to a shared hard drive on one of my Linux boxes. I didn't really worry much about off-site storage unless I was leaving town for a couple days. When that happened I'd just burn some CD's and take them with me. Not a perfect solution, but good enough.
About 5-6 months ago I got a little more rigorous in my backup methodology. External hard drives are so cheap that there's no excuse not to have a couple. I still have my Sunday morning scripts (now extended to more machines than before) but they're a little more thorough. And Sunday afternoon or Monday morning I copy the weekly backups to an external drive, then burn a DVD and mail it to my off-site backup repository. (Thanks, Lois!)
My point being that I was in better shape than the average schmuck with a busted hard drive. I had several copies of my data in several places.
My hard drive replacement was done within 24 hours just like they promised. All I had to do was drive another 65 miles round-trip to get it. I stood in line to pick it up. The cashier turned it on, turned it to face me. Boot. Chime. Blue screen. Nothing.
I just about had a fit right then and there. The Magnate (if they can call their techies Geniuses I can call their cashiers Magnates, right?) looked at me blankly. (I think he was having trouble finding his own system folder.) He powered it off and back on. This time it booted to the long, uninterruptible, Welcome video that serves as your initiation into the cult of Macintosh. I breathed a sigh of relief and took it home.
Big mistake.
Over the next several days I put it through its paces pretty seriously. I did many unnecessary reboots. I installed and uninstalled software. I messed with hardware drivers. And I ran Disk Utility like it was going to squirt money out of the FireWire port.
Mostly, it was okay. There were a couple things that had me concerned, but I figured I'd just go with and see what happened. What choice did I have?
I thought about calling this section "Reconstruction" as it lasted about as long as the historical period so named. Restoring the data is a slower process than you might think. There are a lot of files on a modern computer system. The data for any given program isn't necessarily all in one place. I eventually restored all the data that I cared about but it took me quite a few hours to do so.
Actually, that's not quite true. I didn't bother to restore my Boot Camp partition. (Intel-based Macs can dual-boot OSX and Windows, Linux, etc.) It's a lot of work and I figured I'd wait until I was a little more comfortable that it wasn't going to melt down again. This did, unfortunately, leave me without a working Quicken installation which was the primary reason I'd gone down that road to start with. To be fair, I wasn't real excited about running Quicken on it anyway. (I'd been running under VM-Ware Fusion -- which will actually work without the Boot Camp stuff -- and I have no complaints about that, it works fine.)
I'm finding it hard to describe the problem. Mostly it just felt wrong. Quicken seemed ginormous on my 13" MacBook screen. And the keys didn't always do what I wanted them to do. And mostly I just didn't want to deal with installing Windows again. (Even though the Boot Camp install of XP was by far the easiest Windows install I've done since the 3.x days. Seriously. That part just works.)
I spent some time looking for a Quicken replacement that would run natively on Mac. (Quicken for Mac is one of the most universally reviled pieces of software in the history of the medium. It won't even import your data without you jumping through large, spinning, razor-wired, flaming hoops.) I eventually gave up and installed it on my work PC. Good move.
Once I got all my data restored I decided to get another external drive to back up the MacBook. The latest version of Mac OS contains a program called Time Machine that quietly backs up all changes to your hard drive in the background. (I think Vista may have something similar, not sure.) It doesn't take up much CPU time, you can turn it off any time you need to, and you can store a whole buttload of backups on an external drive for about $100. I went with a 320 GB LaCie "Rugged" drive which is the same thing that Apple uses for its Genius Bar "triage" disks. I chose to pay a few extra bucks and get a FireWire drive because it's faster than USB and (as far as I can tell) easier to boot from if you ever need to do that. (Apple makes it trivially easy to boot from an external drive if/when you need to.)
If you have a Mac I strongly suggest you get an external drive to dedicate to Time Machine backups. Once you set it up (you can tell it areas of the disk to skip) it's pretty much automatic.
Good thing I did.
So, to recap briefly: drive dies on Friday, get it back on Saturday, order external hard drive on Sunday, set up Time Machine on Monday. (Whatever happened to Solomon Grundy?) Good thing I did.
It did a couple weird things on Monday/Tuesday (Feb 23/24) while I as doing all this. Nothing too terrible, but enough to convince me that it wasn't well and that my first appoinment at the Genius Bar would not be my last.
Between the 24th and the 6th everything seemed to go well. All of my old data was restored and I (eventually) got everything back to more-or-less the way it was. To keep it that way I now had Time Machine archiving changes off to my FireWire drive every hour. Smooth sailing. I was starting to think that maybe everything was okay.
One of the things that I've been putting off doing is getting all my schedule data somewhere. I don't take many meetings so it isn't a big deal most of the time, but I don't want to have to grab my phone or my laptop to see if something conflicts with my vacation schedule or whatnot. I'd been doing some research and I found a way to synchronize cleanly between my Windows desktop (Thunderbird/Lightning) and my MacBook (iCal) through Google Calendar. That's just about perfect for what I need. Or it would be if my MacBook hadn't died again.
Just like last time: here one minute, gone the next. This time it didn't even wake up from sleep. Just a blue background screen. And nothing. I couldn't even boot it from the FireWire drive which is a very, very bad sign.
I again had to sign the paperwork permitting them to sacrifice my hard drive to their dark gods.
So back to the Genius Bar at 11:30 on a Saturday. (I could've gotten an appointment last night because, apparently, everyone with broken Apple hardware was in line for "Watchmen." Unfortunately, so was I.) We went to Annapolis this time as it's only about a 45 mile round-trip. It was a zoo. Surprisingly enough it wasn't a bunch of annoying teens like usually stalk the Apple store. It was their grandparents. Next time I going on a Tuesday afternoon.
Today's genius didn't spend much time with my equipment at all. Luckily the symptoms didn't "Scooby Do" me and he was able to quickly determine that it was something more than the hard drive. Now why couldn't genius #1 have done that? Oh yeah, because it wasn't in his script. Honestly, all it would have taken to rule out the original hard drive (and save me hours of torture) would have been to pop out the old drive and stick it in a new machine. (It's only about a 2 minute operation on the MacBook and they had to take my drive out anyway.)
I again had to sign the paperwork permitting them to sacrifice my hard drive to their dark gods. And now my MacBook is on its way to a repair depot somewhere. They're going to test the drive, the logic board, and all points in between. And it should only take 5 days or so. Unless something goes wrong.
This has been a huge bump in the road of my grand Macintosh experiment. I've really come to like many things about OS X. It's pretty (which *is* important at least to some degree) and pretty consistent. I love being able to create a PDF from just about anything. I like the fact that it's Unix inside and I can script and cron to my heart's content. Mostly, OS X just works.
The hardware is another story. I used to think that Apple made pretty decent hardware. Now I'm not so sure. I don't know what I'm going to do if this latest repair doesn't fix it. (I do have some ideas and they're all quite loud.) I've sunk way too much money into it to back out now but I can't use a computer that only lives for two weeks at a time.
On the fifth day after I dropped it off I had my MacBook back. They'd confirmed their diagnosis of a bad "main logic board" which is Apple-speak for motherboard. I've been running it for 6 weeks now with the new board. Everything seems fine, so I'm a happy camper.