Ask a Question Thursday

Periodically, we feature Ask a Question Thursday. Honestly, we've held it on different days...but for our purposes today, it's Thursday, hence the name.


Today's question comes from regular commentator Mikie3toes:

I have followed your blog for some time now. I've lost count of the number of hardware failures you and yours have experienced on your Macs. Why are you so loyal to the Mac, given the number of problems you have had?

Great question, Mr. Triphalanges. It's true, I am a dedicated Mac user, although that's a bit of a redundancy.

For years I was a PC user. I did not know much about macs. For a good fifteen years, I thought as a child and I spake as a child and I computed as a child. It was a two year period of seeing through a glass particularly darkly that caused me to look to the Bright White Side.

When I joined the staff of an unmentioned megachurch, I was issued a new laptop. I was excited. I'd had laptop computers before, but they were always castaways that had served their time. This was my first new (i.e. functional) laptop.

Two weeks after joining staff, it arrived and went straight to IT for prep. It loved IT. I assume so anyway, because it spent most of the time I had it in the IT office.

In the pursuit of clarity, it may not have been entirely Dell's fault. When IT issued it to me, they had stripped off Windows XP and replaced it with Windows 95. This is not a misprint. Perhaps a crime, but saddly, not a misprint. When I inquired as to why they did such a thing, the reply was "We don't service XP." That struck me as something akin to the car dealer pulling new engines out of new cars and replacing them with last year's engines because "we don't work on new engines".

The Dell was a dud. I performed the three finger reboot salute multiple times each day. It would lock up when I taxed it by doing such outrageous things as checking email or opening a second program. It would go to IT, IT would send it back to me. I would sent it back to IT. It was a Radio Shack version of Hot Potato.

When it came time to buy my own, I bought a Mac. To chronicle the headaches, we bought two iBooks - a 12 inch for me and a 14 inch for Kelsey. In the first year, I lost three logic boards and a hard drive. They gave me a new iBook. Kelsey lost one logic board.

I wore the second iBook out. Literally typed the letters off the keyboard. The logic board and hard drive croaked at 11 months and one week. They replaced both.

Kelsey's second logic board died last week, just short of the three year waranty expiring.

In December, I was gifted with a 17 inch powerbook. It is an awesome sight to behold.

You know what? Even with the headaches, I'd buy another one...even if it goes to the shop for a week every year, I'm still time ahead given that I'm not rebooting three times a day. Like all machines, they break. Unlike my PC experiences though, my Macs generally work like swiss watches.

Thanks for your question, Mike3toes. My question to you....are you Mike3toes because that's how you resort to rebooting? :-)