Thursday, April 21, 2011

When Good Macs Freeze



I love Apple Mac! I am their greatest fan but things can go wrong. My first iMac Flower Power was a big disappointment at first. The experience was awful. Six weeks of sheer torture So I rang the Managing Director at Renaissance the distributing house in Auckland and to my surprise I was put straight through.


I do have that sort of accent that commands respect! I am afraid I gave the poor man 'what for' but he was so nice and kind and took the offending Mac to his experts and bingo the thing worked its magic and I have had  Macs ever since.


Not without teething troubles though. Mac 2 a big Mac with 80 gig which today would not even grace the smallest laptop was bought to run iMove 4, a simply wonderful application, but every time I used it it froze solid. I received two new Macs but each one still froze solid which was not on because I was making my DIYTV in 44 minutes DVD.  Nobody at Apple would believe me until I went into their store and proceeded to crash every Apple in sight just by clicking on the sub title button on iMovie.


New Zealand has the toughest consumer laws in the world. The Fair Trading Act and the Consumer Protection Laws mean that if an item you buy is not 'fit for service' it goes back, no arguments. Repair, Replace, Refund.  Apple got the subtitle button to work.


My present 15 Mac Book Pro has been a delight. Gets a bit hot but has done the job with only one glitch in  four years but its replacement the stunning 17 inch MacBook Pro specially configured for Final Cut Pro with 'Thunderbolt' has been a problem.


I bought it in good faith on the 30 March this year. It is a handsome creature but froze the first time I opened it up. A real Arctic freeze! One could not even do an escape. One just had to push the power button and re boot.


Since then I have spent hours and hours on the phone with the charming representatives form Applecare who usually manage to get a naughty Apple going but not this time. Freeze after freeze after freeze.


I asked if anyone else had this problem? I even said I could never report it as the little box that so obligingly appears when this happens never got a chance to appear.  The nice man Artish assured me that this was not a known problem and it was probably in the external applications although I had crashed the MacBook using Calender and Address book of iLife.


After a week of various remedies it had to go back to the distributor's technicians  who announced that the machine was perfect so obviously it was in the software.


My poor distributors have had to spend a week replacing the software. It was supposed to be ready for Maundy Thursday today so I could play with it over the weekend. I don't know what possessed me but I decided to run a Google check on  MacBook Pro 2011 owners experiencing “hard freeze” problem only to find that many hundreds of people all over the world had been experiencing this since 21 March 2011! Nine days before I bought mine! I was sold a computer that Apple knew had issues!
82 pages on Apple Discussion could not have gone unnoticed.


To say I am not a happy camper is something of an understatement. If I lived anywhere else in the world I should be stuck with it as Apple has a way of not accepting returned goods after 14 days. However I live in New Zealand where if  an item sold and it is not up to scratch it goes back and that is the end of it. I cannot even begin to think what a Magistrate in our Small Claims Court where this sort of thing ends up for about $50 would say if she/he knew that Apple were aware of the problem but sold it to me anyway!


No doubt there will be a fix soon but this is now 21 April 2011 and when I rang Applecare today to ask if it had been 'fixed' the Genius (that's what Applecare consultants are called) acted a s if this was the first time he had heard of the problem. I was not impressed. On insisting on an answer to the question 'Is there a fix?' he could only answer that he did not know. Which means 'NO'!


'Never be the first to use or the last to use' my GP husband used to say. Evidently in medicine this is a well known adage but this time I had to do so and of course I got caught with the first not too perfect run.


So its back to Apple and wait until the bugs have been sorted out. They will be hopefully sooner than later. 

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