My Experiences with Apple Products
Posted to thoughts on March 27th, 2009
Over the years, I’ve owned 2 iPods, a 1st generation iPod shuffle, a 1st generation iPhone, and a MacBook, here’s what happened:
First iPod
- worked great for a while (several months), until it didn’t. It quite literally just died. No reboot, or recharging, or anything could save it (would not even connect to my computer)
- brought it to an apple store’s genius bar, they could not fix it either
- they did, however, give me a new one, no questions asked, which is good from a customer service perspective
- I sold the other one a year later and bought a zune (of which I still like the UI better)
iPod shuffle
- I bought this for tunes while snowboarding. I do not like using iTunes, so I tried some other program to rebuild the music db without having to use iTunes. This worked with some level of semi-success
- during the off season, it just sits there. Now it cannot hold a charge, and I cannot replace the battery
iPhone
- iPhone works fine so far, although I did have some iTunes weirdness where it erased all the apps I’ve downloaded
- the charger, however, died about a day outside of warranty. Somewhat ironically, I’m now using a USB travel charger targeted at Zune users to charge my iPhone
MacBook
- about 3 months after buying the MacBook (running on 10.4), I got the spinning beachball of death (SBOD vs BSOD). I waited a long time, and the beachball did not stop, so I did a hard reboot. The reboot never got past the apple logo on the startup screen, it just did nothing. I tried rebooting multiple times, each with the exact same effect. Again somewhat ironically, I had dual boot set up at the time, and could boot into the vista partition, which worked quite well, and can even see into the mac partition. However, OSX would not boot
- I finally decided to reinstall OSX. This was largely OK (aside from the fact that I had to do it), except that I also had to delete my vista partition, and when I tried to install bootcamp again, it was out of beta (and no longer available with 10.4), and I didn’t want to pay for 10.5
- now, every month or so, when I close the lid on my MacBook, it will just restart, for no apparent reason as far as I can tell
