Bad Apple? Couldn’t be. Could it?

I love Apple.

But that love does not explain the last three MacBook Pro laptops to enter my life.

It does explain the computer I purchased three months ago.

This fall, my Powerbook was on its last legs. It was making all kinds of bizarre noises, which left me chronically worried about whether the hard drive would survive just one more day. Apple helped me decide to buy a new computer by introducing to the market a completely redesigned MacBook Pro, just in time for Christmas! It was fast, had a beautiful monitor, and an enormous hard drive. Yippee! Decision made.

In early November, I marched into the Apple store and plunked down about $2500 for a 15-inch beauty. Like buying a new sports car, I proudly carried it to class and showed it to everyone. I’m a graduate student going through a mid-career program and I tote my computer around with me all day in a backpack. It is my educational lifeblood.

My fancy new machine lasted exactly three weeks. Without warning one afternoon, it stopped working. Well, the little spinning ball in the middle of the screen seemed to work just fine, but nothing else did. I called tech support, and after an hour or so on the phone, learned that my hard drive had crashed. The tech told me to go the Apple store for a fix.

So, I went back to the trusty store, and sadly presented them with my non-working brand new MacBook Pro. The tech told me not to worry, because Apple would replace a computer that lasted just three weeks. He handed me a new machine.

Wow! What luck. This is why I love Apple. What other company would simply swap out a broken computer with a new one? I took it home, and because I had made the ever-so-wise choice of also purchasing a Time Capsule and running Time Machine, I had the computer up-and-running in about an hour with all my files safe and sound. Time Machine and Time Capsule are a software/hardware combination that wirelessly backs up your computer on an hourly basis. Setting it up was probably the smartest decision I’ve made in recent history.

The replacement computer lasted exactly one week before its hard drive crashed. This one went down exactly like the previous one. There was no warning. That silly wheel kept spinning and spinning and spinning.

I called tech support. They took me through the drill again and sent me back to the Apple store. I cautiously asked if I was the first to have two new machines crash. One phone-tech told me that he’d heard the new machine had a problem with its logic board communicating with the hard drive. His supervisor told me that Apple had probably gotten a bad batch of hard drives. Regardless of the reason, once I got to the store, the “genius” gave me my third new computer. Apple calls its in-store techs geniuses.

MacBook Pro number three lasted two full months before it suffered from the same deadly spinning wheel of death. Sure enough, when I got tech support on the line, they determined the hard drive had crashed. When pressed for an explanation, the tech said there was a “known issue” regarding hard drives crashing in the new laptops. I suspected that might be a tad bit of an understatement since I personally had three hard drives crash in the new machines.

This time, Apple wanted me to drop off the machine so they could repair it. The tech promised that I would get it back in 3-to-5 days. I pointed out that this seemed to be a systemic problem, since it kept happening to me on different machines, and was not something that I had caused. Repaired or replaced, I didn’t want to live without a computer for several days. I had homework.

I was routed to customer relations, and within a few hours, had a new MacBook Pro. It is my fourth new MacBook Pro in three months. As of this writing, I’ve had the computer for five full days. It’s still working!

I’m keeping my eye on the Time Machine.

Now, that’s an Apple innovation that’s working just fine!

I’m writing this blog after finishing Dan Gillmor’s book, “We the Media.” In the book, he talks extensively about reporting in the future being a conversation involving the voices of many different people and their experiences, rather than a lecture produced by one professional journalist. As part of a class assignment, I was supposed to analyze the reading in a blog.

It seemed to me that joining Gillmor’s new media conversation with a real topic from my life was a better way to demonstrate my comprehension of his book. I could actually become one of the voices in a conversation. Check around for others in the conversation and you do find the occasional blogger whispering about problems  with the late-2008 MacBook Pro, but they don’t compare with the quantity of reviewers and bloggers who give the new MacBook Pro high marks as one of the best laptops on the market.

Right now, regardless of the hundreds of positive comments about Apple (including mine), this voice finds it hard not to also talk about a surprising, repetitive and perhaps systemic problem.