Back up and online

OK, so the iBook had a complete logic board failure. I mean, I was pretty sure that was the case, but I am a bit annoyed as the logic board failed in March 2005 and was replaced. And in fact, that was a little over a year since Apple replaced my ailing G3 iBook (admittedly one of the ones with a logic board problem that Apple finally admitted) with a brand new iBook G4. So, I’m a little miffed. Though perhaps Apple should use me to stress test their laptops. I do seem to be pretty good at killing off at least the consumer line.

So much so that friend was actually questioning why I’d be so stupid as to buy another one if they fail that often and are more expensive citing the fact her Windows laptop had lasted ages.

Of course, it’s a flawed comparison (though I still think Apple owes me something for the fact another laptop failed on me). It’s like comparing someone who drives to work and back once a day to a cab that is operated 7/24. And the fact is, I don’t care about the hardware really. I use a mac because it allows me to get things done. Full stop. I figure I am at least twice (if not three times) as productive on a Mac as I am on Windows. I see and feel the difference and I’m not going back now I’ve switched if I can possibly help it. And I enjoy using it as it gets out of my way and let’s me concentrate on the things I need to get done.

Because things both at work and personally are kind of busy right now, I couldn’t really wait to see what interesting New Year’s toys Steve has in store for us come January 6th whether he’s releasing Intel iBooks orPowerbooks so really it came down to how much I was going to spend on a new one.

The 15″ Powerbooks are nice and I have to admit the screens look great, but I really, really like the 12″ form factor. It’s portable, I can take it everywhere and it sorts well with my nomadic life of planes, trains and automobiles (ok, taxis and buses). I honestly don’t know why every executive feels he needs one. Most of the people I know using them aren’t fiddling with high end video or photo work (which I can understand), so not sure why they’re buying it but I guess it’s kind of like a porsche or something.

I did get them to max out the memory to the 1.25 GB you can get on the 12″ which means that it is twice as fast as my old iBook, has twice the memory and a hard drive 4 times as big. If I hadn’t had to worry about my data I could have walked out of the store right there, but it was nearly 6pm and they wouldn’t be able to haul out the old hard drive and do the transfer till morning.

Even then, they used the Mac’s migration feature so when I came in, virtually everything had been migrated that wasn’t some BSD/Unix change I had made above the level of my user directory. I have to admit, i was super impressed as I had figured my afternoon was a write off installing programs and getting things back to working the way I needed them. As it was, I simply signed in and away I went.

So, all’s well that ends expensively I guess. I intend to bother Apple and hopefully at least get them to pay for an AppleCare 3 year warranty so that the salvage value of my laptop is somewhere around where it would have been. But all in all, other than the fretting over the shelling out of a lot of money right after a Christmas spending binge this has to be some of the most painless downtime I’ve ever had. Considering that we were unable to even recover data from a less serious Windows crash my parents had in October and they lost a whack of email and numerous other important data I feel pretty smug about the whole thing though could have avoided the out of pocket costs.