I love MacOS X, and I generally like the hardware it runs on, but my iBook has been a sore trial to me. Not three hours ago its video went to shit and gone, producing particularly interesting screen effects before locking the machine up solid. It won’t boot any more, either. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and I know from previous experiences that a logicboard replacement will be Apple’s solution when I send it in for repairs. To date this iBook has gone through three logic boards, three batteries, two hard drives, two LCDs, one power inverter, and probably various and sundry other bits that didn’t hit my radar. All in 13 months’ time. I’m growing damn tired of it.
Maybe I’d be more forgiving if I hadn’t just lost my hard drive two weeks ago. When it came back with a fresh drive in it, I spent three days reinstalling and reconfiguring it to be the old friend it had become, but *then* the LCD inverter blew and it had to make another trip to Apple and back. I picked it up on Friday and set to completing the personalization project — ripping my favorite CDs back to the HD, etc, and now this happens!
The one bright spot in all of this is that I recently read a posting in MacInTouch about a guy with similar problems. He had an identical iBook 700, which had been through three logic boards (it’s the second email). Ultimately an Apple rep agreed to declare it a lemon and exchanged it for a brand spanky new one. Of course, you can’t get 700s these days, so he had to settle for a 900Mhz iBook with twice the video ram and hd space. I could live with that. Indeed, I’m hoping to.
