Well, I Did Pay $1500 For It

I am speaking, of course, of my shiny aluminum unibody Macbook, the thorn in my side. The networking is all working, which is a relief, but the stupid red led of death is back. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what triggers it and how to fix it, even to the point of having an old headphone plug to stuff in there occasionally, but the one thing that seems to work most often is blowing in the hole. What is odd is that canned air does not work. Go figger. Every time it happens, I want to launch into a rant about badly-designed headphone jacks. Basically, they're subjected to every torque and abuse in the book, so they absolutely must be isolated from the mainboard and shock mounted. The plug itself has to be constructed of very high grade material. Here is not a place you want to save a few pennies, especially with netbooks nipping at your tail. Seriously, Apple, don't let me spend too much time wondering why I spent $1500 for this thing...

I guess I have to take it out to a 'genius' who will hem and haw and take it apart and look at it and tell me he can have a logic board in by monday or whatever, being as how it is still under warranty, but I hate dealing with that sort of thing. That is one major reason I've traditionally bought Apple hardware, the aura of being somehow a cut above, but the current Apple is in a relentless drive to produce stuff whose internals are ever less well-designed. There's a hundred dollars worth of machined aluminum casing, glass and so on, but the actual system inside sux.

Its networking is sub-par. Using the same disk, a Macbook Pro gets much higher throughput. This may also be due to the drive subsystem, which is also sub-par. To be fair, the Macbook Pro has a processor with adequate cache, but no computer should spend more than ten percent of its cpu handing nfs copying. Of course, lots of that is the hideously bloated internals in OS X, and I do use Linux so I have the bar set pretty high, but some of it is the net controller they use, which is a bargain-bin part. The ancient HP laptop I have has a Broadcom nic. It didn't cost as much as this thing new.

So, yeah, not a bad machine to write blogs on, but a disappointment in most other ways. I understand the new Macbook Pro 13.3 is supposed to be lots better, but, hey, I already paid $1500 for this.