It isn’t happening to all of them, but if it affects yours, you’ll know it!
You’ve probably read the stories about MacBooks failing after the first month, the primary symptom being sudden cold-black shutdowns that occur randomly and increase in frequency. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that Apple got a bunch of wonky motherboards with the early MacBooks, but so far there’s no word from the Sphinx of Cupertino.
A now-locked Apple discussion thread has plenty of details, however, as does this very informative MacNN forum thread. Most people with what have been diagnosed as faulty logic boards are getting the following info from the Console system log:
Aug 13 13:41:50 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: -82
At this point things get murky, as there appears to be no single path to take for fixing the problem. Some MacBook owners have been able to get new machines from Apple Stores, in other cases new logic boards (some of which immediately fail again). My own MacBook, which now shuts down so frequently as to be totally unreliable for work, came to me as a gift, and the circumstances of my own repair or replacement have yet to be worked out. A special case, in other words, so I can’t say how things may go with anyone else. For all I know, I’ll be in the same boat as all the rest anyway.
If you’ve experienced the problem — and as near as I can glean from online sources, it’s by no means universal — I suggest studying the above-linked discussion threads. Some Apple Store Geniuses are swayed by that Console log message, so try to document your own shutdowns. If you have to go through Apple Support, they may have you run every test in the book, but try to be patient. Hah.
A previous version of this post was deleted because something was “stuck” and I couldn’t edit the post, so in the process a number of valuable comments were lost. Please feel free to add your thoughts below.
I’ve been using Macs since 1984 at least. I’ve never had a hardware failure, ever. That makes my experience somewhat unique, perhaps, and certainly set me up to be very surprised this time. It’s not the first time I’ve bought first-run machines, either: the original tangerine iBook I purchased in Dec. ’99 is still going strong, running OS X 10.3 and in daily use. In fact, on that machine, the extra-capacity battery I installed gives 5.5 hours unplugged! I also have a B&W G3 and an early model TiBook, both of which have never even stumbled once.
Do I expect Apple to iron out the quality control glitches? Yes. And make no mistake, I LOVE this MacBook, which has had the good grace to remain running throughout the typing of this post. It’s a gem of a computer, especially with 2 GB of RAM. I just hope I remember to re-install the old memory before I send it back.
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