Mountain MacBook: R.I.P.?

The article description says it all. My beautiful new MacBook essentially died after about six weeks of heavy use, and now it’s on its way to Small Dog to see what their tech department has to say.

But imagine my surprise this a.m. when I saw that Marc Zeedar has precisely the same problems with his own MacBook (read the full MacOPINION post). His article sounds like I wrote it. How utterly uncanny. That means my MacBook wasn’t the only one, obviously, and since the symptoms absolutely match my own (and we’re not the only ones), Apple has a problem.

Here’s what to watch for:

1. The MacBook suddenly goes black. No sound, no fans, no nothing. Dead as a doornail.

2. Pushing the power button may restart it or MAY NOT! Aaaaghh!!!

3. Performing any sort of “fix” like resetting the PMU or reseating the RAM may get it going for a little while, then the shutdowns start again.

The worst thing is that when you do some research on the Web, you’ll find that Apple’s response to this through dealers, Apple stores, and AppleCare reps, is as Marc says, “all over the map.” IMHO Apple needs to issue (irony) a general recall, capitalist’s confession, amnesty, certificate of spiritual purity or something (/irony). This is a messy business, and God knows how it will turn out.

Right now I’m counting on the vendor. I’m not surprised that Apple hasn’t said anything about the DeadBooks, because a) most of the hot-selling MacBooks are apparently just fine, thank you, and b) even when they do get their acts together, corporations change course more slowly than supertankers, and it’s also a fact of life that thousands of different Apple reps will likely respond in thousands of different ways until the word comes down from on high.

And even then!

UPDATE: 8-18-06, 1:55 a.m. MDT — Marc’s follow-up piece is now posted at MacOPINION. The short version is, he took it to an Apple Store, and a week later — they did a lot of testing — Marc received a new MacBook. Well done, Apple. I’ll certainly let everyone know how it turns out with mine.

But you know something’s been improved in production when you read this:

In fact, the new computer is astonishingly cooler than the old one. On my original MacBook, as I reported in my MacOpinion review series, the CPU got very hot (to 70 degrees Celsius) without hardly doing anything (just launching a text editor would do it). The new one rarely gets over 27 degrees Celsius even when I’ve got multiple apps loaded and I’m using GarageBand to do some intense manipulations.

That’s a pretty radical improvement, and Marc’s new MacBook doesn’t randomly shut down. The beat-up 500 MHz TiBook I’m using at the moment has never skipped a beat, either. Dependable as a sledgehammer and a railroad spike. Have you ever had a hammer failure? I didn’t think so.

What a great computer, though. The MacBook’s speed and glossy screen are fabuloso. If yours is running fine, don’t worry, and I’d still recommend you buy one (evidently they’re selling like cheap fast shiny laptops). I figure if the one Marc got in exchange runs so much cooler, things have improved at the factory.