This past week I had a serious problem with this computer, my MacBook— serious problem as in unfixable problem. My hard disk apparently died. I got the spinning beach ball of death, which I tried to remedy by attempting to force quit things and/or wait for several minutes like I usually do. Nothing helped, so I turned it off, waited a bit, and (tried to) boot it up again. But no, it wouldn’t boot! Instead, I got the question mark folder of doom, which, unfortunately, I can’t find a picture of anywhere, since you don’t get to take screenshots when your OS is still booting, and I forgot to take a picture of it. So I tried various ways to remedy this, but failed, largely because the OS X installer’s First Aid utility wouldn’t even detect my hard disk at all. Great… After some more frustration and finally deciding that the hard disk was definitely most likely dead, I put my ear to the keyboard and could hear regular clicking sounds emanating from somewhere in my laptop. Not good, but I already decided it was dead anyway. Luckily I have things backed up, for the most part, from… well, a month ago. Better than nothing, I suppose.

But there’s more to the story! I mean, I guess it’s bad I lost some data, but sometimes you get bad hard disks, and I don’t think you can really blame the whole thing on Apple. Here’s why. I made an appointment online with the Genius Bar at the local Apple store for the next day, and so, after coming home from school and falling asleep for a little bit, I paid them a visit. After waiting just for a few minutes, I got to tell one of the employees my story, and he verified that my problem was indeed a problem. After looking around some more, he promptly said in the same matter-of-fact manner with which doctors tell bad news, “Okay, your hard disk has died.” I guess if I was still thoroughly shocked I would’ve been even more shocked, but by this time I’d already accepted the fate of my computer. So then, I left it there, being given the expectation of “one or two days” of wait time before picking it up again.

The next day, I picked it up again, and my hard disk was replaced, as I expected. However, there was one thing unexpected they did as well. I had the nasty orange discoloration problem at the palm rest areas, and I didn’t tell them about it (although it was pretty obvious), because I only wanted one issue to be resolved at a time— but also because I’d heard bad reports that people would have to send their MacBooks in for two or three weeks at a time to get the keyboard area cover replaced, and that sometimes the repair people would mess up other things as well.

But in addition to replacing my 80GB SATA HDD, they replaced the keyboard area cover without my knowledge beforehand, and none of these bad things have happened. I’m using the computer now, and I have a working hard disk, a white keyboard area cover, and a sensitive mouse click button again (had to be replaced too, since it was also affected by the discoloration problem). So, in the end, I’m very satisfied with Apple’s customer support. I asked for one thing because my hard disk died (although it probably shouldn’t have), and they also fixed another thing that had been annoying me since the first or second week I had this MacBook. Perhaps it’s compensation, in a sense, but regardless, it was a little something that made me feel a lot better.

Excepting those issues I’ve mentioned above, I’ve really had no problems with this MacBook at all. I love the interface. Exposé is extremely useful on such a small (1280×800) screen. Quicksilver is the ultimate application launcher and so much more. The MagSafe power adapter has saved me on several occasions. And there are various other cool upsides of having a MacBook or just Mac OS X, which I may explore individually in depth at a later time.

I’d been meaning to write a review on this computer since I got it in June, and I hope this makes up for it.