MacBook Repair Experiences Part 1
posted in Technology, Mac, Business, Hardware |Yesterday I came up to my MacBook which was running Vista under bootcamp and something was acting really strange. I managed to shut it down, although that took probably 30 minutes. Then I was greeted with the joyful experience of it not successfully booting- each time partway through the boot process it would restart. Restore last known good configuration didn’t help, safe mode didn’t help. I was pretty sure something was wrong with the disk.
So I tried to boot into my Mac OS partition. No luck. I grabbed a Mac install disk and booted it to get to the Disk Utility. It wouldn’t do any repair on the NTFS partition (no surprise) but it tried to repair the Mac partition. The first time it took about 20 minutes before it decided that it failed and after that it failed quickly. Given this I decided I probably had a bad disk and looked into my warranty options.
My warranty was still valid and I looked for a place to contact Apple support online. I hate talking to people on the phone if I can help it. No such luck, but they did mention you can bring it in to the “Genius Bar” at a local Apple store. This sounded like an interesting option so I signed up for an appointment the next day (today).
One note on the appointment sign-up. This was a very well executed web app. It would have let me sign in with my Apple ID, but it was also happy to let me proceed without signing up for an ID by putting in my name and email address. The whole process was very light-weight and easy and is a model for good web-design when you want to not scare away users with a heavy-weight process.
This morning I brought my machine in and checked in at the bar. I had to wait a couple of minutes but no big deal. The guy who helped me quickly took my feedback that I was a professional software developer (they need to gauge the technical level of their audience) but was still able to be helpful with troubleshooting things that I hadn’t thought of. It did remind me how rusty my Mac skills have gotten. I can imagine a more frustrating experience if you warranty / AppleCare has expired, but the no arguments, we are just going to fix everything and work through your problems with a real live person is easily worth the $200 premium you pay for most Macs.
I remember being skeptical about the Apple Store concept when they first rolled it out, but its yet another thing that have executed exceedingly well (ok, I don’t get any points for being the first or even the 100th to observe this). The only real flaw in the support experience is that they don’t really officially support Windows on the machine. To be honest, given the overall “cool” factor of their hardware and this experience, if they could really officially support Windows (which they might with the next OS release once BootCamp is official), their climb from 3-6% market-share would probably jump to 15%+. To be clear I mean really support Windows- pre-install it and have the genius-bar guys help you with your Windows issues on Apple hardware (with no attitude about how much better it would be if you had just stuck to Mac OS / how everything is Microsoft’s fault).
Even more importantly that 15% market-share would represent solidly capturing the high-end of the market. They would be able to do it maintaining their $100-$400 extra price point, and signing people up for multi-year service contracts at rates that Dell would kill to capture.
I get that fully, 100% supporting Windows is a big challenge on multiple levels for any company, and its harder for some cultural reasons at Apple. But doubling (or more) your revenue strikes me as the sort of reward that would make taking that on worth every bit of the effort.
Back to my poor sick hard-drive. I’m currently installing MacOS on an external USB drive to try to recover the data from my Windows partition and determine for sure if the disk is hardware damaged or just a serious software issue that the Mac repair utility couldn’t fix. Getting the Mac OS installer to install on the external USB drive was a bit of a challenge. This article on booting from USB drives from my good friends at Tidbits gave me the info I needed to figure it out. The problem is there are different master-boot records and the default ones that the Disk Utility put down didn’t meet the OS Installer’s specs and it wouldn’t explain what the problem was- it just said it wouldn’t install on that disk because you can’t boot from it. The one trick was that in the Disk Utility I was selecting the partition and not the disk itself. When you select the partition you don’t get the necessary partition tab with the options button you need. Click on the disk itself and all is well.