[geeks] Kudos: Applecare

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

Thursday morning, my almost-brand-new MacBook Pro died on me.  I was
hacking on some code in the hotel lobby, put it to sleep, hopped into a
taxi, got out at work, opened it again, and it was dead; flat dead.

I followed all the knowledge-base suggestions about what to do, and the
system just wasn't going to have any of it.  In fact, plugging it into the
wall make the charger's LED cycle on and off, so I suspected that the
power bits inside the laptop had let the magic smoke out somehow (power
isn't all that stable here in Taiwan all the time).

To make matters worse, I'm here doing an installation/demo/training thing
on a piece of software I've not -quite- finished, and it'd been two days
since I last rsync'd back to Texas.  So, even though I was surrounded by
plenty of computers, I'd have to give up two days of code to move
forward[0], which just wouldn't work.

Apple has a comprehensive list of their authorized repair centers on their
website; sadly, the closest Apple-company location is in Beijing, but
there were several places listed in Taipei, so I took a chance on one, and
got really lucky; they're not only Apple-authorized, but have spare parts
on-hand.

I got my laptop back and working in less than 24 hours with nothing but
time and taxi fare out of my pocket.  I can't say I'm at-all happy about a
laptop crapping its motherboard in less than three months, but I'm
delighted with the service Apple provides me, especially so far from home,
doubly-especially in light of some of the horror stories I've heard from
people who travel with Dell and IBM laptops that've failed outside the US.

Lesson learned: rsync to a USB key nightly.
Lesson relearned: Applecare[1] is totally worth the price.


[0] One of the components I'm working on is a compiler of sorts.  It takes
     a algorithmically-expressed form of $industryStandardDataStream and
     turns it into a representation that cc compile to a .o file.  Two
     productive days on a compiler (even a dinky one like this) is a
     substantial loss.
[1] Yes, this particular system is still under warranty, and it -might- be
     early enough into its life to not be past the first part of the
     failure bathtub curve, but this could've easily happened a year from
     now.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke ( "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever
Elgin, TX         (  figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."
USA               (                                     --George W. Bush