After using my MacBook Pro heavily for a little over two years, and extensively earlier in the day, my machine bit the dust on the evening of December 8th, 2011. It was a good machine; the fastest I had ever owned up to that point. I’ve made, what I consider, a respectable living for someone my age on that machine. I will miss it.
Trouble started a few weeks ago when the MacBook Pro failed to recognize one of two 2GB, after-market, RAM modules I had put in the machine. This was odd, but I thought perhaps one of the modules had gone bad. Performance dropped off, and sometimes the screen wouldn’t come on unless I did a hard reset after opening the lid. No problem, I’d just have the family get a set of new ones for Christmas, and I would limp along on 2GB until then.
Then on that fateful night, after a long day at school, I opened my computer and was hit with a kernel panic. Ok, again this was odd, but I’ve been having more kernel panics under Lion than any other OS from Apple I had run in the past. So this (sadly) wasn’t a total surprise. I followed through the usual procedure of a hard reset and when the machine booted back up, I was hit was a surprise.
I sat there and stared at a blinking folder icon with a question mark in the center of it. My first thought was that the hard drive had gone south. I hurriedly looked up what this meant. Turns out that my machine could no longer find the boot files it needed to launch OS X. I followed the whole “hold down the option key while booting up” to select the boot drive. Nothing appeared. Then I put in an old Snow Leopard install disc and launched the disc utility. It could not find the drive. At this point I was pretty sure my hard drive was toast.
I hurriedly made a trip to Best Buy and bought a new drive. They were close, and the only computer-y store still open at 8:30 at night in town. One hundred dollars and an hour later, my MacBook couldn’t find the new drive either. Not thinking earlier, I had an external drive enclosure sitting around. I quickly checked both the old drive and the new one. They both worked. So, I have two good RAM modules, and two good hard drives, and a computer that recognizes only one RAM module. I concluded the Logic board was dead.
I sat, took a swig of bourbon, and decided that I needed to shell out for a new computer. I quickly made the decision – I was going to get a new MacBook Air.
I had been considering getting a MacBook Air when I graduated from College two years from now. Since they were redesigned late last year, they’ve become viable machines for day-to-day work. They also have SSD drives, which makes all of the difference in regards to speed in today’s computers.
That leads me to now. Here I sit writing this with a shiny new MacBook Air. I chose the high-end $1599 model so I would have room to grow, and plenty of storage space (256GB is more than enough for me). It’s by far the fastest traditional computer I have ever owned (not including the always-snappy iOS devices). Most applications open as close to instantaneously as possible. Even big boy applications like Photoshop and InDesign (which I live and work in) launch within 10 seconds. Even the computer, from the off position, launches within 15 seconds. SSDs are the way of the future. In short, I chose the MacBook Air for the portability, yes, but mostly for the solid state drives. The speed alone was worth the price.
I was lucky in many respects that this whole fiasco went down when it did. Just twelve hours earlier a failure like this would have meant a failing grade in one of my classes. I was lucky. On the flip side, good preparation on my part for an incident like this, saved me from losing much data.
I always, always, always manually perform a Time Machine backup at the end of the day. Usually my laptop is not connected to an external drive during the day, and my Time Capsule died (long story) a long time ago. In a worst case scenario, much like the one I just recovered from, I lose no more than a day’s worth of work. That’s enough work to be a serious aggravation, but not enough to lose a lot of sleep over. It’s a system that works for me, and you’re mileage may vary. Just do yourself a favor and make backups. Now.
The biggest aggravation in migrating my data from the backup to my new machine came with the USB data transmission speeds. An expensive Thunderbolt data array would have been nice. But really, I can’t complain. Everything went as smoothly as possible considering the circumstances.
With all of that said, I’m very disappointed that a $1000+ computer only lasted a little more than two years. I kept the machine under a constant software load, but physically was very careful with it. There is no excuse for the internals to die out in that period of time. Hell, I’ve had an aluminum iMac since they were first introduced in August of 2007. Not one thing has gone wrong with that machine in that four and a half year period of owning it. It’s starting to show it’s age, but nothing aside from that.
In all, I highly recommend the MacBook Air. It’s lightning fast, and a joy to use. The Air line has come a long way from it’s beginnings as a under-powered, over-priced novelty, and certainly has pro-level capabilities these days. In fact, if I regularly attended developer or design conferences like, say, WWDC, I would be more than happy taking just the Air.
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TAGS: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro
