Macbook Black 13" replacement; needs replacing!!
Follow-up to Macbook Black 13" – Fan fixed, CPU idle whine worse from Gibo's Reviews
So the build quality on the Apple Macbook isn’t up to much.
My second Macbook, replacing one that had CPU whine noise and a wobbly fan, has a louder CPU noise. To make matters worse, the hard drive makes a loud click noise every 10 seconds.
A hard drive with hiccups
This is really, really annoying. I can’t deal with the laptop literally having hiccups. The noise is apparently the parking of the drive’s head, however this was the exact same noise that came from my other previous 2.5” hard drives days before they died.
Mac are being compliant, and are replacing this one too. And throwing in a free Firewire cable to copy my data over. Apparently when you replace something twice the matter gets escalated to their engineering team for investigation, so this should be where the buck stops.
But seriously, if the third one is no less than perfect then all three are going back and I’ll get another brand. All these problems within a week; imagine after three years! Here’s hoping it’s just a bad batch.
12 Dec 2006 20:21
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Tags: Rant Review Tech Video
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6 comments by 1 or more people
[Skip to the latest comment]That’s why I’ve decided to stick with my PowerBook. All new products have teething problems – and even more so with Apple since every new product from Apple has some sort of innovation. I’m waiting until Leopard comes out as my Hitachi hard drive on my PowerBook is starting to make clicky noises too.
12 Dec 2006, 21:01
The honest answer seems to be that the Macbook Pro/PowerBook work fine but the iBook/Macbook seem to have Hard Disk related issues. In my family we’ve had 4 Apple laptops:
1. My Powerbook G4/550MHz – Worked reliably from day 1, only change was to upgrade the ram to 512mb. It’s had an Airport card added since but is still going with a friend
2. My Powerbook G4/1.33GHz – Worked perfectly and I’m sure would still be working perfectly had someone else not launched it off the mixing console to the bottom of the Piazza during WSAF2005. Despite a bashed in case it continued to work for another 14 months when at last a crack in the motherboard from the ‘incident’ caused total failure of the machine.
3. My sister’s iBook G4/1GHz – Ate a hard drive at about 2.5 years old. I think she abused the machine – she certainly slept on it more than once, dangled it by its screen etc etc, but didn’t drop it or anything as far as I know. I took it over around Easter and put a new HDD in (the one from my dead powerbook which was working fine). It worked fine until this weekend when it ate another hard drive.
4. Her current iBook G4/1.33GHz – Is in the process of eating another hard drive at around 10 months old.
I’m convinced the consumer laptop doesn’t have sufficient protection around the hard drive for preventing shocks reaching it. I’ve never had any other problems with the Apple machines though, only hard drives. Interestingly the ones that have failed in both the iBooks and a couple of Sony/HP laptops I’ve changed drives in have been Hitachi, while Seagate and Fujitsu ones take a licking and keep on kicking. I certainly have had desktop Hitachi/IBM drives fail too… maybe the fault is actually the supplier.
Me? I’ll be buying a MacBook Pro at some point, but it will probably be dual booting to Windows most of the time
12 Dec 2006, 22:14
Well Chris, the Macbook Pro is the daddy of every single problem affecting the Macbook. Indeed the Macbook only has a subset of Macbook Pro issues – just google ‘macbook whine’ and you’ll get pages and pages of Macbook Pro sites and only a few Macbook ones. Same goes for the hard drive noises. Actually there is one exception: Macbook Pros do not suffer discolouring like the white Macbooks.
As for the hard drives, every single hard drive I’ve had has died on me, or is past its reliability and run out of reserve blocks – though I use desktop drives as 24/7 servers, and the 2.5”s usually take a beating. So that’s… 12 drives over the years. It’s all about backups!
13 Dec 2006, 00:51
You appear to be my twin with regards to technology giving us issues.
Welcome, brother!
13 Dec 2006, 13:39
As a side note, anyone checked out Leopard yet? It looks fantastic!
17 Dec 2006, 16:50
E
I have the exact same problem. Your video captured the sound nicely. Did Apple fix the issue?
30 May 2007, 13:26
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