Sadly, I have experienced the same thing with mine.
I drive mine pretty hard because, well, it's a laptop. And my 20 month old daughter pokes at it - maybe that is my problem.
My biggest beef is the power cord. I am on my second one ($100 or so) and it is cracked with electrical tape all over it (fire threat) and barely works. I have to keep one hand on it half the time. Lame. They brag about the magnetics, but I think it isn't durable enough. Next beef is the battery - they go to crap pretty quickly. I think this is just laptop batteries in general though.
Anyway, in general I love OS X. It is the only thing to have your family on. I just think there is some room for improvement around durability. How sweet would a ruggedized Powerbook be? Maybe they have those somewhere.
Annyway . . .
5 comments:
I have two power bricks: one that came with my PowerBook and another I bought "reconditioned" from the Apple Store. I haven't had any problems with either of them. Nary a sign of wear on either.
My battery did wear out pretty quickly. But, Apple just OEMs their batteries. (I think from Sony but I don't know.) I don't think Apple's batteries are necessarily that much worse than the others. Which is not to say that I don't think they have room for improvement...
My PowerBook has held up quite well. But I baby it so maybe that's part of it. Even with the babying, my previous laptop, a Sony Vaio, didn't fare as well. I still think Macs are better built than PCs. (But I'm not objective.)
We've been happy converts to OSX for a couple of years but I have to say that the Apple charger does really annoy me. I've used ThinkPads for years and never had a charger go bad. In two years I've had two Apple chargers just blow and the high price of a new one is salt in the wound. Kensington makes a decent replacement charger which has been a good solution so far.
The battery in my two year old PowerBook is doing well, and I certainly haven't had any problems with the power adapter. I had good experiences with the iBook I owned before the PB too.
As for OS X, it's a great consumer OS. I converted my whole family from Windows to OS X a couple of years ago and haven't looked back. I do have some PCs too because I develop for Windows, but I also have four Macs in my home. PCs are better if you're a die hard gamer, but if you don't play cutting edge games there's nothing lost being a Mac user.
Thanks Kris!
I'm going searching for one on Pricewatch right now.
Kris,
Just bought it here:
http://us.kensington.com/html/10200.html
Hope its the right one. I take some pleasure in not buying it from Apple (yes I still like them - just constructive criticism).
Thanks again,
Mike
Post a Comment