A Basket of Rotten Apples

Last week I went to an Apple Store in Santa Clara and I wanted to buy a MacBook as a Christmas present for my sister (It's a surprised so don't tell her about it!!!). At that time I had no idea what a terrible experience was that going to be.

I got the white box, paid and happily went home. When I unpacked the notebook, I put in the installation disk and was about to restart the computer to run custom installation when I heard that the DVD in the drive was getting scratched. Ironically I had the same and many others problems with my MacBook Pro. So I re-packed the notebook and the next day went back to the Apple Store.

When I arrived there, I grabbed a sales guy and told him about my problem. He asked me to demonstrate it to him, which I did. He had to admit that this was not a feature and took the notebook in the back office and came back with a new MacBook. After that, he went to the register, did some voodoo with the receipts and gave me the new box and a new receipt. I unwrapped the notebook in the store and checked if this one was OK. My test CD was unscratched after the test so I happily went home again.

When I arrived home I was going to do the custom installation again. After a couple of seconds of working with the notebook while having my palms resting on it, I noticed that this notebook was vibrating. The whole case was shaking as if the DVD was spinning at the maximum speed and the hard drive was doing some really heavy writing and reading at the same time. The thing was that at the time when this vibration was happening there was no disk in the superdrive and the hard drive was idle as well. With disgust I ceased all the activities with the notebook, put it into the box, and waited until I had the next opportunity to go to Apple Store again.

Couple days later I finally had time to go to the Apple Store. When I arrived I grabbed a sales guy again and told him my story. This guy told me that he has no authorization to do anything about this and that I had to see a Mac Genius with my problem. I guess that he saw that I was not very happy with his answer, so he took me to Mac Genius and asked him to look at my notebook immediately.

I explained the problem to this Genius, who took the notebook to the back office. In a few minutes he came out and told me that he needs to compare the vibrations from this notebook to the notebooks they have on display. For a second I thought that if all the notebooks are doing this then I'd get dismissed, but fortunately all the notebooks on display were making no vibrations at all.

After this the Genius sent me to the sales guy and authorized the replacement. I got the replacement accompanied with the receipt voodoo. The sales guy gave me the notebook and told me to enjoy it because that was my last replacement. I was little surprised to hear that and told him that I want to test the notebook before I go home.

I was pretty surprised to see that this one was doing the same thing!!! I showed it to the sales guy and he was pretty shocked as well. Another sales guy came to us and told us that it is normal behavior after first boot because "The computer is thinking". Duh, that was a bit of an offensive explanation for me and I dismissed the guy.

After this, the sales guy brought yet another box (my 4th MacBook!) and opened it himself. It was not that surprising to me that this one was vibrating as well. The sales guy almost collapsed when he realized that the whole batch of MacBooks that they have in stock might be suffering from the same problem.

After few phone calls to other Apple Stores in the area and talking to the store manager the sales guy opened yet another box and with huge relief called me and told me that "Hey Igor, we have a notebook for you!". I touched the notebook and it was fine, no vibrations at all!

The sales guy did his receipt voodoo for the last time and then I went home with a present for my sister. I still can't believe that I had to go through 5 (five!!) MacBooks to find the one that was working.

If Apple wants to increase the market share so be it, but I hope that it is not going to happen by becoming more like other notebook maker who's name rhymes with Hell! If anyone sees similar issues he should immediately go to the Apple Store and return / exchange the product he bought, for his own sake (don't waste time with repairs) and for Apple's sake as well; they must realize that Apple customers are not going to tolerate flaky assembly!

MacBook Pro Core Duo Versus Core 2 Duo Temperature Comparison

Yesterday I bought a brand new MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo for a friend, and since I'm going to keep it for few more days before I have to reluctantly hand it over to him, I've decided to see how much of the buzz is true that the new MBPs are cooler than the previous Core Duo version.

I used Core Temp Duo to retrieve the temperature from CPU thermal sensor. It's a really cool small app btw.

These are the results of running

$ yes > /dev/null&
$ yes > /dev/null&

for about 30minutes on MBP Core 2 Duo (C2D) 2.33GHz:

11/13/2006 00:12 : 23:09 - 10.1% - 2.33GHz - 45C
11/13/2006 00:13 : 23:10 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 70C
11/13/2006 00:13 : 23:10 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 71C
11/13/2006 00:13 : 23:11 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 72C
11/13/2006 00:14 : 23:11 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 75C
11/13/2006 00:14 : 23:11 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 78C
11/13/2006 00:17 : 23:14 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 73C
11/13/2006 00:17 : 23:14 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 72C
11/13/2006 00:18 : 23:16 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 72C
11/13/2006 00:20 : 23:17 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 74C
11/13/2006 00:22 : 23:20 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 72C
11/13/2006 00:23 : 23:21 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 71C
11/13/2006 00:25 : 23:22 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 70C
11/13/2006 00:27 : 23:24 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 69C
11/13/2006 00:27 : 23:25 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 68C
11/13/2006 00:29 : 23:27 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 67C
11/13/2006 00:31 : 23:28 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 66C
11/13/2006 00:32 : 23:30 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 65C
11/13/2006 00:34 : 23:32 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 67C
11/13/2006 00:36 : 23:33 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 68C
11/13/2006 00:36 : 23:34 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 66C
11/13/2006 00:38 : 23:36 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 66C
11/13/2006 00:40 : 23:37 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 66C
11/13/2006 00:40 : 23:38 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 67C
11/13/2006 00:43 : 23:40 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 67C
11/13/2006 00:43 : 23:41 - 100% - 2.33GHz - 67C
11/13/2006 00:44 : 23:41 - 1% - 2.33GHz - 52C
11/13/2006 00:44 : 23:42 - 1% - 2.33GHz - 51C
11/13/2006 00:45 : 23:43 - 2% - 2.33GHz - 50C
11/13/2006 00:57 : 23:55 - 8.9% - 2.33GHz - 48C
11/13/2006 01:01 : 23:58 - 1.5% - 2.33GHz - 47C
11/13/2006 01:01 : 23:58 - 1.5% - 2.33GHz - 47C
11/13/2006 01:08 : 1 day 6 mins - 13% - 2.33GHz - 47C
11/13/2006 01:08 : 1 day 6 mins - 13% - 2.33GHz - 47C

And the results of the same test on MBP Core Duo (CD) 2.0Ghz:

11/02/2006 15:30 : 22:08 - 15.3% - 2.0GHz - 47C
11/12/2006 15:28 : 22:09 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 57C
11/12/2006 15:29 : 22:09 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 63C
11/12/2006 15:30 : 22:10 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 64C
11/12/2006 15:35 : 22:15 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 64C
11/12/2006 15:37 : 22:17 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 64C
11/12/2006 15:39 : 22:19 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 64C
11/12/2006 15:40 : 22:20 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 64C
11/12/2006 15:42 : 22:22 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 64C
11/12/2006 15:45 : 22:25 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 64C
11/12/2006 15:52 : 22:32 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 64C
11/12/2006 15:55 : 22:35 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 64C
11/12/2006 16:09 : 22:49 - 100% - 2.0GHz - 64C
11/12/2006 16:10 : 22:50 - 8.8% - 2.0GHz - 56C
11/12/2006 16:10 : 22:50 - 9.3% - 2.0GHz - 54C
11/12/2006 16:10 : 22:50 - 9.4% - 1.5GHz - 48C
11/12/2006 16:12 : 22:52 - 14.2% - 1.5GHz - 48C
11/12/2006 16:12 : 22:52 - 10.3% - 1.5GHz - 47C

Keep in mind that I was not aiming for scientific precision when executing these test. Both test were done while the notebooks where plugged to AC adapters and the power management was set to "Better Performance".

I have to say that I was surprised by the results of my "old" MBP. The average temperature of 64C is the best that I've seen for MBP CD. And I know what I'm talking about because this is my 3rd MBP CD.

When it comes to MBP C2D, the results were much better than my expected peak temperature of 84C. Considering that one of the MBP CD 2.0GHz that I returned to Apple (see my older post) was able to easily reach 91C, these results are really good.

The results coming from my "old" MBP could most likely be considered exceptional, so I think in general I can say that the new MBP C2D is cooler than the early revisions of MBP CD. Both the peak temperature and the temperature with the fans running at higher RPM are lower than what I was used to seeing at MBPs CD.

After running the test for 30minutes I could feel that the cases of both notebooks were getting warmer, but only the bottom side of notebooks could be considered more than warm. Based on my previous experience with first generation MBPs, this is far from what I was used to feeling.

After this test I ran a quick battery life test: I unplugged the MBP C2D from the AC adapter, set the power management to "Better Battery Life", set the LCD brightness to half and started listening to iTunes streaming radio (via WiFi). I left the bluetooth on as well. The resulting time was exactly 3 hours. Since this was the first discharge of the battery, I would not be surprised to see slightly better results after a few charge cycles. This result is also a slight improvement compared to MBP CD.