Well, friday evening just as i was wrapping up for work, after an interesting afternoon of meetings and internal blog-related discussion, i got back to my desk and opened up my iBook to be greeted by a zzzt! noise, and a pale glow emanating from a gap in the case, just visible in the rebate for the screen’s hinge.
That’s funny, thought I, whilst I wondered if this was normal and that I’d just missed seeing it before. That it was not normal was driven home to me when the case started to get rather warm there, and a thin stream of acrid yellow smoke befan to flow from the case.
Oops. That’s bad.
Kill power remove power lead remove battery shut down. MacOS was running just fine, but something associated with significant current and with driving the screen, had comprehensively died.
I phoned Applecare who gave me an immediate escalation to Level 2 support when I mentioned “smoke and fire”; they quizzed me – presumably to cover their arses:
- was there damage to other equipment
- was the fire department called
- did smoke alarms go off
- what was it plugged into
- had i meddled with the hardware
…an extensive list of questions, which yielded exactly the same result as staying with layer-1 support, viz: they are going to mail a box to me to return it for service. The only difference I suppose is that in the extra couple of hours bureaucracy that they put themselves through, they missed the window to mail the box out on friday, so got back to me this morning with their decision.
Heigh ho. I am making-do with a colleague’s spare G4 Powerbook at the moment.
The iBook gets truly hammered – used 6 to 10 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week, being opened, closed and ported around several times daily – so perhaps next time I should get a Powerbook.
Are they any more robust ?
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