My computer is a white MacBook which I purchased in ... ?August? 2007. Last week, while on vacation in Alaska, my hard drive died. I am fully backed up, so the only things that were lost were changes made during the trip (read: all vacation photos, and 8 hours of work on my iPhone app). When I got home, I confirmed that it is a hardware issue (meaning it would cost $300 - $900 to recover the data), so I purchased a new drive.
When the new 320GB drive arrived yesterday, I installed it (which, on a MacBook is a 2 minute job), and realized I don't have an operating system. Due to the age of the machine, it shipped with the previous version of the operating system (OSX 10.4 Tiger). Since then, I have purchased OSX 10.5 Leopard, but Brandon stole the disk and seems to be holding it hostage. Installing Tiger would be a waste of time, as the backup would be useless, and I couldn't install the iPhone SDK. So I needed Leopard.
Searching high and low for the disks returned nothing, so I tried using the re-install disks that came with someone else's MacBook (purchased more recently). This failed, so I was again left with nothing.
I decided to try my second-to-last resort: call Apple, explain my situation, hope they'll help. (if you're curious, my last resort was downloading an illegal copy and using that) This process took over an hour, but in the end the fellow found the records indicating the fact that I had purchased Leopard from Apple, and he agreed to send me a new copy. Hooray! Initially it was to take 2 weeks to ship, but he understood my urgency, and put a rush on the package, so in 5 business days (still an eternity), I will have a fresh copy of Leopard.
When I had finished this call, I was quite pleased, knowing that my computer would be at her full speed (plus almost triple the storage space) within a week. "Good", I thought.
I got to thinking about the week without my computer, and realized I could get her a brand new case at the same time.
I'm not certain as to whether I've blogged about this before, but my MacBook has suffered the same fate as all other (plastic) MacBooks -- cracking.
Hand-rest cracking caused by the little 'feet' on the screen:
As well as numerous other instances of hairline cracks in different locations on the computer: Notably the bottom casing, and the back of the screen hinge.
The first issue (hand-rest cracks), has recently been acknowledged by Apple as a design flaw, so they're replacing the damaged parts free of charge. The other parts were a little more tricky. I phoned apple, and asked them to create a 'warranty exception' for my computer. I expected this to be a bit of a battle, but they said "okay sir, I'll create that right now". This allowed me to bring it down to Carbon Computing (an authorized retailer/servicer of Apple products in Kitchener), and most of the casing is being replaced free of charge.
I actually took this one step further: I told the people at Apple that my battery had the cracking on the bottom of it, and it's been functioning rather poorly recently. I was pretty sure this was a long shot, but the guy told me he'd add that to the 'warranty exception'.
So, in a week, my computer should have a brand new case, a new battery, and I'll have a legal copy of Leopard again. Solid.
I must say that every person I spoke with at both Apple and Carbon Computing were extremely knowledgeable and helpful. When I had to go through a similar ordeal for Halyna with Microsoft, I spent hours playing phone tag with confused people in India claiming their names were 'Mike', 'Jim', and my personal favourite, 'Frank'.
