On Sunday, I went into the home office to work on my third gig since moving to full-time freelancing.  My out-of-warranty-but-still-very-new-to-me MacBook Pro with its 4GB of memory, 1920 x 1200 screen, and nearly $3,000 price tag in 2007 was dead — a victim of the infamous NVidia 8600 failure. I remember when such hardware failures meant going into my personal inventory of spare parts such as 3dfx Voodoo cards, ATX 350W power supplies, network cards, overclocked AMD Duron chips, and the like.  A desktop computer could be back up in no time.

Apple had the repair box to me on Tuesday and the computer arrived at their repair center on Wednesday.  It was back on my desk on Friday, all fixed.  Apple mistakenly charged me for the repair, but after a thirty minute call they credited me back the amount.

I like my MacBook Pro very much — better than any computer I’ve owned (all previous Windows machines).  It is not without its quirks, however. And now hardware failures.  Those entertaining “I’m a problem-prone PC, I’m an eager and trouble-free Mac” advertisements are products of Apple’s marketing department, not user surveys, and must be viewed with the proper dose of skepticism.

I am a little concerned that the replacement board with the same NVidia chip will just fail again after a certain number of heating/cooling cycles and that this MacBook Pro’s dependability, and indeed life expectancy, is in question.  I did have a week of downtime due to not having a backup computer.  That’s a reason not to sell your old laptop for $400 on eBay when upgrading!  That said, if I were suddenly back on my Dell Inspiron running CS2 on Windows, I might remember why I switched to Apple and OS X.

One thing I did learn about through this experience is Apple’s Target Disk mode.  If you hold down the T key while booting your Mac, it will function as an external firewire drive.  With both the monitor and external display not working due to the graphics card failure, I was still able to access the drive and pull my files off using Chris’ Windows PC and a program called MacDrive.