AppleCare win X2 (and small fail)

About a month ago the hard disk in my 13" MacBook made a dreadful squeal and stopped working. Fortunately I didn't really have anything on there that I couldn't part with and I was pretty sure my AppleCare was still current. I hunted around and found my AppleCare certificate and my heart sank when I read the expiry date of 12/4/2009. Three months expired :(.

"Wait a minute", I thought, "I bought my laptop at the end of the year". Back to searching and I found my receipt and sure enough the purchase date was Dec 2006. My mind was starting to warm up and I realised the date in the certificate is formatted the American way. Cue large sigh of relief.

Off to the local service centre and a week and a bit later I had my MacBook back with a new hard disk. Amusingly, the OS installed was 10.4.11, the last version of Tiger, which was the operating system installed when I bought the laptop. I had already updated to Leopard prior to the hard disk crash and had the CD for the newer OS. The next two or three hours of my life were spent re-installing Leopard and downloading Apple Software Updates.

Then, over the next week or two, I dragged my email logs and desktop hard disks for software licences I had purchased and set about re-establishing my work environment on the laptop. And then my keyboard stopped working.

Well, not completely, just a few keys, but important keys, especially for a programmer. Keys like '=', '~', and the arrows. Back to the service centre. Three days later I get an SMS telling me it is ready to pick up, which I do, and too my surprise the trackpad is new, as is the keyboard and the whole upper assembly of the body. I first noticed when I went to move the mouse cursor and noticed the track pad was much rougher than I remembered.

So, kudos to the AppleCare program. Two service requests and two fixes under warranty.

The fail? Apart from the unexpected date formatting in the AppleCare certificate, when I picked up my laptop today it hadn't been shutdown and the battery was at 25%. That, to me, is just unprofessional.

Now, I am off to find the AppleCare certificate for my iMac, which I think is either expired or, if not, very close to expired, and see if I can extend it.

Sony P-Series

This is the laptop I bought for my wife for her birthday in June and since my 13" MacBook is in the service centre at the moment, it is the laptop I have writing this post with now. Quick review is that I would prefer to use my MacBook. This Sony is too small for me, both the screen and the general size.

A couple of other comments: I bought the version with the solid state drive and as a result this thing is Quiet (with a capital Q). This coupled with a relatively slow boot time often has me wondering if the computer is working at all. Patience is often required to just wait for the Windows login screen to come up.

The keyboard is minimised and has a pointing stick in the middle rather than a dedicated trackpad. This can be annoying as I will occasionally tap the pointing stick and the cursor entry point will change (as happened while I was typing this sentence). I am sure this action can be turned off though.

The big disadvantage of this laptop is the battery life ... 2--3 hours. Granted the battery is very small to fit with the form factor of the overall laptop, but it really isn't great.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of the usability of this laptop is that my wife has since obtained an iPhone and she uses that far more than she uses this laptop. Admittedly she will use this laptop if she needs to write a Word document or similar, but for general web browsing (like Facebook) or IM'ing (Yahoo), she will use the iPhone. For more extensive web browsing she will use the iMac on the desktop which is almost always on (or asleep). The instant on feature of these devices really seems the key usability feature.

Actually, I just remembered that this laptop also has an instant on feature that provides the crossbar familiar on the Sony PSP. This can be used to browse the web (Firefox) and listen to music or watch movies. But it feels like a tacked on feature rather than a primary use case.

Overall, it is an OK little laptop, good for web browsing and document creation. If it was faster to boot and had a better battery life it would almost be good. Perhaps Windows 7 will help with boot time. However, if the speculated Apple tablet is anywhere close to the performance of this thing and maintains the instant on function of the iPhone, I can't see the point of this laptop in the future.