It would appear that for some reason my MacBook Pro is starting to fail on me. First it was my battery that was a little iffy which after seeing one of the experts at the Apple store I was told that it wasn’t anything to worry about, I went back home relieved I wouldn’t have to fork out over £90 for a new battery. Well now it’s been a few months since then and more problems have cropped up, my ‘Super Drive’ has decided that it no longer wishes to burn DVD’s in dual layer…great the so called ‘Super Drive’ which is ‘Super’ because it can burn DL-DVD’s can’t do that anymore, luckily enough I have access to a firewire external DVD-RW, that’s another £120 to replace.

One of the oddest things that has happened seems to be a hairline fracture appearing on the right palm rest at the exact place my wrist rests while I’m typing, which I do a fair bit oddly enough. I thought it was a little odd that a palm rest that should last for the life of the laptop should gain a fracture, again spoke to someone at the Apple store and they said again that they couldn’t do anything but replace it, at a cost of course. The Apple store doesn’t just replace the part that is breaking, noooo, they replace the entire case at a cost of about £150, all I want is for a crack to be gone!

I have also noticed that the machine seems to kick the fans into overdrive a lot, even when sitting on my laptop cooler on my desk, and that when I’m using the machine on my lap it gets ridiculously hot to the point I have to put it on a lap tray to use it comfortably. Guess where I went, yup, the Apple store, yet again to be told that they couldn’t do anything but test it which they did and said everything was fine, however for them to replace the parts if I wanted, they would need to replace the entire logic board (mother board), this included the CPU, GFX, WiFi, BlueTooth and board itself. Now I’m not sure what has actually happened but the cost of that is nearly £800 to replace!!

Now if we add all of these things up to a fully working laptop again, with no heat issues or non working hardware, the cost is:

• Battery £90
• Super Drive £120
• MacBook Pro Shell £150
• Logic Board £800
• Total £1,160

Now let me put that into perspective, the new latest MacBook Pro costs £1,299 for the base model, which is a fair bit better than my current mid-range model from a few years ago. Why on earth would I pay to replace the parts of the current one to get it working again, when I could just buy a new machine for just over £100 more?!? I think that’s exactly what I’m going to do once I have the money to do it, I can’t actually use my laptop as a laptop at the moment as I have to leave the battery out of it to stop it overheating!

It has served me well, but I think its days are numbered for my use Bring on the new 2009/2010 model MacBook Pro, even though I think the new screen shroud looks a little silly.

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