Signal Eleven

I am the happy owner of a Macbook 1st ge (base model. 32 bit core duo 1.83 GHz, 60 Gig HD…etc)

I’m in love with my white cute little Macintosh, but I had my share of troubles that I decided to share with the world on this post. Please note that nobody should decide against buying a Mac based solely on these informations. As an “Apple Fanboy”, like it’s common to be named these days, I strongly encourage people to do the switch from Windows to Mac. It’s a hell of a leap forward. But I’ll leave this for another post.

My Mac had the whole lot of the 1st gen problems.But I’m picky

To name a few:

Sudden Shutdown Syndrome (”Holy c**p, I was working you whiteish piece of plastic-and-circuits!”). Solved with a firmware upgrade. Thanks Apple.
Decoloring of the wrist resting place (99% of the time known as “wash your hands when you get home, before laying your filthy claws on the mac”. Not sure if its the same issue other people had. My issue almost vanished with Blish and other glass cleaning chemicals)
Noisy power plug: when the cpu is idle, this thing makes a whiny sound, but it’s barely noticeable. I don’t know if it’s related to the other power plug problem (see below)
Screen Bezel cracking open near the iSight. This one happened a few days after purchase. Brought to service, they stated to have changed the screen bezel, now it’s as you see in the (sorry, bad) picture and not moving. I consider it a non-issue now.
Power plug with stuck pin. It’s not simply stuck like most stories I read about on the net, where poking the pin with a needle makes it pop out. This is worse because it moves freely, looks like the spring inside got out of place, or broken. The symptoms are apparently not serious (charging/charged light on the plug not always working). I hope it doesn’t have something to do with the indicated capacity problem of my battery (between 75% and 85% after almost 12 months)
Battery…well I said everything above.

On to the more serious issues

Screen lamp flickering when working on battery and not at full brightness. Haven’t been able to reproduce this at will, but it’s happening more and more often and with greater effect.
“Slice” of plastic coming off. The lid has 2 “things” (I have no idea of how to call them even in my mother language) that presses the wrist rest area, and the result is….see picture:

So I’m taking this baby to service again. Hope they won’t keep it away from his daddy for too long.

What did this story teach us? “Early adopters keep whiny blogs!”

Stay tuned, more to come.