Feb 21, 2010 09:10 AM
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My dad's macbook air was not being used much and i decided to give it a try for completing my colleges assignments. My friends were all marveled by the thin piece of high end electronics. It's a good machine to work with also, but most of the usability comes from the mac osx's good capabilities. Though mac Os has it's own faults, but the underlining unix provides a good and stable environment to work with. The hardware is good and really a delight to use. Be it the soft keyboard, the large track-pad, the very bright screen, wifi and
I was very happy to have grabbed this laptop, or should i say netbook? Because it couldn't do anything requiring even 50% processor usage, for 2 minutes, without frying anything the laptop was placed on. This is a very well known problem with the macbook air and all over the web. The machine first heats up on overload (of work) and then almost halts to prevent it's processor from frying.
This is annoying, since it prevented me from running any visualization software to run windows/ubuntu inside the mac OS. None the less i could email and blog and chat on a stylish laptop. At places without wifi, like my college, the lone USB port was used by the LAN adapter, which meant i couldn't use my external hard-disk. But all this was never a concern, i was still happy with the whole thing and the apple mac experience. I was so happy i went out promoting it to my friends and family, a big mistake.
Then one day it happened, it just won't boot. The white screen went on and on. I am a techi myself and booted the thing into command mode and figured i had faced a hard-disk crash! What a hard disk crash on a 1 lakh rupees laptop? On a thing i kept so much secured and safe? My external hard disk goes through more than 100 times the bumps and falls and has never complaint one day! I somehow managed to recover the data. I was hopeful and re-initialized the hard disk and loaded the os again. It worked for a few days and a crash again. I gave up. By the way, my last hard disk to crash incidentally was also a Samsung drive, (macbook air uses Samsung 1.8" drive). But the last hard disk crash i faced was ages ago! I never had had seen a hard disk fail, be it externals, laptops, for about 10 years now! Hard disk technology these days is far better. What cheap technology did apple put into this thing.
I looked around for a replacement hard disk. I could zero down to only 2 manufactures, as it's not a standard drive that is in this laptop! (thanks apple!) The cost of even 128 GB drive was about rs. 19, 000! I can buy Tb at rs. 5000. So i looked and looked and only GB was affordable enough at about rs. 10, 000 including shipping. I even gave the apple service center a try, they quoted prices to rs. 12000 ++ to even rs. 60, 000. I thanked god i didn't have to pay the bucks to buy this laptop initially. I finally gave up getting a drive.
The machine is now a big paper weight. But it was done one thing, it prevented me from trusting apple and buying that new iPhone, i wanted from about a year now!
