Andrew Macpherson

Well the MacBook Air got to BackStage and of course was working perfectly.  I had however described the symptoms, and pointed them to this blog for the earlier description of the fault, so they concluded it was something to do with the motion sensors on the top case (which protect the hard disk by withdrawing the heads, amongst other functions), and decided to replace the keyboard and trackpad again.  They checked after doing the work, and everything seemed fine — and I’m completely sure it did, in no way do I wish to imply otherwise, there’s nothing so frustrating as a customer fault that isn’t there when you try to replicate it for diagnosis.  The repair finished too late on Friday for the delivery pickup, so it shipped out on Monday.

Tuesday morning: the chap from TNT is getting to be a regular visitor.  He arrived with the Macbook Air at 10:55 and by 11:10 I was on the phone to Backstage again.  I had

1. Unpacked the MacBook again.
2. Plugged in the power supply, and clicked the mag-power into place to re-charge
3. Logged in to check that it was apparently working
4. Reconnected with my wireless LAN — for some reason it had lost the preferred  list
5. Checked the date and time
6. Started the Spyder 3 utility to check the screen colour  calibration
7. And that was it ….

I picked up the MacBook Air, exactly as in the picture, and it froze, requiring an external USB mouse to shut it down.

Part of my chat with Backstage was counter-productive:

“If you were to put it on a desk or table and work with it there, do you think it would work?”

“Well I bought a laptop, if I had wanted a portable desktop, I would have bought a MacBook Pro.”

Anyway the answer to his question was no — I put it on a table powered up again and the keyboard and trackpad remain locked.

It’s a great bit of kit, but I seem to be getting an unreasonable amount of greif with this one.  So far this year I have been without the use of the MacBook Air for what feels like the majority of the time:

• 1 week when the right hinge cracked (repair refused by repairer 1, returned with worse cracking)
• 1 week when left hinge went too (repair refused by insurer’s repairer, cracking extended to completely disintegrated)
• 2 weeks in discussion with Apple directly to establish that this was indeed a known fault.
• 10 days at repairer #1 replacing screen
• 1 week with keyboard lockup — top case replaced
• 1 week with keyboard lockup — connector replaced
• 1 week with keyboard lockup — top case replaced
• Usable for 3 weeks
• 10 days with keyboard lockup — top case replaced
• Usable for 10 mins, then keyboard locks up again

That looks like 10 weeks so far this year that I’ve not been able to use it.  I don’t throw it about, don’t think it’s been dropped — this is so frustrating.  About the only unchanged thing is the main logic board, the bottom aluminium shell and of course the disk.