MacBook Pro woes

“Macs just work,” so says Apple in its advertising.

Sure. It may be mostly true for OS X on the whole. But don’t count on it when it comes to the MacBook Pro—and the MacBook, I’m sure, if user complaints on forums are any indication. Perhaps every Mac should come with a sticker on it that says, “This Mac may stop working for no fucking reason.”

My MacBook Pro is merely seven months old but already it has given me countless headaches.

Problem #1: Keyboard and trackpad

There is nothing more unsettling than having a computer die while overseas.

February 26, 2008. Two hours into a 10-hour night train ride from Shanghai to Beijing, the keyboard and trackpad on my MacBook Pro decided to die on me while I was doing a video edit I had to complete overnight.

The standard recovery steps to perform on a Mac are to reset the Parameter RAM or to reset the SMC, but both require key presses. Without an external keyboard and mouse, I could do neither. As I sat in the near darkness and rebooted the damn thing for the umpteenth time, hoping for a miracle, I noticed how the backlight of the Mac’s keyboard still dutifully lit up at the login screen each time. The irony of such a thoughtful and elegant engineering touch was not lost on me as I sought a way to reconcile an acceptable reason as to why the fuck the hardware on a seven-month-old laptop should be failing.

I could not, and I was livid.

The damage? Four hours of downtime as I waited for stores to open, and exorbitant prices for a set of external keyboard and mouse.

Upon returning to Singapore, I sent my laptop in for servicing. The over-the-desk service I received was nothing short of excellent, and while I’d have preferred a faster turnaround, it took a reasonable four days to get my laptop back. I was told Apple replaced the keyboard and the trackpad along with, strangely, the entire top chassis, which was consistent with user reports on the internet. All was well, or so I thought.

Problem #2: Laptop goes to sleep randomly

The second episode. March 24, 2008. I was typing away on the MacBook Pro when, suddenly, the display blacked out and the system went to sleep. I woke the system with a press of the spacebar and went back to work. Nothing was lost; it was not a crash.

Two minutes later, immediately upon releasing a key on the keyboard, the MacBook Pro went to sleep again. That got my attention. Probing further, I formed an early conclusion that pressing Command and the \ key would somehow send the laptop to sleep. There was absolutely no reason for it. Later into the evening, I realized that other keystrokes—such as the arrow keys or the Option key—would put the system to sleep as well. Pressing any of the Command, Option, or Control key, and only those keys, would trigger the sleeping; alphanumeric keys were fine. It made no sense whatsoever.

I had a shoot coming up and could not afford to send for servicing. In the meanwhile, I removed all the applications I could think of that could be causing the random sleeping, but to no avail. After suffering the random sleep problem for four days, and after the shoot was done, I took the plunge and reinstalled OS X Leopard. Two minutes after booting into the new installation, the MacBook Pro unceremoniously went to sleep. The only logical explanation left was that a hardware problem existed somewhere inside the MacBook Pro.

In the meantime I’ll just have to put up with these random blackouts, even during presentations. In front of my clients. How acceptable is that?

Problem #3: Mac refuses to go to sleep (!)

It happened only today. And, no, it’s not an April’s Fool joke.

You’d think that, with a fresh installation, the last thing you’d expect are further complications to the problem already bugging you. I thought wrong again. After a preproduction meeting earlier today, I closed the lid of my MacBook Pro and was about to slip it into my messenger bag when I heard both the familiar whine the DVD drive would make whenever the laptop woke up and the fans whirring to life. The Mac has somehow awoken itself. I tried closing the lid again. I tried clicking the ‘Sleep’ in the shutdown dialog. I tried choosing ‘Sleep’ in the Apple menu. The damn thing refused to go to sleep no matter what I did.

Great, just fucking great. So now not only does my MacBook Pro sleep at random, it now refuses to sleep when asked to.

I have never had a sleep or hibernate problem with my old VAIO. Closing the lid meant sleeping the system, and pressing the power button meant hibernating the system. Every single time. On the other hand, browse through the Apple user forums and you will find a lot of user reports about sleep issues on the MacBook or MacBook Pro. At the moment, it seems that the three biggest recurring problems users are facing are related to Airport, sleep/wake behaviors, and a recently-acknowledged bug caused by the Leopard Graphics Update 1.0.

Now, the “Pro” in the MacBook Pro moniker stands for ‘Professional.’ It is a laptop marketed at—and long favored by—professionals in the broadcast and print industry. Our livelihoods depend on the equipment we use. But with inexplicable hardware behaviors and obscure failures that seem to evade technical support personnel, I’m not quite sure what exactly is so ‘pro’ about the MacBook Pro other than its S$4,300, ‘for-professionals’ price tag.