Apple Products Don’t ‘Just Work’

The Apple gods must have it out for me and chanting ‘It Just Works’ isn’t helping. Apple and its fanboys do their best to convince the world that Apple products are blessed by the hand of god Jobs, but its hard to buy the hype after our six-day old iMac died.

My experience with Apple products over the past few weeks is just ridiculous. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that my Apple products are committing digital mutiny. Here’s a summary of all the Apple-related problems I’ve dealt with in the past three weeks. Either I have the worst luck ever…or deep breath here…. Apple product aren’t perfect and don’t ‘Just Work’.

I own more than my fair share of Apple products, but I’m really starting to lose faith. I like Apple products, but I don’t love Apple products like so many others do. I’m not willing to give crappy products or experience a break because they come from a ‘cool’ company.

I ran across the ‘It Just Works’ page on Apple’s web site today and just started laughing.

(post continues below)

Two dead iMacs

My mom’s iMac G5 just stopped working a week and a half ago. It was about three years old and I didn’t want to spend any money repairing it. I ordered her a 20-inch iMac for $1,199 and she was really excited about the new computer.

It ‘just worked’ for the first five days, but she called me in a panic on Monday. She said the new iMac’s screen went black while editing a Word document. At first I thought she’d accidentally shut down or unplugged the computer, but that wasn’t the case. The computer was getting power- the fans were spinning, the USB ports were getting power and I could insert the Install DVD- but it wouldn’t boot off the hard drive or the DVD. I couldn’t hear the hard drive spinning and the screen remained black throughout the process. I tried the usual Apple tricks to fix it, but nothing worked.

I called Apple and a rep offered to schedule a Genius Bar appointment, but I didn’t feel like taking half of a day off of work to bring a six day old computer in for repair. I ended up just ordering her another one and am sending the defective iMac back to Amazon.

In the meantime, my mom is borrowing a PC notebook from me. Things would’ve been a lot worse if we didn’t have a backup computer for her.

One dead MacBook Pro Battery

One of my MacBook Pro batteries freaked out just before I left for a trip to Las Vegas late last month. The battery wasn’t recognized and the battery meter had a big fat ‘X’ instead of the amount of time until fully charged when I tried to charge it. You can read more about the incident by clicking here.

When I returned from my trip, the meter said my battery would be fully charged in 10 hours, but it wouldn’t take a charge.

I didn’t suffer too horribly since I had an extra battery, but it still meant I had to conserve battery juice on my trip. I couldn’t watch one of the DVDs my wife gave me for Christmas and I ran out of juice on the shuttle from the airport to the conference.

My MacBook Pro is only nine months old. I’ve rotated through three batteries (I lost one of them), so it’s not like I’ve run them into the ground. I’m glad this happened while the battery was under warranty, because I’d be livid if I had to pay $129. for this malfunction.

Countless iPhone Problems

I’m on my third (possibly 4th iPhone…I honestly can’t keep track). I exchanged all of them within the first month of the product’s launch last June and have been relatively happy with the latest one. But I’ve had several problems for the past month that’ve really sucked.

My wife dragged me to go shopping with her and I sat down listen to some music. Only problem was all of my content was missing- no podcasts, no videos, no music. My contacts and email accounts were intact and the phone functioned just fine, but I had to sit through another shopping episode with no entertainment.I think my iPhone knows when I’m being forced to go shopping and get a kick out of not working when I need loud music the most. My first iPhone also did this to me when I went shoe shopping with my wife. As you can see in the below video… I get agitated when my iPhone doesn’t work when I’m ‘enjoying a shopping trip with my wife.’

When I got home I plugged my iPhone into my MacBook Pro to sync it and iTunes asked me if I’d like to set the iPhone up as a new iPhone or set this up as ‘Xavier’s iPhone.’ I’m guessing something went wrong when I synced it the day before.

My iPhone’s battery life is erratic. I can usually get through a full day without issue, but I was at HP with a bunch of bloggers yesterday and my iPhone died around 4pm. I had a full charge when I left my house in the morning and spent very little time talking on it and about 45 minutes using maps. I have no clue why it died so early. One blogger suggested that the battery may have been taxed because of poor reception, but his iPhone was still chugging along with about 80% of its charge remaining.I drove around Silicon Valley a lot this week and my iPhone couldn’t give me driving directions. Google Maps worked fine when I was in San Francisco, but it couldn’t give me directions to locations in San Jose or Cupertino…the iPhone’s birthplace. I kept getting a pop-up message that said directions could not be retrieved, which is not the most useful thing when you’re en-route to meetings.Some other things have happened with the iPhone that bugged me, but I can’t remember all of them.

Non-Apple Accessories

I ordered the Mophie Juice Pack almost four months ago and it still hasn’t shown up. Mophie keeps promising to ship it, but says its delayed because it’s getting Apple certified. I was told (again) that it would arrive this week, but it hasn’t. Mophie is kinda blaming Apple for this. I don’t really care if its Apple’s fault or Mophie’s, or both, but I’m still stuck scrambling to charge my iPhone.

I started carrying my 30GB iPod around and have all but stopped using my iPhone for music to conserve its battery so I can make calls and check email. I forgot to charge my iPod so I picked up a Griffin TuneJuice2 charger, which runs off of four AAA batteries. It worked fine and I was able to listen to some music. I replaced the batteries yesterday, but didn’t plug my iPod into it. When I picked it up to bring it inside it was HOT. I took the batteries out and haven’t touched it today. Not sure what’s going on here, but it can’t be good.

That’s All…For Now

That’s all of the Apple-related issues I’ve had for the past month. Apple sells expensive gear and I’m willing to pay the price for fancy computers and gadgets, but I’m starting to feel ripped off.

I’m heading out to the UPS store to pickup the new iMac and am really hoping its a good Apple.