Slashdot Mirror
MacBook Users Fix Trackpad Problem with Origami Paper
yonnage writes "Some Apple MacBook owners are plagued with what seems to be a defective trackpad button. The button, when pushed, seems "squishy" and sometimes even unresponsive. While these MacBook owners are getting turned away at the Apple Genius Bars, they have come up with a custom and unique solution to the problem. A piece of paper, placed strategically under the battery pack where the trackpad is located, seems to fix this problem for most users."
... as a non-Mac user, is that Apple's after-sales service seems to suck. Sure there seem to be lots of hardware problems, but that's not really uncommon these days. However I would have expected reports of better service given Apple's reputation for "quality products" and the cult-worship it seems to get from it's fans. It's like it's giving a big "fuck you" to its users while at the same time expecting them to whoop and holler everytime Steve Jobs farts out something new.
The story isn't the solution; the story is that there's yet another defect with Apple portables. The somewhat recent changes to Apple's hardware quality are surprising considering the past obsessiveness with getting the design right. That's why these stories keep coming up.
You see problems like this all the time with first generation models, especially from Apple. Almost half of the Apple first-gen hardware that my friends and I have purchased over the years have been completely replaced by Apple within a year of purchase. Don't get me wrong, I swear by my PowerBook, but I'll never buy a new product before the kinks can be worked out.
Duh. Mac systems have always been known to be extremely dodgy as far as rev1 is concerned, which is why veterans whose live doesn't require to immediately upgrade usually wait for rev2 of any hardware Apple produces.
iMacs, iBooks and PowerBooks always suffered high defect rates for rev1s, the difference is that since Apple had much less popularity, there were less switchers and we had fewer internets on the web, it was noticeably less publicized.
Apple's extremely bad record with rev1s is the reason why I'm still waiting before buying a mac. That, and the Core2 being released by the end of the year that seem to literally spank the Core (and AMD chips) perfs-wise.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
It's not very often I can be bothered to login to reply to something, but on this occasion I think we need a little perspective...
Let's start off with an admission - I use Apple products. There, I've said it. I find OS X to be the best OS for what I do, full stop. OK, my servers are all Linux and _occasionally_ I have to use 'doze, but OS X is my bread and butter OS. My Macbook is one very capable machine.
Now, I don't think you'll find many people who've used it who don't rate OS X. It's a _very_ capable and compelling system which has most of the advantages of a real OS with most of the advantages of a windowing interface - it wins. It ain't perfect, but it's pretty fine. OK OK..enough already. Let's not get into the relative merits of all that...suffice to say, for joe user, it's pretty good. Two of the primary reasons for it's stability are it's compartmentalization of legacy/back compatibility issues (Rosetta and prior to that the mechanisms for OS 9 and 68K compatibility) and the fact that it only has to work on a limited, well defined, set of hardware...these are both big bonuses.
Apple hardware, on the other hand, is slightly less slick, in my experience. QC and design quality are both slightly lacking, resulting in products that don't Quite Work Right. Now, Apple deliberately set themselves up as some kind of centre of design excellence so they are (and should be) judged against higher metrics than your bucket-pc-producer and, against those metrics, their hardware just ain't so good at the moment. Go google the issues on the MB and the MBP or pretty much any of the machines over the past few years and you'll see issues.
Now, my point is, we need to keep this in some sort of perspective - can you imagine Dell taking a machine back because it has a soft trackpad button, or the screen doesn't lie flat against the base of the machine? No, nor can I.
So, Apple isn't perfect, it needs to improve its hardware QC and QA (especially on rev 1 kit), but the only real reason they get such a lot of headlines on these issues is because they've set themselves up as Something Better.....live by the sword, you'll die by it too.
Please, take all these reports with a pinch of salt. Out of the set of compromises you always make when buying a new machine, don't let a few hardware imperfections skew your decision unnecessarily harshly, just 'cos some people are reporting them with the aid of a megaphone...perhaps OS X isn't the best choice for you, but there's a fairly good chance that it might be.
DAVE