During WWDC, I put an order in for a 17″ MacBook Pro with a glossy, high-density 1920×1200 display. I’ve had it for just under a month, and so far it’s better than any other machine I’ve used.

I had some issues with my 15″ that I don’t have at all with this machine. First off, the 15″ MacBook Pro had an annoying high-pitched whine when I first got it (it mostly went away after an overly slow repair process). It wasn’t much different from the similar noise made by my 15″ PowerBook G4, but the PowerBook didn’t leak the noise onto the built-in audio channels. There was also the audible inequality between the left & right speakers, which I spoke about earlier. I was also bummed that my 15″ MBP didn’t come with a dual-layer burner, like the last generation PowerBook G4 did.

The 17″ MacBook Pro has no whine to speak of, no electronic interference noise on the audio lines, and the speakers sound great for a portable. I can actually play music on the speakers at a reasonable level and hear a bit of low-end sound that just wasn’t there on my 15″. Oh, and the superdrive burns dual-layer discs…

Of course, there are some more positives that triggered the purchase. 64-bit capabilities of the Core 2 Duo CPU, more L2 cache, 4GB RAM, better GPU, etc. I didn’t get a new laptop just to get over the small issues I had with my 15″ system — I just found that the 17″ MacBook Pro had a critical mass of improvements to trigger the upgrade.

Of course, there are some obvious disadvantages to owning a 17″ portable. It’s heavier, has less battery life, probably won’t be easy to crack open in a plane, … I think all those things are a small price to pay for 77.8% more pixels alone, let alone the other benefits I’ve listed above.

If I could suggest improving anything, it’d probably be the addition of the LED backlight for increased battery life, and maybe a bigger battery (it’s not like they don’t have the space, and what’s an extra few ounces…). Also, I’m not overly impressed with the stock Fujitsu 160GB 5400RPM HDD — it’s slower than the 80GB 5400RPM Seagate I installed in my iBook G4 a few years ago. I’m guessing it was chosen for battery life over performance.

As usual, I’m enjoying the spark of productivity that seems to come whenever I get a new system. This time, though, I think the motivation boost is also fueled by WWDC, and also the fantastic additions in Leopard that are helping me run like a well-oiled robo-coder.

My prodigal MBP is back in my hands, in fully working order for the time being.

It’ll be a while still until I get fully on my feet again, but at least I can begin the long process of restoring all my stuff. Hopefully nothing else pops up while I try and settle back into the regular grind.

When my machine went in for the logic board replacement, I also had a problem with inverter whine, which wouldn’t be addressed until after the logic board swap. I haven’t been able to notice the whine again yet, but it’s still too early to say for sure. Hopefully it’s gone so that I can stop worrying about this machine. I guess I’ll have to get AppleCare for this system after all.

Just when I thought things were looking up…

I plugged in my USB thumb drive today to format it, and upon ejecting the volume my machine had a kernel panic. Seeing how I cannot power on my machine until I receive a new top case, I’m effectively dead in the water for getting any real work done this weekend. I hope Apple chose a really bloody fast shipping option to get my part in, because I’m really sick of waiting to return to normal.

Since I bought my MacBook Pro just a few minutes after The Keynote in January, the experience has been quite a roller-coaster.

Prologue

It all started with the “Ships February” drama, where Apple pushed the shipping date to the absolute maximum. When waiting for new hardware, especially after paying a handsome sum for it in advance, this is the most gut-wrenching time. Once you’ve made up your mind to buy something, waiting to receive it is always the worst.

Upon receiving my MacBook Pro, I was elated to see the great improvements in the speed of Mac OS X, and how much faster I could compile FuzzMeasure Pro. The performance improvements were great, but there were other little niggles that started to pick at me.

Can you hear that?

The most irritating thing was the whine. Oh how my machine whined! I wanted the whine to go away more than anything, and went through all kinds of software tricks trying to make it disappear. One day I decided to just live with it, and go on enjoying the speed — life’s too short to complain, right? I mean, I’m essentially deaf to high frequencies in my left ear, so it’s only 50% annoying, I suppose.

After a few months, Apple owned up to the whining issue. However, I was right in the middle of trying to win an Apple Design Award, and couldn’t afford to lose my machine. The whine was blocked out completely by sheer will, and I got through a very crucial period of my part-time life unscathed. After the win, and the price drop, FuzzMeasure Pro heated up again and I still couldn’t part ways with my machine — not even temporarily.

Time for repair

Fast-forward to six weeks ago. Andrew showed up, and gave me a nice distraction from my part-time work — a much needed vacation. This would be a perfect time to execute a repair. Pick up the phone, call Apple, and start the shipping/repair process — or so I thought.

My first call to Apple regarding the whine was quite frustrating. I waited about 20 minutes on hold with AppleCare, only to be told that I don’t have AppleCare and can’t speak to a representative. The machine was still well within it’s year-long warranty, and this issue was a known one. Luckily I managed to convince the representative on the phone to look up a KB article by number. She acknowledged that I needed to get my machine repaired, and all I had to do was—

Wait — You’re in Canada?

Supposedly us folks in Canada aren’t able to send our machines in via courier, have them fixed behind closed doors, and shipped back. Us simple folks can only get our repairs taken care of by Apple authorized service providers. Now I have to work to get my repair — this should be a piece of cake.

The closest store that sells Apple hardware to the general public wanted to take my machine away from me for a few days to diagnose the problem, then order parts, wait for parts, install parts, diagnose that the problem was fixed, then return the machine to me. When asked if I could make an appointment and have the problem diagnosed, then walk away with the machine until the logic board arrived, I was told that this was not possible. I had to wait at least a few days until the diagnosis could be made. Forget that — I still have a business to run, emails to answer, and bugs to fix.

Catching a break

A coworker had his MacBook Pro repaired for the whining issue at a local University’s IT department’s support desk — not something that I immediately would have attempted to try. They were authorized to do Apple warranty service for anyone off the street, and they were a short walk from work. I also managed to score a direct-line to the tech who would do the repair.

After a pleasant phone conversation, we agreed that I would take the machine over and leave it in the queue for diagnosis, which happened in time for me to get my machine the next morning. After the diagnosis, I was told that I had the most obvious, irritating whine that she had ever experienced, and the logic board was on its way. At the time, I had a new 7200RPM drive that I was planning to get installed into the machine, and she said that she’d be glad to swap the drive for me since she’d have the machine open anyway.

A few days later, I brought my machine back to accept its new mainboard, and my new 7200RPM drive. I was excited to get my quieter, cooler, faster system, and with a super-smooth process! I lucked out, right? A few hours later, the phone rang.

Good/bad news! Which do you want first?

The following conversation happened early in the week of October 2 — paraphrased, of course.

Technician: “During the logic board reinstall, the top case was found to have a defective connector, which broke off during reassembly.”

Me: “That’s actually not so bad! My top case was starting to grow a serious problem with pitting, and a new top case will make me quite happy!”

Technician: “Well, according to my system, there are no top cases in stock right now, but they should ship on October 9th.”

Me: “OK, I can live with that. Can I still use the machine?”

Technician: “Yes, but you can’t use the power button, and the keyboard/trackpad are both not functioning.”

Me: “Uhm…”

Technician: “I can turn the machine on while the case is open, but after it’s put together, you can only ever put the machine to sleep or restart it.”

Me: “I guess that’s okay. It’ll only be a few days until I get the top case anyway.”

1 Week Later

I called the technician to see if the top case arrived, and the ship date had changed to October 16th. Wow — that sucks, but I guess it’s still manageable.

2 Weeks Later

Another phonecall, and still no top case. However, the ship date for the top case still shows as October 16th!

3 Weeks Later

I called the technician again, looking for an update. The ship date is still not updated, and the part still shows that it’s out of stock.

Present Day

I still have no top case. My laptop is now effectively a desktop machine which must be treated with extreme care. I cannot mess around with anything that could cause a kernel panic or other lock-up that requires me to hard-power-off the machine. Sadly, working with audio hardware, it could happen at any time.

However, most importantly, I cannot take the machine with me away from the desk. I bought a laptop for a very good reason — I can’t get all my work done while fixed to a desk. If I worked solely at my desk, I would have gladly saved $1000 and bought an iMac.

For nearly a month, I had access to only my email and web browsing, with a touch of Xcode for emergencies. I have a FuzzMeasure Pro release that really needs to go out, and a machine that needs some reinstallation and reconfiguration for the new drive in order to make the release happen.

With Andrew in the house, the problem is further exacerbated because I cannot work on my couch, or in our bedroom, which is where we spend a lot of our time now between feedings and his “awake time”. I can’t spend my only time on my computer away from my family — I need my laptop back, and fast.

Help me, Apple!

I called AppleCare to see if I could get some further insight into the status of my part order. The technician suggested this route, because another one of her customers went this route and had some success in “unsticking” a stuck part order.

Boy was that ever a waste of time. I spent a half an hour waiting on the phone, and the AppleCare agent kept putting me on hold trying to figure out if he could help me. The end result was that they couldn’t possibly help me.

Through a friend, I managed to get the contact information for a Customer Care specialist. Unfortunately, after 3 days, I still haven’t made any direct contact (only voicemail). Supposedly this person just returned from vacation, which means he has other folks to catch up with first. So, it appears that no matter what happens, I’m stuck waiting in limbo.

Aside from the fact that I’m stuck in limbo, it’s taking an extraordinary amount of effort on my part to just get to a state of normalcy with this system. I’ve been patient with the quality issues because I was getting work done at the time, but now I’m past my boiling point — I need this sorted out ASAP.

I don’t suppose any of you, my gentle readers, have any suggestions, or perhaps the power to help? Use the comments, or feel free to email me at chris@supermegaultragroovy.com if you have any magical contact info to share.

Update (Oct 27, 2006): My top-case has shipped! I got a call back from my customer care specialist at Apple last night, and when given the information about my repair, he said he would make things happen. This morning, I got a call from my technician saying that the status changed to shipped yesterday, at some point last night (because she checked the status again before getting off work).

In the magical best case scenario, I could have the repair completed today — but that’d require Apple sending out the part with next-day shipping to Canada. What’s more likely, though, is that I’ll have to wait until Tuesday to get this sorted out. It sure is better than nothing, though!

It’s actually quite common that laptop speakers are unbalanced, but these ones are really noticeably so (Note: I plan to add graphs for my PowerBook for comparison, but I haven’t had much time to capture measurements — sorry). I hope that folks didn’t take my last MacBook Pro speaker post as dissing the MacBook Pro too much. More than anything, I wanted a great case to explore using FuzzMeasure, and seeing how the MacBook Pro just recently hit the market…

Anyway, using the (wonderful) MacBook Pro disassembly guide found at iFixIt, I will show you exactly why this problem exists. It will not be corrected by software (I have no idea why I thought that — clearly I was delirious), nor do I think it will be ever corrected (without some clever technician hacks).

If you enlarge the first picture on page 10, you’ll notice that the left speaker has some sort of enclosure near it, and the right speaker has no enclosure to speak of. It’s hard to see clearly from this angle, so we’ll delve deeper.

On page 13, note how they built what looks like a little transmission line enclosure to enhance the bass on the left side. Cute!

However, the last picture on page 11 shows clearly that the right speaker’s just resting on the logic board — with no enclosure to speak of! Without any enclosure, you can’t hope for a speaker that small to act like anything but a tweeter, which is exactly how it sounds.

So, it would appear that the imbalance is by design, and we won’t get any fix for it. If the right speaker’s buzzing, I suspect the only solution would be to add some sort of dampening material between the right speaker and the logic board (hence my calling it a technician hack), but the low frequency response will still be poor.

Gotta make sacrifices to make a product sleek! Anyway, listening to music through both speakers at the same time sounds quite decent, and this design is actually quite ingenious in my opinion!

It’s set up similar to older home theater subwoofers, which intercept the left audio channel to play lower frequencies, while your main bookshelf speakers handle the higher range of the audio spectrum. In fact, most of the Bose home theater stuff follows this same principle — surround the listener in tweeters, and do all the work in the woofer. Oh, and charge ‘em a bundle for it. ;)