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Hey, at least my laptop doesn’t have one of those wacky batteries with the spontaneous combustion “feature”

Apple, You’ve Let Me Down
by Jon on 07 Oct 26

If you know me, you know I love my Apple computers. I’ve been a steady Apple customer for most of my years as a designer. Between work and home, I’ve been the proud owner of an old indigo iMac, two G4 desktops, an iBook, two iPods (a fourth-gen model and a nano), a shiny new 17-inch MacBook Pro, and an iPhone (thanks, Tony!). I will always pick a Mac over a Wintel machine, and I happily suggest to my friends and family that they do the same.

I’ve never had a single problem with any of my Apple products — until now. If you’ve seen Apple’s current line of laptops, you’ve probably noticed the cool power adapters they use. They’ve got this groovy little magnetic connector that pops right off without damaging anything or pulling your laptop off the table whenever you trip on the cord or your kid gives it a yank. This thing has a big power brick that plugs into the wall, and then there’s a little tiny cord that runs from the brick to the cool magnetic thingy. Well, my little tiny cord has melted. Yeah, you heard me right. It melted — right where it goes into the big power brick. It’s charred a good bit, and there’s bare wire visible through the big melty holes. Looking around online, it looks like I’m not the only one with this problem.

Here’s where I ran into a big problem. I went to the local Apple store a few days ago to try to trade my power adapter in since it’s still covered by warranty, but they don’t have any new power adapters in stock. Apparently, nobody has any new adapters in stock. Apple apparently pulled all of their inventory a few weeks ago and is supposedly redesigning the power adapter to address the problem. But they didn’t just pull these from their stores — they pulled them from everywhere. Amazon doesn’t have them. Best Buy and CompUSA don’t have them. Small Dog and Mac Mall and all of the other places I know of don’t have them. That’s a big problem considering the fact that I use my laptop all day every day at work. I need it — not a $3000 paperweight. Thankfully, Tony and Nathan also have MacBook Pros, so we’ve been passing power adapters back and forth in order to keep me up and running.

UPDATE: We got lucky and found a used adapter for sale last night from MegaMacs. The FedEx guy should be showing up with it some time this afternoon. Yeah, it’s used, and yeah, it cost a small fortune to overnight it, but I need power to do my job. Hopefully this one won’t melt — at least until Apple releases their new improved versions and I can trade mine in.

About the Author

Jon leads the design and marketing team at OnWired, a web design and development company in central North Carolina. He’s a Photoshop addict and can juggle Google AdWord campaigns blindfolded (if you ask nicely).

Don’t worry that his college degree is in a foreign language — that just means he can design a killer multilingual site.

Read Jon’s Bio.