My MacBook Pro is Sad…
I have a new 15 inch, 2.4 GHz Penryn MacBook Pro. It’s an excellent machine, fast and pretty, and I love it. But I’ve been having some problems. And they started the moment I unboxed it.
Noisy Hard Drive
Over all, my MacBook Pro is worlds quieter than my old MacBook. The fans run almost silently. My hard drive, however, is an entirely different story – it sounds about 10 years old and makes painful grinding noises when opening applications or saving documents. It’s a 250 GB build to order option. The noise is driving me crazy…
Wake From Sleep Issues
I’ve heard this happening with other MacBooks and MacBook Pros, but often my laptop takes a minute or two (sometimes longer) before the screen wakes when I open the lid. Other times, it doesn’t wake at all, and I’m forced to do a hard reset by holding the power button down. On the other hand, if I do not close the lid and let only the screen go to sleep, waking it with a keystroke produces a somewhat startling flash of white light. On occasion the keyboard won’t wake it here either, and again, only a hard reset will get me up and running.
Exceptionally Frequent System Freezes
I can’t imagine how forcing a restart by holding the power button down is good for the computer, but this normally last resort option has been forced upon me so often in the course of the last month… My MacBook needed this treatment maybe 15 times over the course of the year and a half that I had it. My new MacBook Pro freezes up completely a couple of times a week, and sometimes more than once in a single day.
Worst of all, though, is the way that the computer freezes up when playing media. If the freeze occurs while listening to music in iTunes or watching a movie in QuickTime, the audio of the application begins skipping and won’t stop. It sounds like a half second of audio playing on a continuous loop. I have to say that this is an extremely unpleasant sound to hear when you’re laying in bed trying to fall asleep at night.
Excessive Application Crashes
Safari, Mail, iPhoto and QuickTime hang up or crash on a frequent basis, and non-Apple applications suffer similarly. Finder is the worst of all. Applications of course do crash from time to time, but on my MacBook Pro…
Inability to Access Keyboard and Mouse System Preference Pane
This is a strange one. The newest MacBook Pro allows you to use iPhone like trackpad gestures to manipulate images and UI elements in some applications. And though some of these gestures work for me, I am unable to access the keyboard and trackpad preference pane in System Preferences. (Below are some pics of the strangeness.)
Needless to say, I’m unhappy about all of this. My MacBook was a solid little creature, seldom crashing or treating me meanly. I have Apple Care on the new machine, and will undoubtedly take it in. The small problem with this, though, is that I live in Seoul, South Korea and while my Korean is passable, it’s not up to the challenge of describing this situation. I’m hoping for a fix from Apple in the form of a software update, since I know that I am not the only one experiencing these and other problems. Fix this Apple!
