The High Priests of the Covenant of Arch-traitors

Alright, I have had the worst tech experiences ever recently. I thought I had seen it all over the years, but apparently not.

The MacBook Pro I got for work suffered from a hinge which does not go back far enough. Since I am rather tall, this makes it impossible for me to use it comfortably on a table in front of me without using external mouse and keyboard. Another MacBook Pro owner told me that this is common, and the angle is different for different batches of hinges. When he made a fuzz about it, the retailer told him to wait a bit so that the hinge production stabilizes or some such bullshit. Furthermore, the screen is a wee bit flickery, and has some kind of a white spot which is not even a proper dead pixel. Oh, the enter key was all wobbly too. The store where I bought the computer was nice enough to replace the keyboard, so now I have one with a brand new wobbly enter key. Whoop-de-doo!

Having actually been around since the first Mac was released, even though I was just a wee kid at that time, I am appalled at this complete damn lack of quality control on Apple’s part. With the risk of sounding like an old geezer capable of predicting the weather by means of his swollen knee, the early PowerBooks worked for ages. I had one which was ten years old and ran just fine. My LC worked forever and so did my LC475. I have an SE and an SE/30 in the attic which both work perfectly well twenty years later. Now, both my MacBook Pro and MacBook have various issues. My mother's MacBook has had to have its hard drive replaced twice within its first year on this earth, presumably due to heat issues, as she never even moves it from the desk. Her Mac Mini also failed once or twice. So did her Airport Express, on a hot day when the temperature reached 30 degrees celsius.

Granted, computers have become cheaper and are now more of a perishable good than a durable one, but is it actually worth it for Apple and other producers to have so many faulty units? The shipping alone must cost a fortune, never mind the repairs.

Speaking of that, I saw the funniest ad in a while today. Some assinine picture trying to convey luxury and the catchphrase “Shopping turns up the heat.” This was no Al Goresque message, but it was situated outside fancy Sturegallerian where people certainly do not shop because they must, but because they can. Maybe they should have used some more appropriate wording due to the recent global warming and over-consumerism debate. I would have posted a picture if I could, which brings me to the next point.

My new phone works like an employee in a Soviet factory. That is, slowly if at all. The menus are a pain to navigate, feeling just like surfing the ‘net on a 14k4 modem. This is supposed to be a powerful unit, mind you, yet it performs much, much slower than any other phone I have ever owned. It should have synced with my equally infuriating but infinitely faster MacBook Pro, but Sony Ericsson decided that they will no longer offer the required software for download. Bravo. Just to add another little tidbit; the phone will not sync through a USB cable unless a driver is installed. There is no reason at all to give it this “feature”, so I wonder whether the Sony Ericsson engineers are just horrible, spiteful little goblins, such as those featured in the accounting department in the Dilbert comic.

Furtherdamnmore, I wanted to unlock my old phone to be able to sell it. This, the store clerk at 3 (the operator in question) told me with a straight face, would take SIX WEEKS. The procedure is such that I tell them “I want to unlock!” and they say “Sure, we’ll send you the unlocking code!” However, it takes them six weeks to do so. Do they need to assemble the high priests of the covenant of arch-traitors to summon the code? Do they let sloths carry the letter from Nepal, through perils unimaginable? Or are they just completely incompetent? I honestly have no idea. I get so very tired sometimes.

At least I got a nice tank top.