My MacBook Air sits in a box in my study. It came back from the Apple repair depot about a week ago. I haven’t unwrapped it.
Normally, I would be in a happy rush to get the operating system set up, to get the applications installed, to load the documents, and to establish my file structures. Not this time. I’m dreading it.
I’ve already gone through those drills twice in two months. Those were the high points of hours and days and weeks of troubleshooting and emergency backups and Apple support chats.
On top of that, the MacBook was my main machine. So when I realized it was going down, I scrambled to set up an old Mac mini to take the workload. And then the MacBook did go down. So, I bought a new Mac mini. I set that up to serve as the main machine and made the old mini my backup machine.
So, I’ve done virtually the same setup and rebuild four times in two months. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
I had a Time Machine backup of the MacBook, so I planned to use Migration Assistant to smoothly move my entire MacBook setup to the new machine. But the Apple specialists suspected the problem with the MacBook could be in the software, so using the backup could move the problem to the new (and repaired) Mac. That meant I had to do everything one laborious step at a time.
Try entering four dozen passwords manually. Four times! (Don’t talk to me about iCloud Keychain.)
I had to extract the document files, and I made several emergency backups, buying several external hard drives to deal with all the files. Now, I have to sort all those out.
The trouble began with some keyboard entry errors. I decided to restart the Mac, so I started quitting applications. The apps refused to quit. Then the Mac went through a kernel panic, crashed, and refused to restart.
That was my first trip to the Apple Store Genius Bar. The specialist took it into the back and “blew the dust off the logic board.” Miraculously, it started up! He gave it back to me.
A week later I was back at the Genius Bar. The specialist kept it for a few days, erased the hard drive, and reinstalled the OS. He called that a software repair.
My first re-setup of the MacBook did not go well. I plowed forward through multiple system errors and crashes over two days to reach the point that I could migrate the documents and make an emergency backup. Then, it crashed.
My third trip to the Genius Bar convinced the specialists that this was serious. They shipped it to one of their depots, where serious repairs are done to seriously disturbed Macs. When it came back, the packing sheet listed a half dozen replaced parts beginning with the logic board. That ought to fix it.
I went through the laborious and tedious setup almost without mishap. The MacBook seemed to do fine for about a month.
I wasn’t using it much. I had shifted all my work to the Mac mini, and I wasn’t going to shift it back. I used the MacBook in my spare time for low-intensity chores like typing text and sorting through emergency backups. Then it showed a few warning signs. Then it had a kernel panic. I knew what was coming. Sure enough, the next day it was dead.
On my fourth trip to the Genius Bar, the Genius was just going through the motions. He kept assuring me about how they respected all the time I had put into this machine. (Sure.). They were going to send it back to the depot and fix it right, by golly!
One thing I’ll say: the repair depot is quick.
So here it is. I can’t get any enthusiasm for it. I don’t even need it now, really. I’m wondering how to calculate the mean time before failure. They still haven’t even diagnosed the problem. They just replace parts.
But, I can’t just let it sit in the box forever. I have to rebuild it again.