Apple Reporter

Dear Apple,

We love your products. Some of us get our paychecks writing because of you and your products. The amount of care you put into your products is visible, sometimes, but other times it just feels like you build the products that we so graciously buy half-heartedly.

I myself have had numerous problems with my Apple purchases. I received my Macbook Pro January of this year, and from day one I had a problem. I realized that it would not play DVDs. I promptly sent it in to AppleCare, and within two weeks I had it back. Since then, I have not experienced much problems with it, until recently, when a slew of problems have all shown up instantly.

The Macbook Pro, since its creation and release in early-2006, has experienced numerous issues, and I myself have fell victim to a few of them. About 4 months after I purchased the Macbook Pro, the fan began to act up. After the installing of a third-party application to detect the fans’ speed and temperature, and it was then that I discovered that one of my fans was completely unresponsive, and that the entire computer was relying on only one fan.

The next issue I can’t blame on Apple entirely. In the Northwest during the Fall, we are victim to strong winds and along with that, power outages. As I left for school in the morning, I left my Pro plugged in to the Magsafe adapter, while it was asleep. Throughout a series of power outages, my Pro stayed charged, but asleep. When I used it on a Friday night, in my bed while it was unplugged, I shut it off. The next morning, I realized my Macbook Pro was completely inoperable unless plugged in. I, for the second time, called AppleCare and began the lengthy process of sending my Mac in for repair. I’m not blaming this issue on you, however, this event spawned a new set of problems.

My grandmother, who is quite tech-savvy, let me borrow her white Macbook while my Macbook Pro was in repair. I have had it for roughly 10 days, and already there has been a problem. I have treated it excellently, almost exclusively keeping it in a case when it was not sitting on my desk. But the plastic trim at the end of the Macbook, near the trackpad, is slowly coming off, leaving a disfigured area near the trackpad.

Around the same time, I also noticed that the Magsafe adapter that came with the Pro, which as you will remember I have had less than a year, is beginning to malfunction. I have discovered that I am not the first to experience problems with it. The wiring around the Magsafe end of the power brick is now exposed, and is only functional around 33% of the time.

Note, as I mentioned earlier, that people receive their paychecks from writing about you and your products. I am one of those people. I blog about exclusively Apple news at applereporter.com. But my experiences with Apple products have been less than satisfactory, to say the least. My next item on my Wish List, which I am vigorously saving up for, is an iPhone. But will I be subject to the same problems on the iPhone as I have been with my Macbook Pro? I hope not, because both are beautiful and quite functional products, but based on my previous and current experiences, I’m not sure I can safely trust that my iPhone would be durable enough to last even past a few months.

I urge you Apple, please take the time to actually work on your products. Do not be so eager to ship things out quickly, think back to the original Macintosh, which Apple spent years on creating before they released it. I am not saying that the products right now are horrible, on the contrary, I believe them to be some of the most useful and aesthetically pleasing products I have ever seen in my life, but instead, I ask that you think about the quality of your products and how, with a little bit of time, your consumer model could change from the generic fanboy who will buy your products, regardless of the quality of the products themselves, to the regular computer user, who should not have to be afraid of bad quality.

Sincerely,
Kristian Freeman
http://www.applereporter.com