For the last couple of years, I've been living with a hairline crack on the right side of my 13-inch MacBook. This didn't surprise me, because my MacBook lives a hard life: it's been to more airports and countries than some laptops half its age. It's so full of pictures that tech support had to insert more memory to make it functional. In short, it works for a living, instead of lying around as a pampered and spoiled laptop.
In order to deal with this worsening problem--and being someone with a gift for sweeping issues under the rug--I had placed a cute tiger sticker over the crack when I was in Japan in 2009. If the defect got worse, I didn't want the plastic piece falling off and getting lost!
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| The broken corner, January 2011. |
The jagged edge was slightly uncomfortable on the inside of my wrist, as well as being hopelessly tacky. With SXSWi coming up, I didn't mind being the girl with the near-vintage laptop at the tech-toys festival...I minded being the girl with the visibly broken vintage laptop. There are limits!
When I ducked into the heated Apple store on NYC's Fifth Avenue on a cold day-- to see if I could buy a replacement for the top piece of plastic--I was told that this cracked corner was a known issue and that I should make a "Genius Bar" appointment. So when I got back to Austin, I did just that.
Visiting The Doctor
When I took my laptop in--and they told me it was really three years old--I expected to be laughed at. When the dude at the Genius Bar added that he's never seen a crack exactly like mine.... I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Yet, when he plugged my laptop into the system and looked at the history, it turned out that my laptop was covered! He even grabbed another brittle bit from next to the camera (a defective part I hadn't even noticed) and pulled it off! He told me that they'd be replacing all the plastic on the inside of the computer (including the keyboard and trackpad), that it would take 1-3 days and that I wouldn't have to pay anything.
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| Ta da! The corner is no longer broken! |
When I picked up my repaired laptop, my sweetie noticed that the replaced pieces (i.e. basically all the plastic on the inside of the laptop) are slightly gray in tone compared to the brighter white of the original keyboard/trackpad etc.
I wish I'd known about this Apple repair earlier! I lived with an annoying crack/sticker for a long time, when I didn't need to.
When I picked up the repair, the girl who helped me said that she had the same model of MacBook, and that she'd had her own laptop's parts replaced twice!
Who knew?Umm, actually Apple knew. And they didn't bother to let me know that my problem might be covered.
