Despite my enthusiastic post about 10.5’s imminent arrival the other day, about which my feelings are unchanged, and my continuing enthusiasm for my iPhone (named BigMan, all our hardware get Springsteen-related names), I am just a bit short of complete surrender to Apple Fanboyhood.
For example, this morning I woke up to find that the hard drive on MiamiSteve (my MacBook) had died. Again, since this happened last November as well. Once again my lessons regarding frequent backups should pay off since I can see pretty much all the files and such sitting on the NAS drive. Guess what Bill will be doing with his Saturday night…
An improvement from the last such event is that the AppleCare rep I spoke with said that when I go for my 6:00 Genius Bar appointment I’ll be able to get a replacement hard drive on the spot instead of turning in the laptop for the usual 5-7 business days repair turnaround. Keep your fingers crossed that this turns out to be true, please.
BigMan is not in a perfect state either. I spoke with a (different) AppleCare rep a couple of days ago about it and he said I need to do a full restore of the system software. This will, of course, wipe the phone’s drive clean and the sync/backup software only handles some (well, most) of the data. Gone will be SMSs, notes, map bookmarks and settings for things like Weather and Stocks; no big deal but surprising omissions given the Jobs attention to detail which pervades Apple’s product line.
The rep said that my two big issues ought to be resolved with a restore, but I haven’t been up for it yet so no confirmation. Maybe after the new hard drive is installed and all software and date reinstalled and restored.
Update: Sure enough, when my name was called at the store the ‘genius’ had a hard drive in stock. He went in the back, got the drive, swapped it for my deader, installed the OS (Tiger, not Leopard, oh well) and gave it over to me for creating the admin account and confirmation that all was well. Once again iBackup did it’s job with almost nothing lost except for a few directories I forgot to add to the backup profile. Cool!
BillSaysThis 