In mid-September, I bought a 2.16 GHz C2D MacBook. It seemed to be everything I’d wanted. Fast, responsive, versatile, light, portable awesome in an Apple case — until three months later, almost to the day, when the hard drive failed for no apparent reason.

My MacBook has been gently cared for from the time of purchase. It’s never been dropped or slammed or doused in acid. It’s generally resting on an elevated laptop rest (for proper air circulation). Basically, it’s been babied. It surprised me that it would have critical hard drive failure so early in its life, but I keep good backup, so I wasn’t very worried. It went into the shop for a week (it’s a 4 hour round trip to my nearest Apple Store so while the repair was complete in 6, it took time to schedule the time to go get it).

I bought an external hard drive and made a point of backing it up once a week and all was fine . . . until three months later, almost to the day, when the hard drive failed again. This was coupled with the infamous case cracking that is so rampant in this model. This time I shipped it in and had it back within 4 days. I restored my backup and got back to work. At this point, I was frustrated, but still satisfied that AppleCare had been responsive.

Almost exactly 3 months later (noticing a pattern yet?), the top case cracked again. I waited a while, knowing that a cracked case is annoying, but purely cosmetic. Then the MacBook developed some random quirks, so I sent it in to Apple again earlier this month. I received it back Friday.

Quick recap:

4 hard drives

1 heatsink

2 top cases

1 logic board

That seems like a pretty bad stream of events, doesn’t it? Apple informed me that it doesn’t meet their qualifications for a replacement, though — not yet. So I’m left with a computer that has proven itself to be unreliable and AppleCare, for the first time in my Mac using life, being unresponsive and unhelpful.

This is part one of the saga. I’ll be updating, I hope with better news.