MacBook Pros Have Hard Drive Problems?
Many of us who have been using notebook computers heavily for years have experienced the “Blue Screen of Death” at least once. The sinking feeling you get when you have been working away fine and then the notebook refuses to do one more thing. It simply dies. Normally when we think about the BSOD we have a Windows machine in mind, but our boss Om Malik discovered the hard way that MacBook Pros are subject to them, too. He had not one, not two — three new 15-inch MacBook Pros die over the past few days, and he’s understandably upset. The diagnosis for all three notebook deaths: bad hard drive.
Om is a self-proclaimed Apple fan boy, so this is a particularly stressful time for him. It just goes to show that while Macs have the reputation of “just working”, bad components can bring things to a halt quickly. The Apple Geniuses admitted to Om that the hard drives in the new 15-inch MacBook Pros have been failing.
We wait to see if Om’s fourth MacBook Pro will escape the same fate as the first three, but meanwhile he’s using a ThinkPad to get things done. I must add that I have used ThinkPads for over a decade, and I can’t remember having one fail even once.
What does a Mac BSOD look like? Om’s photo tells the tale:
All the more reason I’m happy with my 13″ MB.
Is there a particular brand of HDD that is failing?
I have had 1 ThinkPad hard drive fail out of 7 ThinkPads that I have owned. Not bad. As for Mac laptops, I have had 0 out of 7 Mac hard drives fail. So Apple, in my opinion, so far is still the more reliable laptop.
Doesn’t that say more about the HDD reliability than the laptop reliability?
A laptop purchase is a whole purchase. Components are chosen for each model, so in effect all components have a say about the laptop’s reliability. You can have a car with a faulty alternator, but the reliability is seen as a whole for the model and brand, not for the faulty alternator.
The real equivalent on the mac is the GSOD, or gray screen of death, where OSX tells you “something blew up and you have to reboot” – so helpful. That screen is the result of a kernel panic caused by a memory fault or hardware failure, which is the same cause of BSODs. So really OSX just made the same problem prettier, and less helpful to IT.
The part where you start crying is when it won’t reboot because your machine is actually dead… that happened to my mac mini (and before that, my G5 – a couple months after I sold it).
General rule of thumb… all computers suck, there’s just no escaping it.
I had two friends this week have to reinstall everything on their Macs due to OSX failure (not HD).
In light of the latest commercials: if you’re going to move all your stuff anyway, why not get a Win7 PC?
Because a Mac Genius supposedly said something does not make it true. My company has thousands of these laptops and has not seen the issue. Apple uses standard hard drives and failure is on the hard drive although if it makes you feel better I suppose you can blame the company.
I doubt your story.
Are solid state drives susceptible as well?
I gave up on ThinkPads when one of the last to come from IBM, a T42p (probably manufactured by Lenovo), failed once with a something I can’t even remember (wouldn’t boot), two times with a fan error (refused to boot), and finally with a graphic board failure (no longer worth repairing). I really miss the keyboard and IBM’s next-business-day on-site service. Really wish Apple had both.
Which model MBP? Did you find out which HD it was?
Desktops and laptops are often available with different internal components within the same model. Knowing if and which components have a high failure rate would be helpful to me in picking which internal components to avoid.
I knew a lot of people with this issue in the very, very first 13″ macbooks but have not heard of it since.
I’m curious about the battery setup in the current gen – we’ve now had 3 of the 13″ macbooks come up with a battery that refuses to charge waaay to too soon into their working lives. Apple blames the batteries but I wonder if it isn’t something in the circuits because it has already happened again to one of the replaced batteries.
My iMac had the exact same problem last year. Oddly there were symptoms prior to failure rather than a simple complete death. It was possible to get the machine out of the state to back up…
Is it a coincidence that tech bloggers always have this kind of problems and they love to whine about it like crybabies.
Its a little late, I suppose, to ask Om to identify the hard drive since he can’t access ‘About This Mac’. Nevertheless, I wonder if each of the failed drives was from the same manufacturer? I am not a fanboy of Apple or MS or Compaq or IBM. That said, the hardware failures that I have experienced have all been on Macs. Software failures, meaning down-time, wasted effort are much more prevalent on MS OS systems. So, BSOD on Mac, for me, is a hardware failure, whereas on a Windows machine, its software and/or OS.
Please have Mr. Malik purchase a lottery ticket and send me the numbers. I want to buy at ticket with the exact opposite numbers. Based on his luck, that will make me a sure winner.
Apple does not make disc drives. Nor is it feasible for any mfr. to do an exhaustive test of every single component used in a production run.
Enough said.
You can now go back to your inane dickering.