OSNews featured two reviews of the new 12″ Powerbook from Apple last month. Using a machine and more fairly evaluating it, is a continuous process, so when new facts emerge, we should be reporting them back. So, what I discovered this weekend is that my 12″ Powerbook doesn’t like… the mountains. Read on, it is an interesting issue. Update: The issue is now logged at Apple’s tech support db.So, we spent this weekend at the mountains, in the Tahoe City (in the borders of California and Nevada). The city is at 1900 meters high from the sea level. In the two days we spent there, my Powerbook would work fine for the first 15 minutes and after the hard drive would start becoming warm (not even hot just yet), a very abrupt and clear sound would come out of it: “clong, clong”. Needless to say that I panicked and got pretty angry, thinking that my drive is near a death toll, after only a few weeks of owning this laptop (a value of about 2000 USD).
I restarted the machine several times “just in case” of bad hdd initialization, I used the disk utility to fix any problems that might have happened, but to not avail. The drive would do that “clong, clong” all the time (followed by restarting of the hdd fan, everytime!!), and the funny part is that as much hotter the drive would become, the more frequent the head of the disk would do this noisy sound. In the beginning you would get these every 20 seconds, but as the drive gets hotter they happen every 5-6 seconds! And needless to say that for the 2 seconds that this “clong, clong” sound would happen, OSX would freeze (this is pretty normal behavior actually, as the drive was doing stuff in the low level, so the OS has to wait for these actions to get completed).
Last night we came back to the Bay Area, and the problem has completely disappeared. The Powerbook now works just fine, as it did before we left for Tahoe. The only thing I can think of as an answer to the problem is the altitude in Tahoe City. Up there, there is less oxygen and the air pressure is much lower (25% less), so devices can have hard time to operate properly. In fact, for the first time since I received the Powerbook, I heard the CPU fan turn on, only after an hour of using the machine, and while the room temperature in the hotel was normal.
I searched for the specifications of the Fujitsu 40 GB drive (Model: FUJITSU MHS2040AT D, Revision: 8105 ) that comes with the Powerbook and found that Fujitsu claims that the drive can go up to 3000 meters altitude. Well, obviously, they should test it more thoroughly, or give me a refund or a free replace, as this drive doesn’t work according to the specs (or at least, so it seems).
Please note that the 12″ Powerbook comes with either a Toshiba drive or a Fujitsu drive, depends what the Apple manufacturer in Taiwan has in stock. Other customers will find in their “Apple System Profiler” application that they have the Fujitsu drive, and others that they have a Toshiba one. Right now, I wish I had that Toshiba one as I am planning to go to mainland Greece and spend some time with my family there in the mountains, and I like to have the laptop with me…
Please note:
1. The mountain pressure is not the same as inside the airplane, where there is more “artificial” pressure than outside the plane.
2. Don’t start to worry about your iBook/Powerbook, unless you have a Fujitsu drive (and even then, you shouldn’t be too worried). I got reports that at least the Toshiba drive found on some 15″ Powerbooks works fine even at 4000 meters.
Also, in my previous review, I mentioned about the poor LCD quality, same as the iBook’s, and many people replied “it’s good enough” and “I don’t see a difference”. I was able to verify with the several laptops they had on display in Palo Alto’s Apple Store, that the 12″ Powerbook LCD quality (contrast, viewing angle, “refresh” speed etc) does not hold a candle to the superb 15″ Powerbook LCD quality. The 20″ Cinema Display is impressive as well. I am not too unhappy about this LCD anymore (at least not as much anymore), as by using this great utility, really saved the day (didn’t fix the problem in its root of course, but it made the overall experience more bearable).
I just respcieved a 12 inch iBook 800, and I have been very disappointed about it. I am right this second writting this on my Dell Latitude 400 just because I’m so disppoointed I refuse to use it. First off the heat… Is it suppose to be that hot on the bottom left hand side? I already called Apple worried, but of course they said it’s fine. I’m starting to think I can warm up my coffee on it. And I still can’t figure out where all these scratches come from, is there a ghost in the machine I ask myself. Maybe, it’s Bill Gates evil spirt scratching it. I’m starting to wonder if I should get rid of it, but I don’t know. The speed, I don’t own any games, but I do feel it is as slow as this Dell Latitude 400 running RedHat 8. I upgraded to 384 megaram but it still feels slow. Though I haven’t tried using any games, so I’m only speaking of response time. Is it broken I ask myself? i still look online for other complaints but it’s nearly impossible because most Apple fans will be happy with anything even if it burns there hands.
Hi Eugenia,
Here is my 2 penneth
Fuj* drives are IMHO something to be avoided. My basis for this is very simple. They produced a 20 gig desktop drive in recent times that is wholly unreliable, and have been poor in tackling the issue. The numbers are vast and makes their hard drive division ‘one to be avoided’.
However, I do not know about the laptop drives. Often like IBM/Hitachi, the laptop drives have a different reputation from the desktop drives.
I would not touch an IBM 3.5 desktop GXP drive, or its rebadged Hitachi brethren, as the 60 and 75 GXP series were so horrifically bad. Yet, their scsi and laptop drives have fine reputations.
If I were in your shoes, what would I do? I would go and get the drive replaced. Its not operating to standard. One of the possible issues is that you do have a faulty drive. Its not failed yet, but its erratic behaviour at a still in tolerance altitude showed up as a failure. I do not know if the HD is user serviceable, but it might be worth throwing in another laptop drive next time you are at 1900m and doing some tests. That aside, I would no longer trust your drive. Regular backups until its replaced
Best luck
AdmV
I suppose much of this is subjective, but it seems obvious and apparent to me. Perhaps you should make clear that you aren’t presenting anything scientific, simply a layman’s observation.
Come on…
This is a technical problem with a computer that you purchased (and I’d say you purchased it without fully investigating it based on all your complaints about the quality of the LCD display). This isn’t an article worthy of being on an OS-related site.
More and more (despite promises to the contrary), this site is becoming your complaint center Eugenia.
Instead of articles about OS’s and innovations relevant to OS’s, we’re faced with articles about you either bitching about how people won’t listen to you and your all-encompassing viewpoints, or bitching about how things don’t function the way you want them to.
Get over it… I can’t believe you actually posted this here, as opposed to simply filing a ticket with Apple support like any other customer would have to.
The next time you purchase something without fully investigating the purchase, and/or the next time something you purchased has a problem, do us all a favor and do what a normal consumer would do. Why waste your bandwidth and our time by clouding your OS-related site with your complaints?
There’s a site that’s ideal for such things called http://www.epinions.com. Check it out. OS news this ain’t!
Most people like their iBooks. We had one before we got the 12″ PoewrBook. LOL, it didn’t get as hot as the PB does. The iBooks are very durable, but you do have the watch from scratching. I used iKlear to polish it and it sort of rubs them out. As far as performance is concerned, that is really subjective. Basically, with a 800 G3 and enough rAM, it won’t be really fast, of course. But, the performance on ours was such that it was “smooth”. by that I mean everything worked as it was supposed to, you didn’t have to wait forever for anything, but pretty much everything would work at the same speed. So, you get used to it not being real speedy but, we were satisfied as long as it had that consistent smoothness of operation.
As far as the professionalism of this site is concerned, you can look and look, but tell me where else you can get up-to-date articles about all OSes? Eugenia and David wrote reviews of the Apple 12″ PowerBook just to have a change of pace., to try to provide some enjoyment and discussion about a new product. And many of these comments are ludicrous. Why would Eugenia shell out $2000 to Apple just so she could bash them? Preposterous.
Eugenia experienced a problem with her drive and the only thing she could think of off hand was the altitude change. There have been some excellent posts here about hard drives. She also called Apple Support after being encouraged to do so. I’ve had good success with them over the years. If this happens again with her drive, she should call them again and ask for a replacement -she’ll have a good case to do so – and mentioning she’s editor of OS News won’t hurt 😉
This is way OT, but the Mac sites are reporting that Apple is going to have its own music service, possibly with a new version of iTunes. They don’t say if this will be part of .Mac or not.
Eugenia, it appears to me that this whole Powerbook deal has become a soapbox for your sour grapes / buyers remorse. You have NEVER been satisfied with Apple products, back to your original issues with the cube. Apple is never going to be the low price high speed high quality company you desire. The drive is a non-issue as far as Apple is concerned. How many other laptop makers use this drive? Even if the drive does have a problem at altitude, HOW IS THIS APPLES PROBLEM? I agree that, if an issue is discovered it should be covered by Apple, but, by your own admission, you didnt even give them that chance before you posted this junk on the net…. The only time I ever had a problem (loose Air Port antenna) with my iBook Apple fixed it and had it back to me within 3 days.
I dont blame Eugenia for being mad at Apple, hell I would be too if there favorite motto is ” It just Works ” then by god it should just work. Everyone expects quality and not to have any problems with a new laptop, look at the first rounds of TiBooks when I bought my first TiBook I had to send it back to Apple 4 times for an HD replacement, then the DVD Drive would not eject the CDs or DVDs so it had to go back then the video card mucked up twice, the first time it went totally black the second time it went gray, and Apple never replaced it, after the laptop finally died, they claimed user error and said it voided Apple Care and refused to replace it. It took 3 letters from my lawyer, a civil complaint filed, a call to the Better Business Bureau and a call from a local TV station when I called a reporter that I know who was going to do a story on it. It took all that before they finally replaced it. So dont all you Mac Zealots sit there and say how reliable Apple computers are and how great a company Apple Computer is because if they can dodge having to eat a repair cost or even a replacement cost they will do it. I just Hope Eugenia doesnt have to go through all that if her 12″ dies or something goes wrong with it.
On the note of laptop screens, How about
we look up the manufacture specs on these screens??
anyone got the OEM numbers?
Leslie
The clicking could just be the drive attempting to recalibrate for temperature variance. HDs do this anyway at boot time (You’ll notice it clicking plenty first thing on a monday morning).
So perhaps what’s actually happening is that the change in pressure/temperature (Hell, blame EM emissions as well, it could be anything :>) at altitude produces a number of bad reads forcing the drive into a recalibration state. If the effect takes the drive beyond the point at which it can compensate then it will cease to work.
More worrying would be if the drive is marking these sectors as bad and using its spare sectors (Depends on drive as to whether or not this mechanism is used) instead. Then you’d end up with perfectly good sectors marked unusable, permanent fragmentation and a drive on its way to the dustbin.
Gotta love these little quirks. Then again if you think about the probabilities, most of the hardware in a modern computer is working against the odds all the time anyhow. Not surprising there should be some odd failures.