Two Apple customer service representatives told reader Mark to blame his MacBook’s four hard drive crashes on GarageBand, professional-grade software that his puny consumer-grade laptop ‘can’t handle.’ Every MacBook comes with GarageBand pre-loaded as part of Apple’s iLife suite.
Mark writes:
Hello Consumerist,
Recently I went into an Apple Store with a broken hard drive on a black Macbook. This was my third hard drive crash on the machine in 18 months. Previously I had another apple notebook which had no problems in the four years I used it.
After the second hard drive crash I took the machine to the Genius bar for service and it was sent away to Apple in California. After getting it back about ten days later I was informed that they had replaced the DVD drive (?) in addition to the hard drive and was told if I had any trouble with this hard drive they would replace the machine.
This time when my hard drive crashed I took it into to be replaced again. After a few days I called Applecare and asked them whether I could request a replacement machine. They informed me I should contact my local Apple store that was doing the repair and speak to them about a replacement and if that didn’t work I should speak to Customer Relations.
When I called the Apple store I was put on the phone with an Apple Genius again who told me that he wouldn’t replace the machine. I asked him if it was unusual to go through four hard drives in a year and a half and he asked me what I used my machine for.
I told him I was a musician and I recorded using Garageband in addition to surfing the internet, etc. He told me that Macbooks are consumer level machines and that often they can’t handle writing big files like the kind Garageband uses. He said I should use an external hard drive for recording with Garageband.
He refused to replace the machine and when I asked for the number for customer relations, he game me a number which was actually the Apple Care hotline.
After I navigated the Apple Care menu, I spoke to a tech support person who connected me to someone at customer relations. He agreed to replace the machine and was much more polite than the Genius I spoke to on the phone.
He put me on hold and called the store to cancel the repair. After that had been arranged he warned me that since they were replacing the machine if I continued to experience the same behavior with my next machine it would be my fault.
He also told me that Macbooks were consumer level machines and they weren’t made to handle certain programs. I asked him if that included Garageband, which comes in the iLife suite (http://www.apple.com/ilife/) and is obviously targeted at average consumers as it comes with the operating system. He didn’t address that directly, but seemed to agree with me.
I was pleased with the service I got from customer relations and also pleased with Apple agreeing to send me a replacement computer. I can’t say I’m pleased with the Genius bar guy I talked to , though my previous experiences haven’t been so bad and the guy I actually met at the store was nice).
I have to say I’m completely perplexed with why a black (supposedly high-end) Macbook can’t run Garageband without crashing the hard drive. In all their Macbook ads online they show Garageband in the dock of the Macbooks and they include it with all their new computers. Surely it’s meant to be used. Maybe just occasionally?
There’s a world of difference between “can’t handle” and “runs better.” We expect better performance from better hardware, but Apple claims clunky old G4s can handle iLife, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that it will smoothly on Apple’s top-of-the-line consumer notebook. Right? Tell us in the comments if we’re missing something.
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I love how the owners of the black macbook think they have a higher end machine. Its the same motherboard, hard drive, ram, ect as the white one. You just paid $200 more for that black color.
So the macbook pro with the identical hard drive as the macbook can somehow handle garageband better?
Sure it has a dedicated gpu and faster cpu but the hard drive is the same crappy 5400rpm sata drive. Apple should replace the drive as many times as it takes, they are manufactured by Seagate who still has a 5 year warranty on their drives.
Folks, let’s keep this comment thread on topic.
Discussion of price points between Macs and PCs, or general Mac vs PC debate, is not appropriate for this thread.
Please make sure your comment is relevant to the topic posted before posting further.
@Consumerist-Moderator-Roz:
Actually it is relevant. If the tech support’s line was about whether the Macbook is a “consumer grade” machine and, as a result, can’t run big programs like iLife, then you have to wonder if the Macbook Pro is any better for significantly more change.
Likewise, the price points of the Macbook versus PC equivalents is relevant, since many posters have described their less-expensive PCs’ ability to run processor-intensive programs. So, whether the price of the Macbook is inflated or not, given the OP’s Mac’s proclivity to breaking, is certainly relevant.
Heat kills so I would like to ask the OP what kind of temperatures he sees when recording his music. I use a widget called iStat Pro on My MB Pro that displays temps for the hard drive, enclosure, GPU, CPU, etc.
When I convert videos using Visual Hub I used to regularly see the CPU hit 140+ so I installed SMC fan control to manually force the internal fans to maximum AND I have a laptop cooler underneath. That brings it down to around 115.
The worst temp is the graphics processor. For example, right now with Firefox, InDesign, Word, Seismac, and VLC player running, the CPU is 97, the HD is 77, but the GPU is 108 (the infamous nVidia 8600M GT).
So, to the OP, do everything you can to get the heat out.
When I took my uncle shopping for a new computer at the Apple store, they tried pulling this crap on me.
They said that regular macbooks couldn’t handle Adobe Photoshop, well they could handle it, they would just crash a lot because it ran a different architecture, and he needed to buy a powerbook.
This guy get no sympathy from me. He probably bought a base model MB and wants run multiple tracks of garage band.
I own a MB and a MBP both of which I use for multi-track audio for television productions and everyone knows that you NEVER write the files to your internal hard drive unless you have a 7200 RPM hard drive, and you’re only creating a maximum of FOUR tracks. Any more tracks or anything slower is just too much stress on the entire system.
The OS (Mac or Windows) needs free space on the hard drive for part of it’s operations, and if this moron is running multiple channels of Garage Band, with Effects and Plug-Ins, the machine has no other place for it’s processes.
I wouldn’t have replaced his machine, let the jerk learn, buy another one, and equip it correctly.
i was thinking about this the other day and i thought of this possible scenario for apple:
apple starts heavily growing market share, expanding through places like best buy.
apple manages to anger best buy enough that they stop selling mac computers again (it has happened before, i could easily see it happening again. apple isn’t good for BB selling geek squad, strike 1, they aren’t good for margin stand alone, strike 2, and they do run sales like the student sale, which best buy cant easily match without losing/ not making money)
and apple from what i heard has actually decided to put less mini apple stores into best buys and more just stand alone stores.
as apple grows, they lose a lot of their advantages, they get more customer complaints as they find more bad customers. they cause more complaints when they pull stuff like this article is about. and they lose their magical no virus claim as virus writers start targeting them.
they lose their advantages and all of the sudden these expensive mac stores they have opened start losing money and closing, windows 7 actually doesn’t suck (long shot) and all of the sudden its 1998 all over again.
unlikely, but it could happen.
hard drives fail faster with use. A large company running a server farm that is writing data 24/7 can expect hard drives to last a couple months to a year depending on how much they are getting used. Grandma can expect her HD to last 6 years because all she does is email, while little toby playing WoW can expect his to last 4 years before having decay issues
I deal with this stuff all the time. The most logical explanation is that the model and revision of hard drive being used has issues. We had this with some IBM POWER systems we had. For several months, a hard drive would go bad about every other week. I would have to RMA it with IBM, and after a few of those, I concluded that the entire series of drives was bad — they were all the same model and had sequential serial numbers. I asked IBM to proactively replace the drives, but that was going to be difficult to get them to do. Eventually most of the drives failed, and I RMA’d them one-by-one. The newer model that replaced them has experienced NO failures, even though the machines have the exact same workload.
What the Applecare people are telling you is B.S. There’s little difference between consumer-level drives as far as reliability. Enterprise class drives are supposed to have higher MTBF, but how much is questionable. Using the drive a lot shouldn’t make any difference. We have consumer-level SATA drives that get hit hard in a double-parity RAID configuration and haven’t had a single one fail in two years.
I would call up customer relations again and ask to speak to a supervisor and complain about getting the run around. Or email Steve Jobs or some other Apple execs. The problem is not you, it’s crappy drives.
If you think the machine is getting too hot, I’d recommend a program called SMCFanControl. It will let you speed up the fans on your system to make it run cooler, which should help if the hard drives are failing due to heat problems. It also is nice if you are actually sitting the computer on your lap.
Regarding quality and prices, in my experience, the components Apple uses on the motherboards in their pro models (capacitors, for instance) are higher quality than the consumer models. I’ve seen a lot of failures of iMac G5 computers, but virtual none on Power Mac G5 computers.
Regarding pricing, comparably equipped Apple notebooks are usually within a few hundred dollars of a Dell, but they are more expensive. What do you get? More capable firmware with time-saving features like Firewire Target Disk Mode (extremely useful), and a better operating system that requires a lot less babysitting, so that I actually get work done instead of troubleshooting the OS. So PCs do come out cheaper, as long as you consider your time to be worthless.
I have never heard of a consumer hard drive failing because it of an application that uses the hard drive more than normal. I call bunk on this.
I have both Macs and PCs at work, and I find the entire Mac vs PC debate silly, it all depends on what you use your computer for.
A hard drive in decent shape, in a laptop that is properly cooled, isn’t going to fail because of a specific program.
But if the hard drive is marginal and/or the laptop or hard drive is running hot, then a program that makes the drive run more could conceivably push the drive over the edge – but in this case the drive would probably die sooner or later anyway.
I think the genius in question is the problem. I run an old bottom of the line consumer grade ibook (ibook for god’s sake! it’s over four years old!). I’m running the latest Mac OS and can manage large files in Photoshop, record in Garageband and even play World of Warcraft on it. I think there’s something else going on here.
I came in here to call BS on what the tech is saying too.
First and foremost let me start out by saying that the few times I’ve had to deal with Apple tech support, they’ve been great. They’ve gone out of the way to make me happy as a customer, I’m sorry you didn’t get the same great experience I did, but at least you got someone that spoke English unlike calling Dell
Anyway, moving on. MacBooks and MacBook Pros are both capable of running GarageBand fine. My friend works at a school that has a hundred of these suckers that they use in multimedia class and they tend to use GarageBand in there a LOT. It sounds like maybe the current batch of MacBook hard drives are bad? That or maybe there’s another short in your system somewhere. Hopefully the new machine you get will have this issue fixed.
As a side note I used a MacBook Pro (first edition) to edit a HD feature project and things didn’t really slow down on the thing till we had imported in around 250 hours of HD footage and edited that down into a muti-sequence/component 1hr 50 min project.
Now I know that Macbooks can’t run FCP, but if a Macbook Pro can handle that much HD footage, a MacBook should be able to handle a 65-100mb audio file.
Hope it all gets resolved ASAP!
Best,
Lee
I forgot to mention in my previous post, when we edited the HD project, we used external drives extensively.
If you decide to get an external drive for your audio project I highly recommend the Western Digital myBook line (the big ones not the smaller ones w/out power supply). These suckers have a huge fan inside so they’re a little noisy, but incredibly durable.
Under any circumstances DO NOT GET a LACIE BigDisk, we had several of these things fail on us (not the actual hard drive but the USB interface part). I had to rescue the files myself by ripping the drive apart, fixing the connection, and plugging it directly into my desktop machine. DO NOT BUY THESE, YOU WILL LOOSE EVERYTHING ON THEM unless you know how to use a soddering iron.
Best of luck!
I’ve had my black mac book for over 2 years, I’ve just recently put a new hard drive in it. There was nothing wrong with the old hard drive, I just wanted a 250GB HD versus the old 80GB one. That said, garageband can’t kill HD’s I use it all the time, it’s just silly to make that kind of statement. Good Mac geniuses don’t stay at Apple for long or at least that position for long. I know I’ve hired two.
The Seagate hard drive that came in the Macbooks for about a year and a half (I think it was 2006-2007, unsure of months) had a tendency to, well, crash. Apple knew this, continued selling the computers with the hard drives, then when the hard drive crashed would replace it. I happened to have this happen to me about a month after I bought the computer… while I was sitting in Iraq. So, no replacement, as to mail the computer back and wait for its return would take around 3 months. Instead, I ordered a laptop hard drive and Macbook RAM off of Newegg for far less than I would pay through Apple, replaced them myself, no issues.
@nicemarmot617: NONSENSE & FUD on the price comparison. It’s amazing how somebody so out of touch with the reality of this is the first responder. PLEASE READ THIS for price comparison truth:
[www.macworld.com]
There are many articles that have done this and show that on EQUALLY COMPARABLE machines, the price difference is not that much – and sometimes Apple machines are cheaper.
I guess that my milage is different than yours. I switched from Windows to Mac about 9 years ago, and bought a Mac Powerbook, OS 8.6. It crashed more often than anything I had ever owned before (and I’ve owned a lot of computers). Sudden, unexpected and catastrophic crashes that took all my work with it. After putting up with this for several months, I went back to Windows and gave the Powerbook to my kids for internet cruising only; that’s all it was good for. Are today’s Macs better? Perhaps, but I’m not going to gamble another couple of thousands of dollars on fanboys’ say-so.