Apple: I Was Wrong, Here's Your $200 Back

Previously on Chris Mountford's blog...

Genius: "Oh um ya that battery that split open like a stepped-on-banana.. that's expected behaviour"
Me: "You're kidding me? Should I expecting all other Apple products to do this?


The latest is, thanks to Mr Anonymous, Paul M and legion others like them, is that I have been refunded my $200 because, as a reasonable person would assume, the extended warranty DOES cover such explosive situations.

Exploding Macbook Pro Battery = "Expected Behaviour"

After booking my appointment with a Genius at the Genius Bar in Sydney's city Apple Store, waiting in line dutifully holding my AppleCare extended warranty stuff, packing what I thought would be an iron-clad case of Exploding Battery Obviously Defective Here's A New One Sir, I was rudely awoken by the facts.

Apple's official position, according to the lips of two courteous Genii, is that exploding is "expected behaviour".  The battery was bought with the computer in June 2008 (exactly 2 years ago) and it had been sitting for a couple of months looking like this before I got around to taking it in:
 

Well it's not behaviour I ever expected. And I say this with some experience with batteries, even lithium ion rechargeable batteries, that ranges roughly two fashionable Genius lifespans or near enough, judging by their fresh-faced appearance. I've never had anything like this.

I think the elephant in the room is that while the fine print may say that the extended warranty doesn't cover batteries, this is a major manufacturing defect and Apple know it. I was virtually told as much as I was assured my 1 year old Macbook Pro with the built-in battery would not suffer the same fate since it is a non-nickel based lithium polymer construction. I was invited to attend the Apple battery page: http://www.apple.com/batteries/ which keen observers will note contains nothing of Apple's expectation of explosions.

Looking further the Apple battery replacement page says:

However the AppleCare Protection Plan for notebook computers does not cover batteries that have failed or are exhibiting diminished capacity except when the failure or diminished capacity is the result of a manufacturing defect.

Right so, who says this is not a manufacturing defect? Shouldn't a manufacturer's expectations about common failure cases be published on thier main information page? If it really is not a manufacturing defect where is the information about this expected behaviour on their written material?

The battery still holds a charge as demonstrated by the indicator lights on the battery. Also, although it doesn't properly fit the case due to it's unsightly bulge, it was powering the laptop fine until I took it out. In fact the reason I did so was because the bulge was pushing the back of the mouse button, preventing it from clicking. None of this stuff appeared to be news to the Geniuses. Just another exploding battery.

So $199 later, I purchase a new battery which, I carefully confirmed, would be expected to explode in roughly 300 power cycles (which I assured the young Genius my existing battery had not experienced).

Has anyone else had luck in getting their battery replaced as a part of Apple extended warranty? I see plenty of talk to this end:

http://www.appledefects.com/?cat=27
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=909217
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/12/25/battle-of-the-battery-bulge/

Aussie Censorship Error

As a father of three young kids the thought of child porn disgusts me.

If only an Internet filter imposed by the government would be effective against it.

As a professional software engineer I can't help but acknowledge that the proposed filter will be 100% ineffective at stopping child pornography and that hundreds of millions of dollars could be better spent elsewhere.

The proposed censorship by senator Steven Conroy does not propose to stop most material that is unsuitable for children and it does not propose to stop the most common channels of illegal content on the Internet (bit torrents).

Finally any VPN will effectively go straight through the filter so anyone who wishes to can circumvent it using current technology.

Titanium Reinforced Self

For those of you I know personally, you've probably already seen my impressive X-rays, but for the rest of you I'm announcing that I have recently had cause to become hyper human.

Not content with collar bones constructed of mere bone matter, which I ably demonstrated can break with the aid of a single mountain bike and a spot of bad luck, I opted for hyper human augmentation.



I can wholeheartedly recommend the procedure should you be advised that it's necessary for adequate bone knitting. It completely stopped the disconcerting clunk that occurred in my shoulder on certain movements for the 36 hours prior to surgery.

The only down side was, apart from the usual recovery and healing process, I discovered much to my surprise, morphine is quite disgusting. It certainly blankets almost all pain but at the expense of almost all cognitive ability.

Further, morphine causes the sensation of hanging upside down in a vat of warm butter after having skulled a salmon milkshake. With an automated IV drip, that feeling was only a button press away should I become convinced that it was better than post op pain.

Now I'm back on the bike but my shoulder does not have 100% strength or mobility and my muscles feel wasted and weak all over. So if you happen to pass me on a hill, this is going to be my standing excuse.

More Cowbell in One Line of Groovy

Sometimes you just need more cowbell.

It is for those times that I wrote this:

groovy -e 's=javax.sound.midi.MidiSystem.synthesizer;s.open();c=s.channels[9];c.noteOn 56,99;Thread.sleep 99;c.noteOff 96;s.close()'

I do often find myself needing more cowbell, such as when invoking a maven comannd which inevitably downloads the internet, like mvn clean. So get this puppy on your PATH and you can do this:

mvn clean && cowbell

...for an audio cue that tells you the internet has been successfully downloaded with a modicum of funk.

Ali G Joins Github Team

I was browsing a Github hosted project, Mangos recently and attempted to check out the network graph visualisation of the clones of this open source World of Warcraft server.

Moments later I learned that there are too many branches on the graph for the flash visualisation to render. The following error message is shown:

Sorry, this repository's graph is currently too logical awesome to display. We're working on optimizing it. Check back soon.

Which leaves one wondering just how much is the right amount of logical awesome.

Clearly the only conclusion is that the Github team has been joined by a celebrity error message writer, Ali G:



Booyakasha!

A Tale of Three Buzzes

Google's Buzz is causing a stink. It's the third social network which is called "Buzz" to come out recently. All have the Twitter model of microblogging (or multicast chat) with an asymmetric social graph (people decide who they follow but not who follows them).

Yahoo Buzz has been out for at least a year on buzz.yahoo.com and predicatably, Yahoo and their new overlords Microsoft are going batshit insane about this.

Oh really Microsoft? You've got a product and a bigger competitor comes along and uses your idea? And they use the generic term to name it? That must be annoying. The worm has turned.

And the drones at AT&T launched buzz.com about 6 months ago. Less said about that the better. In fact you can probably safely forget them right now.

So now we'll all be looking forward to the shakedown. There are too many players.

I think the winner will be the service that provides enough features (not necessarily the most, Facebook) with the best integration with everything else. Twitter so far has been successful at crowdsourcing the integration work with the massive proliferation of Twitter clients and "tweet this" buttons like Tweetmeme. Can Yahoo/Microsoft get this traction?

Google already has a great integration story. When the hundreds of millions of monthly GMail users hit their inbox now, they will be able to thread together lots of their google software that produces socialisable events. Now the google suite can buzz.

Perhaps it's just me but the one image I have about Buzz is those hotted up cars with the ultra-loud stereo systems and the monsterous bass frequencies causing every bolt in the chassis to loosen and the number plate to buzz.