Last night while I was busy putting together a post about minimizing debt while you’re in college, I noticed that my MacBook Pro was only charging sporadically. A short while later, the light on the “MagSafe” plugin flickered a bit and then went out.
To make a long story short, I discovered that the wire leading from the power brick to the MagSafe plug (which goes into the computer) had shorted out. As you can see from the pic below, it burned right through the wire insulation. Scary stuff. As far as I know, there’s not a recall for this (yet).
(Sorry for the crappy cell phone-quality picture.)
The good news is that my computer wasn’t damaged and the house didn’t burn down. Since I have AppleCare, I called them up to report the problem and to get a replacement. They took an incident report and then agreed to cross-ship a replacement. The bad news is that it will take 3-5 business days to arrive. I objected, as they’ve sent stuff to me overnight in the past. But this time they wouldn’t relent, saying only that 3-5 days was the best they could do.
Fortunately, my wife has a plain old MacBook, and the power adapter is compatible with my MacBook Pro, so at least I’ll be able to compute between now and when it arrives.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Is there an Apple Store near you? Whenever I have problems, I just go in and they swap parts out for me right then and there. Painless.
May 9th, 2008 at 7:48 am
JD: Nope. We have a local Apple dealer, but the nearest Apple store is over an hour away.