Waking my PowerBook (part II)
It turns out that the problem with waking is a hardware issue after all. My PowerBook has been back to the shop in October when it had the same problem and often could not boot past the initial grey screen. I hoped this time it wouldn’t be hardware, because of the log messages, but although they appeared often, it was not always the case.
At first I had not noticed the booting problems (shows you how often I turn my PowerBook off). So I hoped it was a software issue that I could track down. I thought I had on one occasion, erroneously blaming Adium (I really could reproduce it several times then, but anymore not the next morning). But as matters got worse (having to wait 20 minutes for a PowerBook to wake up is no fun), I searched the Apple discussion forums and found some references to the same problem there.
Now, the previous repair was finished on November 11th, and my warranty ran out on November 18th. But I thought that wouldn’t be a problem, since it was exactly the same problem and it showed up about a month or so after the repair. Imagine my surprise when the store told me that this kind of thing was not covered under warranty, I had to contact Apple myself, and ask them whether they would be so kind to cover this.
So, I called Apple, braced myself to be mad and furious, but I didn’t need to be. I explained the situation and after waiting about 10 minutes or so, they got back to me and told me they would cover it. Just like that. Maybe it is because I called at 5pm on a Friday ;).
Now you might ask, “Why didn’t you buy AppleCare on your machine?”. Well, simple: AppleCare in Europe costs almost 1.5 times as much as in the US (US: €289 ($349), EU: €439 ($530)). Add to that the fact that the machines also cost about a quarter more (15″PB: US €1650($1999), EU €2070($2500)). Then you’re not feeling very happy. And if your colleagues all use Dells and the same protection plan costs about €200, then your boss is not very likely to chip in on this.