Apple took a bit of heat over MacBooks randomly shutting down, but now that they’ve tersely acknowledged the problem I had a smooth experience getting it repaired.
My MacBook only became afflicted in the last week, but the frequent shutdowns in the middle of tasks quickly threatened to make it unusuable. I’m fortunate enough to have an Apple Store nearby and made an appointment online. They confirmed it was the much discussed shutdown issue and would need to be sent out for repair. When I returned a few days later expecting to part with it for a week, I found out they had received the parts at the store and it would only take a few days. As it turned out, I got a call the next day saying it was done!
Apple has been tight-lipped about the nature of the problem, both on their site and through the techs at the store. My repair invoice belies their secrecy, though: it was a bad heatsink. The part is cheap, but labor (and shipping, if you’re not near one of their stores) make it an expensive proposition for Apple to repair a large number of MacBooks.
The only part of the experience that concerned me was being asked for my main account password on the machine. Natural privacy paranoia and years of corporate security conditioning kicked in, and I offered them a non-admin guest account instead. That was good enough for their purposes; it just surprised me that while Apple offered me the very wise option to encrypt my files, they would then ask for the password. Overall, though, I was pleased to get a quick fix to a major problem with an expensive piece of hardware.
