My MacBook Needs a Genius...Fast!

For the second time, I'm blogging from the waiting area at my local Apple Store's "Genius Bar" tech-support counter. I'm here with my MacBook, which is on its second motherboard and, despite that, continues to shut down unexpectedly and frequently. (Sadly, I'm not the only MacBook owner who's being bedeviled by shutdown woes--I'm still a big fan of this notebook's design, but I'll be glad when mine works without serious hiccups. And given that the motherboard swap involved being without the Mac for about three weeks, I'm worried that I'm going to have to give it up again for more than a little while.)

The last time I blogged while wating for a Genius, the visit went wonderfully well--he fixed my old PowerBook's busted keyboard on the spot--but this time, I showed up and was told they wouldn't be able to help me tonight. I looked pitiful and pleaded that they'd fixed my motherboard already and my system was still a basket case, and was told they'd help me tonight if possible, but no guarantees. We'll see.

Oh, and a couple of humble suggestions for whoever's in charge of the reservation system software for the Genius Bars: If no more reservations are being taken, it'd be nice if A) the big monitors behind the bar stopped telling you that you can sign in from any Mac in the store; and B) if every Mac in the store told you that no more reservations were available before they collected your information...not after.

In case it's not clear from this post, there are far more things right with the Genius Bar than wrong--if I could get the kind of service I usually get here for my Windows PCs, I'd be a happy guy.

Two other notes before I shut down (intentionally!):

On the bright side: The fact that I've been able to spend all of 20 minutes writing and posting this on the MacBook means it's gone a longer-than-usual time without deciding to shut down on me.

On the possibly not-so-bright side: I'm sitting here using the MacBook on Apple's Wi-Fi despite the video demo at this week's Black Hat security conference involving attacking a MacBook on a wireless network. Here's my colleague Narasu Rebbapragada's blog post on this, straight from the show in Vegas...and here's a post from the Unofficial Apple Weblog reporting on controversy over whether the demo, which involved a third-party wireless adapter rather than the MacBook's built-in wireless, was all that it seemed to be.)