I think that the Apple stores are pretty neat, well designed, and promote a good shopping experience. However, I can’t say that I’d wait in line overnight like these dorks just to be some of the first people to goto the Apple store in New York. Some customers came from Texas, Scotland, and California to the opening. I sure hope they didn’t come just for the store opening, but the video clip sure makes it sound like they are king dorks. Do I care if I see Steve Jobs? No, he may run a company that has cool products, and he may be a good speaker, but I could care less if I see him in person.

As I was talking to the guy at The Chip Merchant, we both said that Apple (and the Apple store) immediately say that bad third party RAM is to blame. While it is quite easy to blame RAM, it is such a cop out. For awhile now, my PowerBook’s DVD drive has been flakey, probably due to dust on the lens. However, I’ve needed the machine all the time, so I never sent it in for repair. Now that I have a spare machine, I decided to clean off the PowerBook and reinstall the OS. Due to the flakey DVD drive, it took a lot of tries and attempts at blowing the dust out of the drive to get the computer to read the install DVD. So, I called up AppleCare to see about replacing the DVD drive. They had me do the usual BS steps of using Disk Utility to repair the disk and repair permissions and then zap the PRAM. Of course, I knew this wouldn’t help as I probably already cleaned out the crap for now. The next thing they asked was if I had extra RAM in the machine. As I’m not one to lie, I said yes, knowing full well that RAM was not the cause of this problem. The lady on the phone was nice enough to send out the repair box anyway and let me “test” the machine without the RAM to see if the problem persisted. Yeah, sure the problem is caused by faulty RAM that I’ve had in the machine for almost 2 years.

I’ll send the machine in for repair when I get the box as it is still covered under AppleCare and the DVD drive either needs to be replaced or cleaned. I realize that the support reps work from a script, but given the age of the machine (almost 2 years old), isn’t it quite possible that the drive needs a cleaning?

I’ve been having some problems with my 2.5 week old MacBook Pro where it spontaneously restarts. It happened again today while I was doing a backup and after some research on the web, I found that others were blaming RAM. So, I called The Chip Merchant and they said to bring my machine in and they’d look at it. I brought the machine in and while they couldn’t determine that RAM was the problem, they said that others have had problems with that brand of RAM and would replace it. Hopefully this replacement solves my problems. What I’d like to know is why is RAM such a crapshoot? I’ve bought RAM from The Chip Merchant for the last 10 years (through at least one change of ownership) and only had problems with the RAM I bought for my server last year and potentially now. I don’t blame them as other people have problems with RAM from other vendors. RAM is supposed to be a standard, but I guess manufacturing tolerances on the modules as well as the computers vary so widely, that there is no way to guarantee that a RAM module will work in any given machine. I would have expected that over the years things would have gotten better, but RAM seems to be the leading cause of computer wackiness.

Maybe in my next life I won’t have to deal with computers and the randomness associated with issues.