The unmasked demon of MacBook Pro hell: a true story

I was commiserating with JK over at  jkOnTheRun about the necessity of returning his MacBook Pro. I left a story there about a close friend of mine, but the story was (I thought) interesting enough that I thought I'd post and edited version here with a small epilogue.

A friend of mine had a brand new 17" Macbook Pro that he had to repeatedly send back to Apple due to bizarre and fatal hard disk problems. He spent much time at the Apple Store at the Genius Bar and no one could diagnose these problems. Apple replaced both the disks and motherboards, but within a few days of getting the new components, the system would start acting up, the hard drive would die, and he'd be dead in the water. Needless to say, he was not a happy MacBook Pro camper.

And then, one day, as he was struggling with his latest MacBook Pro on his lap, he removed something in his pocket that the MacBook was pressing into his leg. He pulled the offending money clip out of his pocket, set it on the table, and suddenly had an epiphany. His money clip had a magnet on it. Hard disk drives use magnetism to store bits. Magnets and disks don't mix. Cue the scream, "Nooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!".

If only we'd had Rod Serling to step into the foreground and say, "We all have problems, but when things go wrong, our computers open the gates of hell for us. We descend, step by step, into the depths, seeking the perpetrator of our torment. Yet sometimes, we know that perpetrator all too well. The demons of technology are no match for the torment we inflict upon ourselves in .... the Twilight Zone."

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacBook Pro, Story, Twilight Zone