Where Everybody's Crazy

Dear Apple: You have a problem with your MagSafe adaptors. Here's mine:

And here's Christoph Burgdorfer's:

Here's Rogier Mulders:

And we're not the only ones. You're pushing too much juice through these poor connectors. It's a design flaw. Please stop it.

Now it does not help me, in this situation, to find that you have drastically reduced the levels of support available in the UK to get stuff replaced. I was told by the lovely lady at the Apple Store today that the lovely mail-in repair centre that used to operate has been replaced by... nothing. Thank you very much! It turns out my only recourse is to get down to London for 10am to book an Apple Store appointment and then hang around for the rest of the day until it comes up. That would make sense if I lived and worked in London. I don't.

In terms of train tickets and the cost of my time, it's cheaper for me to buy a new one from a third-party reseller, which is what the lovely lady at the Apple Store advised me to do, and what I did.

It rather makes me wonder why I shelled out for AppleCare; Apple blatantly doesn't.

Hard-up Apple fans - and those better-off Apple fans looking for geek toys - ought to know that with the introduction of the Intel Mac Mini, G4 Mac Minis are being sold off through the refurb store at a generous discount of 36% off.

That makes 250 quid for a 1.25 GHz computer with 256M ram and 40G disk, or 278 quid for 1.42GHz with 80G disk. Not at all bad! I'm still holding out for a cheapo laptop, (or maybe a MacBook if more people buy the book) but I was quite tempted by the thought of using one as a "portable" Mac for hooking up to a projector to do presentations, show DVDs and things like that.