Power(book) Outage

Sigh. After sixteen months of use, the monitor on my Titanium Powerbook gave up the ghost a week ago Tuesday. That's four months past the one-year warranty. As I researched the problem, I learned that I was not alone. A surprising numbers of Mac users are facing similar problems, with the top third of their screens functional, and the bottom two thirds garbled and tangled.

For me, the good news is that my credit card company (Citibank, I salute you) has followed through on my extended warranty, and I'll soon be downgrading to an iBook, as I now understand that they are more tailored to a life of daily transit than the comparatively fragile TiBooks.

That said, I think I will no longer be able to recommend Mac products to friends and family (and I've prompted half a dozen sales over the years). I'm stung by the notion that Apple produced a laptop that, according to my experience and others, simply is not sturdy enough to withstand daily transit. The loss of this machine has been a major inconvenience, and were it not for Citibank, I'd be faced with a $1,314 repair bill for a machine that cost $2100 new.

All of which goes to explain the light blogging. This time the computer really did eat my homework.