I recently wrote about my MacBook, and how pleased I am with it. It is my first Mac, and has largely been a joy to use.

It’s not all perfect, however. Over the first six months of using the machine, two very nasty habits developed. First, the Superdrive (CD-R/DVD-R combo drive) started to mangle a lot of the writable media I threw at it. Eventually it got to the point where it wouldn’t burn any discs correctly at all. This was a real problem, as I burn audio CDs from our church for distribution.

The second, and more annoying habit was that the screen would flicker randomly. When it first started, it was a very slight change in brightness. I remember thinking it was my eyes because I was up late, writing a sermon. In time, it got worse, and was quite noticeable. At one point, the left half of the screen went all-but-completely dark. That was the last straw.

I found a number of folks with the same screen issues on the net, and decided that I ought to get the machine serviced, as I suspected it needed a new power inverter. I scheduled an appointment with a “Genius” at the Apple Store in Syracuse, 70 miles south of my home. The guy I spoke with was great, and said that he thought I was right, and that they should repair both the screen inverted, and the Superdrive. He told me it would be two weeks. I was prepared for that, and left it with him, as pleased as one could be in such circumstances.

Diana and I went from Syracuse out to the Watkins Glen area to spend a week with her family. Two days later, I got a phone call that the MacBook was back, and had been successfully repaired.

We picked it up in Syracuse on the way back from our vacation, and the screen was noticeably brighter, and didn’t flicker. The burner worked, and incidentally, even sounded better (which makes sense, because as I found out, they replaced it with a different model).

Everything was good. The key word of course is “was.”

Two weeks ago, on September 12th, the flicker came back. It’s not as bad as last time, and so far the screen brightness hasn’t deteriorated as far, but it does seem darker. This bothers me immensely, and because my warranty will be up in December and the problem doesn’t seem to be a one-time-thing, I’ve decided to purchase the additional two years of AppleCare.

Despite these problems, I still love my MacBook. It’s the best system, from a software and workflow standpoint, that I’ve ever owned. I hate to sound overly dramatic, but it really has changed the way I work. I guess that’s why it’s worth it to me to pay an extra $250 to have two more years of coverage. I’ll probably post in the future about the experience I have when I eventually get this flicker fixed. I certainly pray that it goes as smoothly as the previous one, and stays fixed.

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