Another Mac bites the dust (This is becoming routine)

I got a call from my brother today. I convinced him 2-3 years ago to get a PowerBook. I felt I was doing him a favor, releasing him from Dell Hell.

But today his Mac suddenly gave up the ghost, taking all of his data with it:

Here is the story: I was in the kitchen browsing basketball news and eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes. I finished breakfast, closed my Mac (which had been turned off the night before, so it’s not as if it had been running all night), and took it to my room. I then plugged it in, only to be met by big gobs of putrid smoke streaming from the fan area. The Apple people couldn’t tell me whether the hard drive is OK; for that, I’ll need to pay $3,000 to find out.

I have spent over $120,000 with Apple (through personal purchases and through OSBC), and have convinced friends/family to spend at least another $40,000 with the company. I figure that Apple can peg $160,000 of its income to me.

I don’t expect a computer to last forever (though my ThinkPads always did – I still have one or two from six years ago that function flawlessly, except that they’re running Windows). But I do expect a computer to give some sort of warning before it dies. In my brother’s case, he had no warning that the fan, or anything else, was giving out. It simply died.

And now Apple is asking him to pay the cost of the computer simply to retrieve the documents/iTunes music (!!)/etc. that Apple killed. This doesn’t seem right, even if he wasn’t wise enough to get the AppleCare extended warranty (which wouldn’t have salvaged his data, regardless).

Why does Apple sometimes make it so hard to love it? $160,000 in Apple hardware does not buy you Apple’s loyalty. It doesn’t even buy you a Mac that works, apparently. (Apple, if you’re reading this, you should recover his data and fix his machine. It really is the least you could do.)