The MacBook Pro that Apple generously allows me to carry as my primary notebook is showing some signs of aging. It was sent to me new last November, and I’ve treated it well. It’s been through 123 full charge cycles, higher than I expected because if I’m anywhere near an outlet, I’m plugged in. Still, it’s fairly young in laptop years.My battery life is down to about 2 hours per charge at the lowest possible energy settings, a bit early in my experience. It’s also clear that the power management circuitry is dazed; a full charge reading that’s displayed as “minutes to empty” starts at about 1:45. The machine takes forever to charge and discharges as if it’s at full power when it sleeps. I have done a couple of deep discharge cycles and zapped the PRAM to no avail.More annoyingly, the MBP will randomly report something like 60 minutes remaining on the battery with a comfy and linear ramp down, then suddenly snap into death sleep mode with the first charge status light on the battery pack doing its last gasp rapid flash. The MBP has become the first notebook for which I carry with its charger no matter where I am. This MBP has developed a few other maladies that are beginning to interfere with my work. First is that pop-top Delete key I’ve mentioned before. That’s no gag any more–I need to get it fixed. The second problem is one I’ve encountered in every Apple PowerBook and MBP since the last two PowerBooks. When the trackpad is set to tap and drag, the function works flawlessly on a new machine, then deteriorates such that moving the pointer often sweep-selects everything you fly over. Trackpads of yore had calibration routines to cover this circumstance. The case warps and bows with usage, and it’s hard for the pad to tell there isn’t constant pressure on the pad.Lastly, OS X dealt me a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic failure on the MBP. My primary drive was within about 250 megabytes of full. For whatever reason, I didn’t get the pop-up from the OS. A file write failed for having too little space. The app closed and deleted that file, at which point I exited all apps and quickly wiped out about 5 GB of temporary files from the command line. This did not add to the system’s free space, which is a bad sign. The system froze on shutdown, signaling that the final sync to disk never completed. Sure enough, after the reboot, when I opened Mail.App it had forgotten all of my accounts and layout preferences; oddly, rules remained. The shortcuts I had assigned in Butler were gone, but Butler still launched. The default font for text boxes and lists changed to a scrawny scrawl that shipped with Word.It added up easily: OS X had destroyed every writable file that was open when the sync failed. After the boot, Software Update offered me an upgrade to the very OS version that I was using. The machine wouldn’t boot at all after that upgrade, and it took a rare and delicate foray into single-user mode to clean things up. Before you ask, I do have backups, but I must apply them selectively. OS X software recreates configuration files when they go missing. I can’t just do a “restore what’s not there.” It’s a small adventure in the scheme of things that leaves a faint sour taste that will persist for a day or so at most. My Mac switching study victim is still coming to terms with MacBook, which she finds more accommodating, and my loaned MacBook Pro will still probably see plenty of action before it gets any treatment. Software Development