I can’t fault the service I received from the Apple Centre, but the quality of Apple’s online and telephone support is appalling.

I went round and round the automated telephone system chasing the status of my repair until I felt like I was about the have a brain haemorrhage. I’d already tried the online service only to find that it had no more idea about the status of my laptop than I did! Fortunately, I got a call from Solihull to tell me the laptop was ready just as a was beginning to wonder if I’d ever see it again.

It turns out that is was a failure of the new LED display, and to their credit Apple duly replaced the whole clamshell unit containing the screen. The fix seems to have worked, but my confidence in the design’s longevity has definitely been shaken. This blow is particularly keen due to the fact that the repair would’ve cost nearly £400 if the laptop wasn’t under warranty.

The long term question is now whether I should consider taking out the AppleCare extended warranty. It’s a lot of money, £279 for two extra years, but if the equipment is this unreliable…?

The day came and I received my MacBook Pro; beautifully presented in carefully designed and executed packaging. I opened it up and was immediately impressed by build quality that put my past laptops, Dell and Toshiba, to shame. The new LED screen was the very impressive, almost as good as my external Dell 2007WFP.

Before you get the impression that I’m one of those people that get over excited by anything with an Apple on it, I should point out that the MacBook Pro is not without faults. It lacks a few USB ports, could do with more battery life, gets too hot for my liking; though I’ve never felt in physical danger; and as a result the fan can get a little loud.

However, in use everything was going as well as I had hoped. All my favourite applications worked well and I am a convert to virtualisation, with both Windows XP and CentOS Linux running at the first attempt.

But less than three months later and I’m using my good old Mac mini again. The display suddenly dimmed and started to flicker. The local Genius bar, 30 miles away, think that either the backlight or display logic board has failed and are going to replace them under warranty. They were helpful and very apologetic, but have had it for six days now and I’ve not heard anything.

It’s pretty disappointing for what I previously considered a quality brand. I’ll be posting how well Apple handle the problem, both this repair and the ongoing MacBook performance.