Archive for January 2, 2015

Hey IT Nerd! How’s The Hard Drive For Your MacBook Pro Working For You?

Posted in Commentary with tags , on January 2, 2015 by itnerd

I just got a question in my inbox related to my my recent run of bad luck with hard drives in my MacBook Pro:

Happy new year! I was wondering if you could provide an update on your MacBook Pro and the Western Digital hard drive that you put in. Is it working well for you? 

Thank you. 

Thanks for the question. I was going to wait until 90 days had passed before posting an update, but I’ll do one now and follow up when the hard drive hits 90 days. In short, the Western Digital Black hard drive (the review that I wrote is located here) that I installed after the third drive failure is working just fine. I have had zero issues with it. After I replaced the drive. I put forward four theories in this article as to why three hard drives would fail in a short amount of time. Let me list them with some commentary:

  • Apple has a systemic problem with the hard drives they use: This is highly plausible. All I did change the brand of drive and the problem has so far disappeared. This implies that the drives that Apple uses are prone to failure. Plus available evidence in this article seems to support this theory.
  • I am either abusing the drive by running my MacBook Pro 24/7 or by moving it about while it is on, or in some other fashion that I can’t imagine: This is unlikely as my behavior in terms of how I use my MacBook Pro has not changed. Logic would dictate that I should therefore have similar problems with this new hard drive. But I do not.
  • I have an undiagnosed issue that is causing the drives to fail. This is somewhat unlikely as these are media failures. But it’s on the list because it’s possible no matter how unlikely it might be: This is unlikely. Logic would dictate that the hard drive that I installed should meet the same fate as the other drives if this were true. Thus far it has not which implies that this theory is false.
  • I am extremely unlucky: This is unlikely as the available evidence that I detailed in this article points to a quality problem with Apple and the drives that they use.

As stated above, I will report back when the hard drive is 90 days old which will be in early February. So far things are positive and I hope they remain that way. Also, if someone files a class action lawsuit against Apple regarding the quality of the hard drives they use, please let me know. I’d like to join such a class action lawsuit as this is something that Apple should have dealt with in a way that solves the problem and doesn’t make me have negative thoughts about Apple as a company.

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Apple Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over iOS 8 Reducing Your Available Storage

Posted in Commentary with tags , on January 2, 2015 by itnerd

A lawsuit filed this week against Apple alleges that upgrades to the iOS 8 operating system result in you not getting the space that you paid for, and that the company has misled customers about it:

In the legal complaint filed in California, Miami residents Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara accuse Apple of “storage capacity misrepresentations and omissions” relating to Apple’s 8 GB and 16GB iPhones, iPads and iPods. Orshan has two iPhone 5 and two iPads while Endara had purchased an iPhone 6.

They contend the upgrades to the operating system end up taking up as much as 23 percent of the storage space on their devices.

Now I had to admit that I had my challenges upgrading to iOS 8 because I have a 16GB iPhone 5s and I now have less than 1.5 GB of space free. Prior to that, I had over 2GB of space free. But as far as I am concerned, the lack of space is because I was too cheap to buy a 32GB iPhone 5s and not becasue Apple is trying to screw me on storage. Having said that, Apple perhaps could have slimmed down the OS a bit, or include the option of having an SD card in their iDevices to avoid this problem like most other smartphone vendors. After all, SD cards are cheap and you get a lot of storage for your money. By not doing so, it gives the impression that Apple who gives away OS upgrades for iOS and OS X makes its money off selling hardware and will force its users to upgrade any way they can. Perhaps that is more fact than impression? I don’t know.  But perhaps this lawsuit will shed some light on that, if it gets that far.

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Fox News Creates #OverIt2014 Hashtag And Encourages Viewers To Use It To Tweet…. #Fail

Posted in Commentary with tags , on January 2, 2015 by itnerd

The danger with a company asking for audience participation via social media is that they may get more than they bargained for. Take Fox News for example. They via the show “Fox and Friends” created a hashtag called “#OverIt2014” and asked its viewers to Tweet what they were over using that hashtag.

Let’s just say it ended badly for Fox. Here’s some examples of what they got:

https://twitter.com/NEPP_Superman/status/550993882872578048

https://twitter.com/EndHateRadio/status/550990584400596992

https://twitter.com/its_russ/status/550949670701109249

Well, that was an epic fail. I’m guessing that Fox News is going to think twice about ever doing something like that again. For that, they may want to take some advice from Rogers who had a similar social media fail a few years ago. However, they had a pretty decent recovery from it. Fox might learn something from their experience.

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