MacBook Pro Woes

So I bought a MacBook Pro, with the latest Max OS X build. Yes, you just read that correctly, Mr. Microsoft guy here bought a MacBook Pro. The reason why, is so I can develop native applications for the iPhone / iPad platform with Xcode IDE and Objective-C. Lets face it everyone, Apple has the best form factor and platform for Phones and Tablet / Slate devices.

Because of this, I broke down, and bought my first MacBook every. I have made 95% of all my income in my 12 years of being a Software Professional on Microsoft technologies.

I was excited when it arrived today, and could not wait to get it booted. When I first got the box, I noticed a strange garlic smell. In further openning the shipping box, to reveal the white MacBook Pro box, the garlic smell was near overpowering.

This would end up setting the tone, or smell, for the rest of what would take place.

After getting past the smell, and realizing the MacBook itself had the new computer smell, I powered up. I was able to connect to my Wifi, get registered, and launch into my new MacBook desktop.

From there, I went directly to the reason I bought the MacBook Pro, which was sign up for the iPhone Developer program, so I could download and start to make use of the XCode IDE and iPhone SDK.

When browsing, I noticed at times the MacBook would freeze. Then pick back up, I thought 'ok' but continued on. About 70 megs out of 2.3 gigs my MacBook totally froze. Keep in mind I am a Microsoft Technologist mostly, and have never even touched a MacBook. So I went to my Windows 7 laptop and started looking up things. Finally, after playing around a little bit, I called Apple support.

This started out with the typical kind of support options, which I learned a lot about MacBook's today. I have leared how to boot up in Safe mode, how to load the Disk utility, how to launch the Activity Monitor, how to select a startup disk, and finally how to earse a hard drive and watch it fail in the earse process and remove the harddrive from the drive selection list.

In the middle of all of this I also installed Firefox, and learned all about how to do such a thing, which is very interesting compared to a Microsoft based PC. Nothing seemed to help though.

The funniest thing to me, or the most ironic, was about 20 mins into the support level I engineer call, he suggest a total reinstall of the Max OS X. Which to me, again, is just very ironic. All this start over, rebooting, etc. that was taking place. I could not help but laugh as I thought of those claims and commericals of how it just works. And I am a PC, well I am a Mac.

As I mentioned above, we did try to earse and was going to reinstall the Max OS X, in hopes that would fix this issue, but instead, the earse failed, and the HD totally disappeared. At this point I was working with a level II support engineer from Apple.

Finally after about 3.5 hours of total phone and support time, the level II Apple support engineer got the process started for a return and replace. I will add, the whole time, they were very professional and had good humor, as of course the sense of irony was all over me and in my tone. Even pointing out the "grey" screen of death we kept running into at times.

When the nice lady for the replacement got on the line, she had never done a DOA replacement before, which either is not true or does say something for their lack of need to do this kind of return. She was also very helpful, even though it was her first time at this.

Also, no one from the support team or herself ever heard of an elusive "garlic" smell, and I had someone comment 'might be someone's lunch they find when they open this MacBook up'.

In the end, I am waiting now for an email with instructions on what to do next for sending back my MacBook, so they can send me another one. I am still looking forward to developing iPhone and iPad applications with my MacBook, I just hope this time around it works. I also can't help but to smile a little, yes I paid over $1,600.00 for a new MacBook Pro, that on the first day, on arrival did not work.

Coming from a mostly Microsoft world, and writing this from my Windows 7 Laptop, which I am very happy with, just seems fitting. And actually, I had to open the support case up from my Windows 7 Laptop... which without my Windows 7 laptop, I don't know how I could have even started to resolve my MacBook woes!

So what does this have to do with Dynamics AX? Well this specific event, not much directly. I thought it was a good story. However, some of the work I will be doing on the iPhone and iPad is enabling native applications for those device to work with Dynamics AX and Microsoft Azure - Cloud Platform.

So in an in-direct way, and not at all how I would introduce this line of post, this does kick off my series on enabling iPhone and iPad, native applications, to work with Dynamics AX and Azure.

That's all for now, but check back soon, as more to come!

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