.. No, not me, my Mac.

Last wednesday was one of those nightmare scenarios every geek dreads. I got up fired up the mac, checked my email then went to grab some breakfast. On my return I was met with the rare but horribly daunting grey screen of death, otherwise known as a kernel panic.

I’ve only ever had a couple of these in over 5 years as a Mac owner and usually a power cycle is all that’s needed, but sadly not this time. Several reboots, safe boots, hardware self tests and verbose mode confusion boots later I’d come to the sickening realisation that yes, it’s broken.

I even stripped it right back to a minimal bootable configuration, removed all my drives and external peripherals, swapped the SSDs for the original boot drive which I knew was a valid boot disk, still no joy. Locked hard on the apple logo.

Damn.

So, genius bar appointment booked for Thursday morning where the lovely Nick went through much the same process I had before plugging in a USB drive to run some more thorough diagnostics on the main board before proclaiming that indeed it was a definitely a hardware fault and they’d have to take her in for the attention of very clever people who live behind the shiny aluminium portal that leads into the secret world beyond us mere mortals. I reckon I must’ve had a bit of dust in my eye or something because as they wheeled her off through the door it was like watching the vet wheel your dog off into the operating theatre and your not actually quite sure if you’ll ever see her again..

As a side note, tut tut Apple.. They said they’d phone me on Thursday evening with a status update. It’s Sunday now and i’m still waiting for that call..

Oh, and to top it all, a mate of mine *really* fucked me off this morning with a particularly smart-arsed comment.. I pointed out it was really bad timing as I had a load of important work-related stuff I needed to be getting on with and was totally scuppered without my Mac so his particularly thoughtful reply was “Oh well, you could always get a job stacking shelves in Tesco and then maybe in a couple of years you’ll be able to afford a new one”

Gee thanks. Cunt.

I’m not concerned about data etc. as I’ve got all my drives here and being the geek I am I’ve got multiple current backups in place of everything important but it’s still bloody inconvenient as so much of what I do for both work and hobbies is reliant on that machine. This has made me rethink the idea about getting a laptop as until now I’d never really felt I needed one for portable computing but I can now totally see the value in having a backup Mac in case of emergencies which I could also make use of on the go if I wanted to.. May have to look into picking up a reasonably current machine from somewhere when I figure out what the £damage is on my Mac Pro..