Yep, it just stopped working. One moment I was happily editing images the next it was frozen and then just wouldn’t restart. But this didn’t bother me too much; I decided to just wipe my hard drive and start from scratch. Only it turned out that my laptop was so royaly screwed that I wasn’t even able to erase the hard disk. This left me in a predicament because I really need my laptop to get anything done but from Apple’s website it seemed like I was going be charged just to have a technician look at it.

I decided to just walk into the Apple store and try my luck. I managed to get into my local home brew store and pick up some grain just as they closed as a fallback to brewing beer tomorrow if I couldn’t get any work done. So at least my trip into the city would not be for naught.

On arriving at Apple I put myself in the appointment queue; I actually expected this to be full or to be required to pay $40 for out of warranty technical support so I was already happy that I was going to get some help. After an hour wait I sat down with a genius who confirmed that my laptop would not turn on. A few more tests showed that there was some strange issue with my hard drive. But what happened next amazed me.

They told me that even though the laptop was 2.5 years old they were still going to cover it under Australian consumer law. They just gave me a new $800 hard drive free of charge which they replaced in about 10 minutes. So now I’ve got my laptop working again with a brand new hard drive free of charge. Gotta commend Apple for how they handled this.