The box came a day early, on the 29th … and even an hour earlier than originally stated, neat. The machine was unpacked, hooked up to the existing equipment and booted. I should have known what the rest of the experience with this machine was going to be like, by that first boot. It didn’t. It required being shut off and back on again before I would see the glorious Apple logo on screen.
Then the problems really started.
Airport Extreme router, works fine with 2 Macbook Pro’s, an iMac and even an Apple TV, but the Mac Pro while it connected to the N 5GHz network, would drop every other connection as to be completely unusable. Being a dual-band, it had the 2.4GHz network, where the iPhone and other non-N peripherals connected, and it dealt with this one just fine. Of course, having Applecare meant I called right away and worked through this issue with a support agent, who deduced that it wasn’t software and the card was defective. We stayed on a bit more and got an onsite support setup to replace the card (apparently it’s not user-replaceable any longer).
Dutifully, I reconnected my Macbook Pro and started transferring more stuff over to the new machine, and that’s when it started getting, a little wierd. The Apple keyboard would completely miss keys that I had typed, and type others 10x instead of just once. So any chats occurring at the time sounded completely unintelligible. Swapping tabs with the key commands also brought and endless stream of websites or terminal windows zooming by without stopping … the keyboard was screwed. I grabbed another one I knew worked, same issue. I swapped the USB port on the back of the LED display it was plugged into, nada. The magic mouse was also, right-clicking now for every left click.
Something was obviously, very wrong. I called back into Applecare and explained what was going on, and after hearing about my previous issue they suggested we replace the machine entirely. A few transferred calls and confirmations of information and they sent me a FedEx shipping label via email this morning at around 09:30. Thankfully, the local worldwide FedEx dropoff is only a few miles from the house, so I took the box over there, and sent back the lemony flavored Mac Pro with tracking number in hand.
Apparently, when I spoke with the sales support person the previous night, she was able to somehow assure me they could send a new one out within 24 hours of receiving confirmation I’d dropped off the broken one. Being a custom order, I was pretty sure this wasn’t accurate. The rep I spoke to mentioned 2 - 4 business days, so it looks like Tuesday of next week is the earliest I’ll receive the “hopefully” pristine Mac Pro.
I was really hoping to end 2009 with a brand new box, massive speed and power, only to find a machine that didn’t like communicating with the outside world.
It looks like I’ll have to just wish for a Happy New Year.
