Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Sony support doesn’t suck, but having experienced it for the first time, I have to say it’s not as good as Dell’s. It started almost 3 years ago, in the fall of 2005, when I bought a new Sony Vaio FS-790 laptop, and this service plan:

Product: 4 Year Onsite Service Plan plus Accidental Damage Protection for Notebooks
Total Price: $ 439.99

From then till know I’ve had a great, portable, machine with a great screen and decent specs. But, last Friday, after putting the Vaio into standby mode, it just wouldn’t turn on. I noticed that:

• removing RAM from the primary slot would let it boot
• … but the LCD backlight wouldn’t turn on
• … and putting in the battery shut it down immediately

To me, when one RAM slot fails for memory you know is good, it screams a motherboard issue, so I called the Sony support line. That was where I ran into my first hitch, with a conversation like:

Sony: Can we have you service contract id number?
Me: Yes, but I don’t have it, can you look it up?
Sony: Tell us your phone number?
Me: Tells them my current and previous number.
Sony: We can’t find it!!!!!?!?

This went on for about 5 calls spread over two days, until someone was helpful enough to actually find it. I’m not sure what she did differently, since she asked and got from me the same information I’d been giving out previously, but I finally had my service contract number. I was forwarded to Level 2 tech support, put on hold for 20 minutes, and asked about my symptoms, which I described as above. The tech said he’d replace the motherboard and LCD backlight inverter and schedule me to talk to the onsite guy. Three days later, I get a call from the onsite technician, and schedule the appointment for two days hence.

When the technician arrived, he first assessed the state of the laptop, verified that the problems I had been experiencing could be reproduced, and then slowly–over the course of two hours–took the laptop apart and replaced the motherboard and inverter.

The monitor got prints all over it from the Sony repairs

I can live with fingerprints. I cleaned them off, and put in a live CD memory test to make sure the RAM really was ok. Two hours later I come back and see that my RAM passed all the tests (and that my L1 cache runs at 25Gb/s), and noticed that the laptop was extremely hot everywhere, and that the fan wasn’t blowing. Want to guess why?

The fan assembly, lying on the motherboard

Can you see it? Let me help:

Yeah, the fan wasn’t plugged into the motherboard. I had to take out all the screws on the back of it again, just to connect that one little missing bit. To Sony’s credit, their technician, if not meticulous and brilliant, was good-natured and careful. On the other hand, my previous experience with Dell stacks up just a little bit better:

I am happy with Sony; it took a week, but they fixed my notebook. But, they’re just providing what they have to. They’re not actually trying to get a fast, responsive, integrated support experience like Apple or Dell gives. The fact that they outsource their warranties to divers numbers of third party companies is evidence of that. If I had to do the notebook thing again, I would probably be going with Apple, both for their support and for the quality of the macbook line.

My brother has a Dell Inspiron, my sister has an Apple Macbook. The inspiron has a Dell Wireless 1390 or Intel Wireless 3945 card, while the Macbook has AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n. The other night we were all playing an online game, with mixed results. They share a DSL connection to the internet, while I measured their latency over time from my Verizon FIOS:

Looking at the box-plots for my brother, who has the Dell, he is spending about 50% of his time experiencing latencies up to twice as bad as they should be, while my sister is getting decent, consistent Wireless performance. I don’t know if it’s environmental to their home, or something else, but what’s causing such bad performance for my brother? Does Dell just suck that much?

I bought a pair of Shure E4c-n earphones about 6 months ago from Amazon, and I have to say they are the best I’ve ever owned. They have a 4/5 star review on Amazon with 50 reviews; their newer cousin the SE420 has similar reviews. Here’s what they look like:

The sound isolation is orders better than any other headphones I’ve tried, and the frequency response is excellent. My coworkers, two of whom bought similar or identical Shure earphones, also swear by them. You can be sitting on the worst part of the NYC subway line with them on, and not hear the pain of the wheels screeching on ill fitted metal tracks.

A reviewer on Amazon praises the sound quality better than I can:

These IEMs sound absolutely incredible. They sound is so clear and detailed that I notice new details in songs that I had listened to dozens if not hundreds of time. In a complex musical passage it is easy to follow every note of a single instrument which is not an easy feat with most headphones.

As for Customer Service, it’s the best. My earphones started wearing out in 6 months at the cord junction where it meets the plug, and they are sending me an advance replacement (against my CC) of the SE420s. When I get them I’ll send back the defectives to the Customer rep who took my warranty replacement and they’ll reverse the charge. Another customer had a similar, great experience:

As for Shure customer service–I had a suspected loose wire in one of the E3 earphones (used for 8 months) leading to dropouts when I would move my head. I got a return form off the Shure website–filled it out and sent it along with a copy of my receipt to Shure. Within 10 days, they had sent out a completely new pair at no charge.

Even Apple doesn’t offer this level of personalized customer service. I’m extremely impressed, and with their 2 year warranty, I’ll definitely buy again!

Today at the Macworld 2008 Expo, Steve Jobs released a new version of the Macbook called the Macbook Air. Unlike last year’s iPhone announcement, the response to the Air was negative. The price of Apple’s stock today dropped 9.02% to close at $169.04 and $163.01 in after-hours trading:

If you’re interested in the Macbook Air, check out these specifications from the Apple Store. For $1799, you get a 0.76 inch thick, 3.0 pound notebook with a 13.3 inch backlit widescreen display, 1.6 GHz Core2 Duo processor, iSight camera, backlit keyboard, and multi-touch trackpad. It has a single USB 2 slot and a single micro-DVI slot and headphone jack via a door on the side. Wirelessly, it supports 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1/EDR. It has no optical drive natively, and comes with a wimpy 80GB 4200 RPM hard disk. A 1.8 GHz processor and a 64GB solid-state drive (SSD) will cost $3,098.

I have to agree with Michael Arrington of Techcrunch that the laptop, even as a premium option, is grossly overpriced and underpowered. A slightly heavier, but significantly more powerful Sony Vaio (40% faster CPU, 30% faster hard disk, more ports, fingerprint sensor, nvidia graphics, twice as much hard disk space, slightly thicker, slightly heavier, same height and width) can be bought for $1800. If you go to Dell, you can configure their 13.3-inch widescreen XPS M1330 with an SSD drive and a few upgrades for just $2,404, a significant savings over Apple’s price.

It’s interesting that Kineda and Paul both point out seriously problems with the new Macbook (it’s wimpy, overpriced, and full of proprietary non-replaceable, non-upgradable parts) but still cheer it on. Paul says,

News flash to Devin people don’t buy ultraportable notebooks for their workstation-like performance. Enough said. Do I want one? Hell yes.

But, it’s Daring Fireball who finally gets to the bottom of the Macbook Air, and why it sucks. It just doesn’t make the right design choice! Thinner is not the same as smaller; we want a 12″ or 11″ or 10″ model, both smaller in form factor and thinner and lighter to boot:

I’d have rather seen a smaller footprint, a la the old 12-inch PowerBook G4 — something just exactly as wide as a full keyboard. I’d prefer to sacrifice screen size on the notebook in exchange for an even smaller machine.

Update: Did you know that five years ago, Sony made the Vaio X505, a laptop .8″ thick? Pwnt, Apple. That’s all I can say!

I just bought a Zalman Reserator 2. It was a horrible experience. I had set up the CPU fittings and was getting ready to lay the tubes. I filled the water reservoir, and watched it slowly leak down one of the bottom screws onto my carpet, where I mopped it up with towels. Yep, the brand new $350 water cooling kit I bought online and had Fedexed to me overnight leaked. Dripped water and coolant.

I’ve sent away for a Newegg RMA so I can recover some of my money. On the other hand, the new Q6600 processor I got and the Nvidia 8800 GTS are purring away, albeit nosily. See, the idea of the Reserator 2 is passive cooling–it has no fans, just a massive radiator. Because it didn’t work, I have to run a case fan, CPU fan, and VGA fan…