The consultant meets the Genius; bad “superdrive”

Just tonight; I decided to get my 2011 Macbook Pro fixed; its CD/DVD players suddenly stopped working. The Genius at the Freehold Apple store ran a battery of tests – including rebooting it into the previous operating system (Snow Leopard 10.6). They confirmed what I suspected; that somehow the mechanism had failed. Only solution is get an external optical drive or replace the internal one.

The Genius waved the labor fee and only charged me for the part ($119). Best of all they installed it an hour. Very impressive. My interactions with them was fun and professional. I do wish of course that my drive had not failed. It is a bit extra annoying that it broke 110 days after the warrantee period. Should have followed my own advice and bought Applecare extended warranty (although if that’s all that goes wrong; I am still ahead cost-wise).

My editorial remark on the topic is; that over the many years of using internal notebook DVD super drives from Apple; I am not so sad to see them go bye-bye. (They are not built-into the Retina Macbook Pro or Macbook Air’s.) I do not have a formal count, but a good guess is – four times – is the number that I have had to replace them since I brought my first Apple notebook in 2000. And each time cost me much more than $119.  I am fine with using the external USB drives for watching and burning my future CD and DVD’s from my notebooks; at least that will only cost me $50 to replace.