My first generation MacBook Air has been performing progressively worse over the past year. I had assumed it was just a consequence of software cruft, so I thought nothing of it. Then, last week, git commits started taking several minutes for small Django apps. It was time to fix the problem. Not wanting to be bothered, I did a simple OSX reinstall. (Although, since the Air has no optical drive, it was a bit bothersome; for some reason, the Air refused to communicate with my Desktop.)

Upon resinstall, I was quickly disappointed. The problem was not corrected. That annoying little beachball kept on spinning for practically every task. This suggested harddrive, so I took a look in the logs. S.M.A.R.T. was indicating imminent hard disk failure. (I really have no clue why no glaring alert was generated; I assume S.M.A.R.T. indicated the same thing a year ago — when I was under warranty — but I never checked the logs. Unfortunately, by reinstalling OSX, I lost access to historical logs.) After perusing a few articles online suggesting that replacing a first gen Air drive is very unpleasant, I just decided to bite the bullet and go to the Apple Store.

I went without an appointment, only because I was ignorant of their reservation policy. (Kudos to Apple on reservations; it’s a smart idea.) I was forced to wait around at the mall for an hour until a slot opened up. After learning the mall had no bookstore — a fact that made the snob in me feel angry — I turned to skimming HackerNews. (HackerNews is to geeks what Facebook is to non-geeks — somewhere to go when your bored and want stimulation.) Coincidentally, a blog post about hard drive replacements at Apple happened to be one of the front page stories for the day. This was fortunate, because it warned me that Apple would not allow me to keep my hard disk before having to deal with the genius bar “genius”; it spread my anger out over several quiet minutes instead of one loud minute. Thank you for making me appear like a decent person, HackerNews.

So basically, after deleting all my files and writing a quick python script to fill the hard drive with random numbers, I finally got to talk with my genius. (When you have a failing drive, filling it with random garbage is a painful operation to watch.) I must admit, Apple hires or trains employees very well. He was calm, funny, and generally charismatic. After I told him I want to keep my drive, he clearly explained Apple’s policy: they refurbish the drives and use “government standard encryption” to prevent data theft. By “government standard,” I assume they mean they overwrite the drive about a bajillion times past the point (one overwrite) where data could reasonably be expected to be recovered. I assume his answer is considered satisfactory for most users, but I was unhappy. I’m not paranoid enough to think my single-pass overwrite was going to make me vulnerable, but it’s still my drive. Furthermore, for drives that have not been overwritten, the eventual buyer is not the point of vulnerability — the many hands the drive passes through before being fixed are the dangerous ones. If the user requests their drive, not giving it to them is a bad policy.

Later on I realized that there is something more troubling about this policy. Apple, a consumer product company, is profiting on the failure of their own products. That’s pretty uncool. The replacement cost on my invoice was listed at $139.06 with an additional $85.00 in labor (HARDWARE REPAIR-LEVEL 1). By comparison, a new Toshiba MK8009GAH 80GB internal 1.8″ ATA-100 4200 rpm drive costs $114.85. Considering the cost of the very similar Toshiba drive, I don’t believe they were replacing my bad drive with a refurbished drive. (If they were, that would be especially ugly.) I assume they sell the refurbished drives as part of a refurbished MacBook Air, not as an individual component. Regardless, if the cost of a new drive plus shipping and less the profit from selling my drive refurbished is less than $139.06, Apple is earning money off product failure (i.e. shipping < refurbished profit). I’m angry.

Update:

A commenter on HackerNews asked why I didn’t just go to a non-apple service center. The truthful answer is because I am lazy. Nonetheless, it appears like the policy is set by apple and is universal amongst non-apple service centers. From MacService:

The old drive (working or not) is returned to Apple. If you wish to keep your original drive, Apple charges a significant core charge.

P.S. I’d be curious to see some hardware failure rate comparisons on Apple products. It’s my opinion that they produce bad hardware, but no one cares because most Apple consumers buy the latest version of whatever product Job’s slings out.