[stoppingdown]

This is, in short, the story. My current MBP was bought at the very beginning of 2013 and it was a late-2011 model - the last one before the "retina" models. It was deliberate: first, because it made me save quite a few money; second, because I didn't like the fact that the 2012 models didn't allow to replace parts. 

 

It was good for my needs, but unfortunately it was plagued by a massive hw failure, that happened to many: the discrete graphic card soldering, with time, tends to fail. It already costed me 600€ for repairs. Fortunately, some people menaced a class action in the USA so Apple reckoned its fault and I got refunded. After a few months, the replaced mother boards failed again in the same way; fortunately the repair was under warranty and I spent nothing. But of course it was twice a big annoyance for my business. Even though I still have the previous 2008 MBP, which is kept as an exact clone of the primary, and that I can switch in every moment, the problem is that the backup is painfully slow, mostly because of disk encryption, so it is a really emergency backup - I mean, I can work, but efficiency dramatically drops. I can tolerate a laptop failure as a rare event, not so frequent as the problem happens.

 

 

The scheduled replacement for my MBP was at the beginning of 2017 and two weeks ago I started looking around. I first concluded that it was not meaningful to spend 3000€ for the newest model, and I probably could live up to the beginning of 2018 without big hassles. In the meantime I could eventually look at special offers, refurbished stuff, or eventually buy a not-so-hot model as in the past and save money.

 

The past Sunday, the day before leaving for the holidays, the hardware failure happened for the third time; two months after the expiration of the warranty of the latest repair. So this time I'd have spent 600€ without refund; to have a repair that, clearly, is not reliable. Furthermore, in the countryside where I am now, there's no trusted repair shop as at home; and while I'm officially in vacation for four weeks, I've still got a number of assignments to do, that can't be practically done with the backup laptop.

 

It happened in the worse moment ever. The only feasible solution was to immediately buy a replacement (it will be delivered tomorrow). I also searched first for refurbished models etc..., but this approach fails if you're in a hurry, because they are not always available. Furthermore, I need the version with 1TB of SSD, and that's not easy to find (I mean refurbished, used, etc...).