It’s been a long strange trip, dear friends. It began almost a month ago (can you believe it?) when my MacBook started doing the spontaneous shutdown dance. There were tears, there was yelling, there was a coming-of-age roadtrip. It was great. Days after the shutdowns began, I took my computer into the Apple store, where they shipped it off to be repaired. Meanwhile, I “bought” a black loaner MacBook so I could continue to entertain our readers with the finest in bloggery. Don’t all clap at once.
Fast forward three and a half weeks, and the white MacBook has—like Lassie—finally come home. Is it fixed? They tell me so: the cryptic notes on my repair sheet say that they replaced “APP-603-8071 ASSY, HEATSINK, M42” which is good to know, I guess. We’ll see if the shutdowns start up again, as it were, but I’m glad that the MacBook has finally returned—especially its 1GB of RAM, which is like day and night when compared with the 512MB in the black MacBook. Also, despite the Genius telling me that they would almost certainly wipe the computer, it seems to be totally intact, which is great: it meant all I had to do was transfer over the newer files from my loaner, which I then wiped.
In the end, other than waiting 3 weeks, Apple’s repair service hasn’t done badly by me. And I’m sure everybody’s happy that I’ll stop writing about it now. To those of you who’ve also experienced shutdown problems on the MacBook, I wish you the best of luck.
My MacBook came back a couple of weeks ago with the same note, i.e. that the heatsink had been replaced.
However, on closer examination, the MAC address of the Ethernet port and Firewire ports had both changed indicating that a new logic board had also been fitted. The Airport MAC address stayed the same, I guess it's a removable module?
From what I've read, only the heatsink needs to be replaced, but that seems to have been a more recent conclusion.