I've tried my best escalating but to no avail. I got it back unrepaired yesterday and it is completely dead now. It worked before Apple touched it, I don't know what to do, posting this from my phone.
Has anyone dealt with this? Any ideas on how to get it back to working condition again?
Alternatively, its really not that hard to switch to a cheaper and more reliable, laptop with Elementary OS Linux distro.
Makes sense with the elementary OS rec, do you have any recommendations -- thinkpad?
Of course battery life will be on the average worse, as specific things like video decoding isn't as optimized as it is on MAC, but in terms of CPU heavy tasks like running VSCode with browsing, I didn't find my work MPB to be significantly more efficient.
I personally never really messed with Elementary, but I did run Manjaro on a Levovo Ideapad and things like NVPrime worked out of the box which was surprising.
The cool thing about Linux is that you can install any number of Desktop Environments and just switch between them. I3wm is worthwhile to install along whatever you use, as that is very efficient in terms of screen space, and you can often get by without using the mouse for a lot of stuff, which makes laptop use experience much more efficient.
It's both. A fool and his money are easily parted, it's no coincidence that you're supposed to Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. When you stop having money to give to Apple, they stop rendering services, hardware support and developer tooling.
I like ElementaryOS but I'd give modern GNOME a serious look too. Something like Fedora feels closer to the modern Mac experience than ElementaryOS does, these days. But it's all pretty subjective so you may as well try both once you find a laptop you like.
I'd recommend to get
- Frame.work Notebook (e.g. 13 Ryzen ai)
- Lenovo (e.g. T14s)
- LG Gram
If you'd like to start with Linux as a former a macOS user I'd recommend GNOME with dash-to-dock extension. Probably you could go for Fedora. Alternatively you could use Debian or if you are more exp. maybe plain Arch or a derivate like EndeavourOS.
I'm surprised they didn't turn it on or anything at dropoff. I feel like they usually check stuff or disable Find My when I drop devices off. But maybe for battery replacements it isn't necessary?
Any business that has to ship things off for repair is not qualified to do repairs.
As for brands, I would avoid those with short warranties plus depot service for mission critical machines.
He has a YouTube channel and does lots of repairs like this