Back in business!

Today at around 14:00 o’clock it finally happened: I got my laptop back which had been at an Apple service partner since July 14. This also means that I can finally continue working properly on things like webmentiond and other side-projects.

Since this whole episode took a bit longer I thought I should aggregate the major dates in a little timeline:

  • July 14: Contact store via email to get an estimate. They told me it would around one week and that I’d leave the device with them for the whole time between assessment and repair.
  • July 14: Handed the MBP over and got the following estimate: 7-10 days.
  • July 24: Send the shop an email and learnt that it should still take until the middle of next week (July 27 - August 2)
  • July 31: Called in the morning and heard that it should be ready on that day.
  • August 1: Called the store and got the information that they were still waiting for a part and it will probably take until the middle of next week. (August 3 - August 9)
  • August 3: Laptop is ready for pickup.

I also talked with someone at the store at length about what had gone wrong and why it had taken so long. I won’t go into details here but he convinced me that it wasn’t their fault. Things have gone wrong that were not under their control regarding the replacement parts. That being said, I think that my complains regarding transparency and repair statuses are still valid 🙂

This whole thing has told me once again, though, that I should properly invest in a contingency plan. I thought that my Windows PC should be enough to keep me productive but I somehow went into the rabbit hole of trying to use Docker via WSL2 inside of VisualStudio Code. Let’s say it this way: The performance of that stack hasn’t convince me. Next time: skip Docker and just go with WSL2 all the way or get a backup Mac in order to stay sane.

I’ve also now finally a SSH setup on iOS that I’m comfortable with. Now I just have to find the time to also set up part 2 of my contingency plan: A Raspberry PI that I can use and connect with from my iPad even without a laptop nearby. This is something that has been on my list for literally years now but I think I should finally get started 🙄