MacBook Pro owners face an eventual failure from their SuperDrive CD/DVD reader-writers. The 2006 batch of MB Pros all shipped with a fouled run of optical drive hardware. User after user complained and found failures in the only device that would load their new applications like Adobe’s Creative Suite or Microsoft’s Office Applications. Read the long and sad tale of failures at the Macintouch Reader Report Forum. Even the new MacBook Pro owners are getting bitten.)

The included device gained some stability in later MB Pro units, so by 2008 you had a better than even chance of having a SuperDrive remain operative within the one-year warranty. But hundreds of thousands of MacBook Pro SuperDrives went out the door with a Mean Time Between Failure  (the old MTBF ranking for professional storage) of well under 20,000 hours. A weak figure at best, and unacceptible for small business or enterprise use.

Replacing these units can be simple, or not too costly. But not both. By simple, I mean the $310 replacement drive from the Apple Store, plus an $85 replacement fee. “It’s pretty much $400,” the Apple Genius Bar tech told me tonight. (Then there’s the tax, but at least there’s no shipping.) That’s a total cost of 40 percent of the price of a new MacBook, and about one-third the cost of the lowest MacBook Pro. But this solution is easy, so long as you can do without your MacBook for a week or more. (This is where having the Apple Pro uplift on AppleCare gets you to the front of the line, I’m told.) Read the rest of this entry »