Soon after I had plugged in my brand new MacBook Pro, it died. Sorta. Film at 11.
UPDATE
As best we can piece it together, what happened was this: Thursday morning, when I first plugged in the MagSafe connector from the power adapter, it went from green to red, not amber like I thought. I believe this indicated a problem with it communicating with the computer’s Power Management Unit, and it was never charging in the first place. I thought it was amber at the time, and didn’t think much of it. I pulled it off to show my wife how cool the MagSafe connetor was and how it wouldn’t send my ‘Book crashing into the floor, denting the corner and killing the optical drive (like happened to my last ‘Book).
When I plugged it back in, I didn’t see the adapter light come back on, but again didn’t think much of it, since my last adapter went through a stage when it didn’t light up at all for months, but it would still charge the machine. After transferring my email and a few other things over from my old Mac, I packed it up and went to work.
When I got to work, I set things up and started fiddling with it, installing software inbetween After Effects renders and such… soon, though I noticed that even though I was plugged in, it looked like the battery level was going down. I checked the adapter, made sure it was plugged in, tried spinning the MagSafe plug around (it’s symmetrical). No dice. Then I looked online in Apple’s support kdocs, checked the pins on the MagSafe to make sure none of them were stuck in (they’re spring-loaded); tried resetting the PMU (unplug, pull the battery out, hold the power button down for 5+secs, reinstall battery, re-plug, start ‘er up); still nothing.
Called up Apple, told them what I tested. They said, well, that’s pretty much everything I was going to ask you to do. We’ll send you out an advance replacement of the power adapter. So I’ll be getting that Monday.
Friday morning, I thought maybe I should check with my local Mac reseller and see if they’re seen anything like this— and good thing I did. Immediately their service manager Rick told me they’d had one earlier that week where this lady’s left-hand I/O board was the problem, and not the adapter. I brought it in on my way to work for them to look at, and when they hooked it up to a known good power adapter, it lit up green for a second then quickly flicked to red. Seems that not only was my adapter probably bad, since it wasn’t lighting up anymore, but there was a good chance that there was a problem with either the left-hand I/O board or perhaps even my main logic board.
Yay.
So, hopefully Tuesday they should have the parts in and know whether they’ve licked the probem or not. Kudos to MBS for taking the time to actually figure it out, and not just blame the adapter… though to be fair, it looks like that’s bad as well.