Macs are even more expensive than I thought
When I got back from Europe my black MacBook wouldn't boot, it just sat there with a disk icon and a flashing question mark. So I made an appointment at the Apple store in Emeryville to have it looked at. — When I got there, there was no wait, they were calling my name.
Context & Ripple Effects
The piece lands at the end of a year when Mac demand was visibly strong — Apple's white 120 GB MacBook was Amazon's top-selling computer on Christmas Eve 2007, and analysts were arguing that bulls were overlooking growth in the Mac business. Against that backdrop, a longtime user's black MacBook refusing to boot — just a disk icon and flashing question mark after returning from Europe — reads as a counterweight to the sales story.
It also echoes a theme from earlier in the year: CNET's July coverage of the iPhone's black screen of death showed Apple hardware failures becoming a public talking point. Here the failure is a MacBook, and the conclusion drawn is about money, not hardware — that service and repair make the true price of a Mac higher than the sticker.
First-order effects
- The owner faces an unplanned repair bill on a machine already paid for, which is what turns 'expensive' from a purchase price into a total-cost claim.
- Apple's Emeryville store absorbs the failure smoothly — a named appointment, no wait — so the immediate cost of the failure to Apple is service time, not a lost customer.
Second-order effects
- A fast, free-feeling retail service encounter converts a hardware failure into a loyalty event, reinforcing exactly the repurchase behavior behind the strong Mac sales analysts cite.
- For Windows-PC rivals competing on sticker price, the effective comparison shifts: they must match not just specs but a retail support network that softens failure costs.
Third-order effects
- If buyers increasingly price machines as purchase-plus-failure risk, Apple's premium is defended less by hardware specs than by store-level service capacity — making retail footprint a structural moat in personal computing.
- The pattern also raises the stakes for Apple on hardware reliability itself: each high-profile failure story tests whether the service halo can keep covering it.
The trend: Personal-computer purchasing is shifting from sticker-price comparison toward total cost of ownership, where retail service networks function as part of the product.