Today I had an encounter with greatness. Not a life altering one, not God style greatness, just pragmatic and capitalistic greatness. I called Apple technical support.

I've only had my Macbook Pro for about 1 month now, and for the first 3 weeks, it functioned flawlessly, as I had hoped. As I sit and type on it from home, it continues to amaze me in its simple, elegant functionality and beauty. But then I hooked up an external monitor and it turned into a temperamental child.

It turns out I'm far from the only person struggling with this. Forums abounded with people claiming the exact problems I saw, and described them as intermittent, possibly the worst description of any bug ever, and certainly the most frightening. So I've been fighting this for a couple days and decided to call Apple about it.

First, I actually initiated a tech support request online, which yielded a human answer in less than 1 minute, which was impressive. She was fluent in English, friendly but respective of my time and concerns. Her suggestion was one I was skeptical of (connecting the external monitor to a different power outlet to ensure no fluctuations in power consumption by the monitor were affecting the laptop), but she was knowledgeable enough to describe it in a way that sounded worth trying, and made it super simple for me to follow up. Which I did 15 minutes later when my laptop locked up again.

Again, less than 1 minute from my dialing a number, I'm on the phone with another English speaking gentleman who mentioned that he'd seen different displays behave differently, to which I responded that I'd be using a different monitor starting tomorrow, which would likely be the one that matters. He still brought on a higher level tech to advise, and he advised having the cable inspected at an Apple store. So although I had purchased a knock-off cable, which they never asked about, I purchased an official cable from Best Buy today to make sure the blame cannot lie with third party adapters.

All this to say, I'm thinking about actually paying for Apple's nearly legendary, and also stupidly expensive tech support. For a machine that is to become my daily driver, I need to know someone is covering for me. So far, so good. Now let's see if Apple can deliver a laptop capable of driving an external monitor. :-(