My iBook G4—affectionately called Whitey—gave up the ghost last week and refused to boot. I hooked it up to another computer and put it in target mode to move over as much of my data as I could. A quick jaunt through Disk First Aid revealed that there were some disk errors and it was able to repair one or two of them. I took it in to Re-Mac, the local authorized Apple reseller, for a little TLC and diagnostic.
Today they called my wife and told her that they could swap out the hard drive for the low, low price of $300. Hmm, probably worth it, I thought. I called the guy back and he had discovered, in the intervening time, that the logic board was malfunctioning. He put in a brand new hard drive and it still wouldn't boot. Luckily, Apple has a flat-rate service where you pay $485 and they'll swap out any bad parts for brand new ones.
Now anyone that knows me knows that I spurn the notion of fate. At most, fate is a set of random coincidences in which the mind discerns a pattern that doesn't exist causally. Well, seeing as how the annual Macworld keynote is tomorrow and the iBook is expected to be refreshed, I'd say that this series of events is quite a fortunate set of randomness. Here's hoping.