Last week, after six months of faithful service, the screen on my MacBook Pro started acting up. The lower half of the LCD displayed thousands of vertical lines from the middle of the screen to the bottom, obscuring everything underneath it. No amount of cajoling, adjusting the display, or resetting the PRAM would fix the problem, so I made an appointment at the local Apple Store and spent the better part of yesterday getting my laptop ready for its journey.

The first thing I did was to repair permissions and purchase a large external backup drive: a 250GB Seagate I dropped in an enclosure I had laying around. Next, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of the laptop drive, and tested it by booting from it successfully. Then, I wiped the internal hard drive clean by doing a seven-pass erase, and reinstalled 10.4.6 from the factory disks.

The Genius at the Apple Store took one look at the screen and said, “Whoa.” He didn’t blink, though, and within ten minutes I had a work authorization for a new LCD and logic board, all covered under warranty. I should have my laptop back within seven days, although the iPhone launch may back things up a little.

While I was at the store, I got my first hands-on look at the iPhone, and it’s official: I’m going to buy one. Probably not this month, but within the next couple of months to be sure. It’s light, sexy, responsive, and the UI is a thing of beauty.