The latest MacBooks, both the Pro and the Air, now have SSD's (solid state drives). Essentially its static memory like a USB memory stick, only much larger, obviously. Their advantages are that even if you bump or jolt your Macbook, it won't kill the hard drive. The seek rates are also much faster, and so it speeds up the operation of the computer because it isn't waiting for the hard drive. A traditional hard drive is a spinning platter inside a vacuum sealed enclosure with a small arm moving across it to read different sectors. When it gets bumped, the arm can bounce off the spinning platter. If it hits it too hard, it kills the drive or at the least corrupts large parts of it. This technology has been in use in both Mac and PC laptops since they were originally invented. The only way in which this has been addressed in the past is with 'drop sensors', which have been able to sense when the laptop is being dropped, and quickly parked the heads. However this isn't a perfect solution, and even with this technology, eventually laptop hard drives still fail. This is why SSD is actually quite a good solution. I suspect that the Macbook in question is one of the previous models, with a normal hard drive, as the SSDs weren't introduced until about mid 2013, I think. My wife has the mid-2013 Macbook Air, that has a 128Gb SSD, and the 2013 Macbook Pro Retina that I have for work also has a 128Gb SSD, and I don't think that was introduced until last autumn, but I would have to check dates.
I also suspect that the clue is in the dent in the case: this is a Macbook that has obviously had a knock or a drop at some point. The cases are made of aluminium and therefore do not damage easily.
Just googled the hard drive serial number from your first post - it's a traditional hard drive (a hitachi one) and it will probably have failed because of the knock it received a couple of months ago.
@baybirmingham thanks for all that. Sounds like the Macbook Air will be the one for me, being mobile will help me to continue my work and keep in touch with clients even on an extended holiday
The only drawback of the Air is that it has reduced performance compared to the Pro. Not a problem if you're using normal office type software (word processing, spreadsheets, email, internet) but if you are a serious user of publishing, graphics, photography or music apps then you might need to think about the Pro. One thing I would say is that even the Macbook Pro is really light - it feels about half the weight of my 2010 unibody white macbook.
The Macs do unload the heads if they feel a knock coming - you can hear the "clonk". The hard drive may just have expired - they sometimes do.
May I be stupid please. I know computer whizzery is clever stuff but how does a computer "feel a knock coming" for if it felt something would that not be a knock?
