November 21, 2008

Apple Woes

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APPLE WOES….So remember how you guys were all over me for years about how bad PCs sucked and how I should get a Mac to solve all my problems etc. etc.? And so I finally got one a few months ago, and it worked fine. (Not really any better than a PC, to be honest, but it was fine.) Remember all that?

Well, guess what? I haven’t used my MacBook for a couple of months, but I pulled it out the other day and discovered that Macs don’t hibernate in order to extend battery life. They just go into standby mode when you close the lid, and then hibernate right before the battery goes completely dead. So of course my battery was completely dead. No big deal, though: I just plugged in the charger and went away for a few hours.

And nothing happened. The notebook no longer recognizes the battery and declines to charge it even a tiny bit. Reinstalled the battery, but that didn’t do any good. So now what? Take it into an Apple store and find out what’s wrong, I guess. What a pain. Why can’t Apple make decent hardware, anyway?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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