Or similar. Doesn't have to be exactly that. Here's the story. 
I was listening to Bruce Sterling this morning. The file has been sitting on my MP3 player for months and I finally got around to listening to it. It's a very cool talk. He was talking about "user generated content" and "architectures of participation". One of the points he made was that you don't see so much of RTFM ("Read the Fucking Manual") as it has been replaced with GFE ("Google Fucking Exists").
All of this came at a good time, because I've been battling with AppleCare over my blasted MacBook Pro's battery and PMU problems. The battery has been flaking out after about a minute's use. There's lots of juicy silliness in the story - I now have two empty boxes which have been flown from Germany (or so the UPS website tells me) because the first one had the wrong address on it. Rather than sticking a post-it note on the first box and redelivering it, they flew another one from Cologne to Stansted, then drove it all the way around London to the depot in Crawley and then took an empty box to my house. Apple are flying empty cardboard boxes from Cologne to Britain and UPS will try three times even if the second line of my address isn't present. Far be it from me to question the sanity of these policies, but we shall move on.
I explained these problems to the guy at AppleCare last week and I told him that Apple have flatly refused to actually state "we fucked up" or words to that effect. I pointed out that "Google acknowledges that this problem exists, why doesn't Apple?"
And this is what it comes down to. Apple has a comprehensive knowledge-base system on their site. It's got lots of okay info on it. Sterling was saying that you get far more real and useful info from just Googling. "My screen has crapped out!" gets far more results than combing through Apple's site for ideas. We need an indie knowledge base about Macs.
With the old PowerBook G4 machines, they had an audio problem which caught a lot of podcasters out (listen to the Daily Source Code and suddenly the music will all stop and there'll be this annoying noise). Apple refused to acknowledge the existence of it. I envision this knowledge base to be a sort of Digg for Apple hardware problems, but instead of "I digg this story", it's "This problem is annoying me". It would be intelligently laid out, so that you type in exactly what model you are using and get all sorts of folk wisdom. If you are putting in information about how to get AppleCare to fix your problem, it would sort it by the country or region of AppleCare (out of interest, my repair is going back to Telford - the empty boxes come from Cologne but the filled boxes go to Telford - again, the policy is of a questionable sanity and I believe it was thought up by Jobs and Wozniak one night on a real big LSD trip in the late eighties and has been taken as holy writ ever since).
Someone, please build this. I love the Mac platform, but Apple are such a pain in the arse to deal with. Having a sort of independent, reader-edited bible of Macintosh craziness would make life so much easier. And much as I hate Mac errors, they're still a damn sight better than Windows errors.
