Mac quality?

I am writing this on my wife's Macbook because my MacBook Pro (less than a year old) has apparently lost it's video card. I just got it back from the Apple store 3 days ago, after they replaced the logic card.

I have had 5 Macs, and every one of them have had a hardware problem within 2 years. One (G5) had to be replaced.

I love the Mac, but I have all of my financials, photos, etc. on it, and can't afford to lose it. Time Machine saved my bacon about 6 months ago when my wife's computer disk crashed.

Is everybody else having such problems as I am, or am I just "lucky"? Thanks for listening to my rant.
--
Gary

you seem to be luckier than most from what I've seen. I've had 5 powerbooks and only one ever flaked out but there are plenty of stories of Mac hardware failures.

regarding your 'financials'. Backups (multiple and offsite) are your friends. If you lose your data, you really have no one to blame but yourself. External disk, USB keys, etc are simply too inexpensive to not use on important data.

Now days, it's best to buy the 3 year extended warranty. Jon L

Quanah Parker said:

I am writing this on my wife's Macbook because my MacBook Pro (less
than a year old) has apparently lost it's video card. I just got it
back from the Apple store 3 days ago, after they replaced the logic
card.

I have had 5 Macs, and every one of them have had a hardware problem
within 2 years. One (G5) had to be replaced.

I love the Mac, but I have all of my financials, photos, etc. on it,
and can't afford to lose it. Time Machine saved my bacon about 6
months ago when my wife's computer disk crashed.

Is everybody else having such problems as I am, or am I just "lucky"?
Thanks for listening to my rant.
--
Gary

Click to expand...

my 17" MBP just passed the two year mark. No problems at all. Ever.
--
My Art, Your Pleasure



http://photopedia.homestead.com

I do hear problems from time to time. But I have a 12 inch powerbook (6 years old) that can run circles around (for the things I do on it, maybe not gaming or graphics) a lot of computers from 2008. Heck until this year it was my only computer and it handled intensive RAW conversions and heavy multi gigabyte video editing and dvd encoding. WHen I bought my new iMac this year 3.06 GHz 24 inch monitor, 4 GB of ram 1tb hard drive, I thought it would destroy the little powerbook in terms of speed but its only marginally better for most things I do. The only things I really notice a difference on is editing images and do really heavy graphics intensive tasks.

I don't know if its the quality of the hardware that's decreasing or maybe just that the old stuff was exceptional? I definitely didn't get the same excitement when turning on the iMac a when I opened the powerbook for the first time. People still comment on how amazingly well the little twelve inch runs and looks. The only thing I had to replace was the battery which failed after four years.

--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gariepyjeanmichel/show/

I also had to replace a logic board and power supply on a relatively new 20" iMac.

The tech who did the work indicated this is a more common situation for Macs than in the past. It is unfortuante situation that there are only some many hardware suppliers in the world and Apple has to purchase where it can. Certainly seems like a common problem for most of electronic these days. On the plus side, at least I don't have day to day software issues like with Windows.

All notebook computers tend to be problematic, probably because they tend to get rough usage. But we've never had a problem with our Macs: 4 year old iMac G5, 2 year old iMac C2D, 3.5 year old iBook, and year old MacBook.

My family has had 5 different Notebooks between my kids and me and 4 desktops. We have never had any early failures. One of the early white ibooks had a logic board failure after is was three years old and it was replaced on a extended logic board warranty because of known issues. The only other issues have been hard drives that had lots of hours on them and with the newer smart drive they both alerted us before they failed and we were able to archive the drives and transfer to the new drives.

I am sticking with them.

I've had one G5 Tower and 2 24" iMacs over the last 5 years. No problems what so ever.

When I made the switch my local Mac repair buddy sold me on Mac stability and second their quality HW. As for the first, it's even better than 2003, As far as the hardware, my old 17 Powerbook 1.0 has only lost the airport card and it has been rock solid, My G5 1.8 dual desktop zero problems, Macmini, Zero, iMac 20 2.0 white had the powersupply go out a year out of the warranty, it was repaired for free on the spot at the Apple Store. My 15 MBP 2.0 original has had the HD go out do to the overheat problems when I did not eject and external drive and put it in the softcase, it overheated and melted the bearing grease. I think the optical drive is going out now as it fails often burning dvds. Here is a 2 year old link that shows that some models aren't as good as others. 17 inch notebooks fair better than smaller ones. Still it shows that Apple did improve on HW. Most of the stuff that fails is the same HW that you can find in a PC so I would expect the same. Also in the link below you will still see incredible customer satisfaction despite some of the problems.
http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/macbooks2.html#results
If anyone has newer info please post it. Thanks
--
Gregory Eddinger
Those that believe they can, CAN, because they BELIEVE!

I've owned Macs since 1999 and I've found them to be computers. No better or worse other brands.

A few years ago they were 3rd for reliability among laptops. Somebody might have newer info.

REd

I'm using Macs for almost seven years now and I think that Apple makes great and reliable hardware in general, but went a bit careless about their hardware in the last 3 years. The new unibody manufacturing process will definitely do its part on the outside of Apple notebooks and the hardware built in is, from my experience, always very reliable. I'm not sure if desktops have problems like the notebooks the sell, but I guess since they are easier to built they won't have that many problems like, for example, the plastic MacBooks with their broken topcases.

Hope you next buy will satisfy you more!
--
Visit my private photo and microstock blog: http://www.microstock-secrets.com

Like all HW they can have problems.

Over the last few years I have had a G4 PowerBook which had a logic board failure. It was repaired under warranty.

I replaced it with a first generation MacBook Pro. That had 2 PSU failures (the magsafe connectors...), Display backlight failure, and 2 logic board failures. All were repaired under warranty and the laptop eventually replaced with no quibble for the latest generation 2 years later.

I have a MAcbook air. The first of these failed within 2 weeks of purchase. It was replaced with a new one. That is in for repair right now with a grinding cooling fan.

My wife's MacBook had it's keyboard plate replaced because the plastic had fractured.

So lots of failures and repairs but all done quickly efficiently and with no cost to me. I do have Procare and apple care on all our laptops (1 Air and 3 Macbooks at the moment). I do have a PowerMax dual 2.3G and that has been powered up and running for well over 2 years now. The only time it get restarted is if an installation needs it. I am picking up a MacPro next week so we will see how that does.

My laptops do around 300K miles on aircraft every year. They are lugged from location to location and get use exactly for what they are intended; on the go computing and frankly I expect them to fail...

Where Apple really wins is the fact that all those repairs i mention above were carried out pretty much while I waited in Apple repair facilities in the UK, US and China. Heck I had a failure in Santa Clara one time they couldn't fix it but fiouns another store that could, arranged for me to get there and even gave me a tee shirt to apologize for not being able to help immediately. I have not found another supplier with this fantastic level of customer support.

You seem to have had a lot of failures, as much as I like macs, if I had problems like that I might have switched, I'm glad you had good repair experiences though.

--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gariepyjeanmichel/show/

We also have two Dell latitudes dumped in a drawer right now. They have both failed multiple times and now are beyond repair.

Yes I have had a lot of failures but I think it is because of hard life rather than poor design. I know that Dells have not lasted so long under the same conditions...

I work for a large printing company, which uses macs exclusively in their prelim/premedia/prep process. I was in the office of one of our technical managers last month, and was teasing him about all the dead macs laying in his office. His answer was "Don't get me started on Mac quality". Well, I did get him started, and his experience has made me rethink mac quality. Granted I've had three macs with no issue. He told me about how when he took his old powerbook into a mac store for a fix, and asked for an upgrade, the response was they only installed the original parts. Well, if it was the original parts that were poor quality, they are just replicating failures. He went on to tell me about how when a mac dies, it's best to buy another then to try and get it fixed. He's been trying to get us to switch to Linux for our processes, with no luck. He is confident a pc is more reliable then a mac when it comes to hardware.

Take the mac mini for instance. If something fails on your mini, there are really no user replaceable parts in the unit unless you want to go out to your workshop, grab a putty knife, and have your mini scream at you while you tear it apart. I've done this twice with my mini to upgrade memory and replace a busted hd, and the sound still haunts me. Take the mini into the apple store, they will give you the same quality hard drive as a replacement and charge you twice as much as it should. OK, enough ranting.