Posted on 07/12/2006 6:20:19 AM PDT by Halfmanhalfamazing
the Power Mac G5's 17% first-year failure rate remains far higher than the industry average of 5% (see Gartner's recent report on PC hardware reliability, linked below). If Apple is to maintain its premium pricing, it should provide premium reliability. As things stand, high Power Mac prices must include high warranty service costs built-in.
With an overall failure rate of 23%, a quarter of which occur outside of Apple's 1-year warranty, and an average of 1.29 repairs per affected unit implying repeat problems, Power Macs are neither cheap for Apple to service after the sale, nor cheap for buyers. Power comes at a cost.
(Excerpt) Read more at macintouch.com ...
You make your mom run Linux? That's nasty.
That statistic is based on a scientific survey of preselected respondents... not what MacInTouch did. Gartner bases its statistic on all computer sold... or all Apple Mac G5s sold... not on a self-selected small group of person who may or may not have a Mac G5.
We thank MacInTouch readers who participated in our June 2006 Power Mac G5 reliability survey. More than 3,000 Power Macs were logged, with more than 1,300 insightful, informative comments.
Sorry, but MacInTouch's reader survey was not a scientific survey. MacInTouch is an online webblog that requested visitors to participate in its survey. Proof of model ownership was not required or possible. Anyone who went to their website could participate whether or not they had a G5 or not. It was a self selected survey of those MacInTouch readers who chose to participate.
I am a MacInTouch reader... I have a Mac G5... I chose not to participate. I have never participated in their surveys because they are always unscientific and produce distorted statistics. I have had no problems with my first year G5. I also do IT support for an office that has seven one year old iMac G5s, none of them have had problems... and none of them were included in the survey. I have several other clients with various aged G5s and not one of them has had a problem... and none participated in MacInTouch's skewed survey.
It is probable that those who HAVE had a problem with their G5 would be more likely to respond to a "reliability" survey than those who haven't.
Apple has consistently been on the top of reliability surveys where the surveying was done properly.
You can junk that PC... Quickbooks for Mac 2006
Actually, Quickbooks for Mac has been around for quite a while. There are several other options ... I use MYOB Account Edge for Mac.
PowerMac G5. Not a problem since I got it a year and half ago.
Hey! 0% failure rate in my survey!
When I was in college the drama department did a play that required everyone to have a sword... I was property manager and had to produce them... so, yes, I did make swords... not good ones but good enough for the purpose. I had to make about 30 or so, if I recall correctly.
He's got his eyes closed, he doesn't want to see any facts.
no matter what i did, i couldnt see what the mac was so great at.
That says more about you than about Macs. :D
It's not. Actually the Apple failure rate is only slightly better than top of the line PCs...
According to Consumer Reports, the Apple Macs were scored at a 76 points while the next closest PCs were 75. Not a significant difference but there.
Even looking at a G4 and G5 side by side(on the inside, not outside) shows where things have been headed.
G4 Interior
G5 Interior
Where are they headed?
No argument... but that Mac has no relationship to an OS X Mac. Different processor, different OS, different File System. How much time have you spent on a modern Mac?
I agree to some extent. A properly configured Windows system should not have to be rebooted daily. However, at work, when I come in in the morning, my PC cannot connect to the exchange server. When I finally give up and reboot, right before it shuts down, it says the connection has been restored, right after the shutdown screen comes up. Sometimes I have to reboot two or three times to get it to connect to my network drive. We've had viruses run rampant through the college, despite running a virus program and a firewall. We have a $30,000 net nanny system called WebSense that has the system shut down tightly. We can't access any streaming media at all, and eBay, FR, and probably over half the internet sites are blocked. Our baseball coach wanted to run a blog when our team went to the playoffs, but the school wouldn't help him set one up, and when he started one on one of the free blog sites, guess what? It was blocked. I have to get email from my students at my home email address because our spam settings on mail are set so tight I can't count on getting emails. Our entire campus network is set up for the convenience of the IT department, and my system in my office still locks up frequently. I haven't installed a d*mn thing on it or changed my configuration, and it still runs like a gasoline Pinto with diesel in the fuel tank.
At home, I run a Mac system with Photoshop for my sideline business. Each of my two daughters have Macs with a wireless network. I don't know IT and I don't WANT to know IT. I routinely open seven or eight photos from an 8 megapixel camera in Photoshop on my Mac to make comparisons between shots, and locking up or freezing is never a problem. A friend of mine was using Photoshop elements on his PC at work (two years newer than my Mac), and I asked him to show me the interface. It locked up on him twice while he was showing it to me, and he was using 300K photos to show me the program, and never had more than two open.
The whole point is this: If a bunch of IT people, with years of training, who spend all day doing nothing but dealing with PCs can't set up a system properly, how does an average user like me, who doesn't need or want to spend his entire life dedicated to making a computer run without crashing have a chance?
I did a photo session Monday night at 6:30 PM. Went to work the next day, and didn't get to start editing until 9:00 PM Tuesday night. By midnight, I had the photos finished, this web page posted, and an email off to the lady who bought the photo session. There's no way I could have done that on a PC. During football season, I have an even tighter schedule, as I have to shoot the Friday night games, and have the photos posted in time for the newspapers that buy my work to pick out their photos in the morning.
I had heard that Apple had moved a lot (if not all) manufacturing to to China. I'm sure they know the failure rates by plant of origin. They should immediately drop any plant that isn't performing to standard.
Your work envirnoment his a very complex network with lots of people attempting to manage lots of security issues. On top of that you seem to have college students attempting to break it. At the very least they are downloading "free" stuff, and getting viruses along with their free stuff.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^But as I said, it was a disk drive failure, not a problem with any Apple-designed components.^^^^^^^^^^^^^
While I agree with you on the technicality, that's not going to be a distinction made with many other buyers.
^^^^^^^^^^The Macintosh survey was not conducted with scientific methods.^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Neither one was. The mac or PC hardware one, at least not that I saw. I could be wrong.
Keep in mind this is only for the G5 line. Not the G4, and not the macintelosh line either. The G4 line was notably better, you could just look at the internals and see that.
^^^^^^^^^^You make your mom run Linux? That's nasty.^^^^^^^^^^^
I fail to see why. It's easier to run than windows.
I like how you deflected to this instead of arguing the ease of seeing the IP address every time a reboot is done.
I can guarantee moms everywhere would find it easier to just look for those numbers upon reboot than to worry about what a control panel is and which control panel needs to be accessed, or even what's a command line and what's an ipconfig.
^^^^^^^^^^Apple has consistently been on the top of reliability surveys where the surveying was done properly.^^^^^^^^^^^
I know. As I said right at the beginning, I was surprised to see such a high number.
Heh, that's funny.
I'm not 100% sure what's going on here- I normally find MacInTouch to be pretty decent, but when the article tied to the survey is flawed - it claims that the first generation of POwerMac G5's are "the ony machines that can fit in the last category" - 4 years or older - the PowerMac G5 was first introduced in June 2003- barely three years ago....so I'm filtering the data in my head.....
But back to the figures. I do know that many of the iMac G5 machines had many problems- primarily power supply and motherboard issues which have been taken care of under a "quiet" recall. I actually hadn't heard much about the "Pro-line" Powermac G5 units have all that many issues (and I spend a significant time on several Mac boards that are hotbeds when there are hardware issues). So I'm a bit confused. I can't help but wonder if they actually included the iMac G5's in the survey (even though it was supposedly limited to "PowerMac" Models..... who knows.
I will acknowledge that a 23% failure rate is crazy but does line up with what I know about the G5 iMacs... There is no excuse for that kind of trouble from what is suppose to be a "premium" computer manufacturer.
I will say that my MDD Dual G4 has had zero hardware issues in the few years that I have owned it. The only hardware issue I have had with my iBook was not Apple's fault - it was the embecile at CompUSA who didn't fully seat the additional RAM I had them install (should have done it myself - was so easy).
Oh - and by the way - the ads you refer to - are for the consumer line of Intel-based Macs - which have thus far shown to be well-made machines.
The other issue with this article is the apples-to-oranges aspect. One difference I freely admit - Apple users are more likely to actually report problems and to return hardware to the manufacturer for repair than Windows machine users - and many Windows users never report problems that Mac users would (often they don't recognize those problems as hardware issues).
I am also curious where the 23% figure comes from - the average listed in the article is 2.7% component failure rate...Although two models were over 26% "repaired", but it also makes one wonder how many people didn't respond who had no problems at all. Considering the total number of the models shipped, the survey seems rather small. As people here on FR are fond of pointing out in regards to surveys - the sample can make all the difference.
But I do hope that Apple makes good if there is a definitive pattern to the problems (which there appears to be).
We have a winner. Your case at work sounds a great deal like my work - but we run Novel for networking at the school where I teach. What a pain - And we have full-time IT as well.
This isn't surprising to me...the G5 was both a dissapointment and the catylist for Apple to move to Intel processors. They always ran too hot, and IBM couldn't get their clock speed over 2.8 Gigs, nor fix the heat problem. On their Xserve rackmount servers, when they moved from the G4 to the G5, had to sacrifice a hard drive for extra fan and airflow space to keep the board from melting down. It was, to me, an embarrassing statement on IBM's engineering ability. Steve Jobs was increasingly unhappy with them, especially after he promised users a 3 Gig G5 4 years ago, and IBM couldn't deliver. It'll be largely moot though, as the last of the G5s are coming off the assembly line this fall, replaced with an Intel chip that will probably be a variant of the high end Xeon chips for the PowerMac replacement.
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