Those poor Mac fanatics.
Maybe someone should make a TV commercial where that hip, twentysomething Apple kid approaches the conservative old PC guy (that's me) to ask him for help fixing the broken Mac.
Heh..........
I sent a copy of these links to my mac fanatic family member.....
I await the flames. This oughtta be good. heh heh heh *EG*
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).