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My daughter must have had one of the few bad Macs ever built. (Disclaimer - I worked for Compaq for 5.5 years and left right before HP bought them.) When she asked for a Mac to take to college so she’d fit in I made her pay the difference. Then I picked one up at the local outlet and she was happy.

After about a month she couldn’t get video unless she held it just so, then even that failed. So I told her to take it back.

She called from the store to tell me it would be a 3 day repair but they would “rent” a replacement to her for $99. I asked to talk to the service person. She said it was a known defect and an easy fix but their technicians were backlogged. I told her it was obviously a manufacturing defect and she should RTM my daughter’s computer and hand her a new one with all her data transferred. She said Apple wouldn’t let her do that. I asked my daughter to wait while I called Apple and got the same story.

Maybe Macs don’t fail as often as PCs, but if she had walked into Best Buy after a month with a failed computer she’d have walked out with a brand new one she could use. There’s no way the PC world would have let her pay in time and money for a manufacturing defect.

To top everything off, when her computer was ready and I went to drop off the rental they had to do an inspection before I could leave. So, $99 spent and hassle for both my daughter and me mean I won’t buy a Mac for myself any time soon.

My daughter finally bought a replacement after 5 years when she couldn’t get software upgrades for her old one any more due to Apple moving from Motorola to Intel. I went to use the Mac tool to transfer her data and the two versions weren’t compatible. Microsoft got called out for that with the move from Windows XP to Windows 8 and went out and bought a version of LapLink to make available for free so people could do the transfer.

For some reason, this is something she’ll put up with. As long as Apple has people buying it because it’s hip, I guess they’ll continue to get away with it.