Every Mac I've owned has failed also. But every laptop I've ever owned has also, similarly, failed. Maybe it's me.
My point is though: Apple treated me right when my machine fails, the other laptop manufacturers (Dell, Acer) do not, not by a long shot, and for that reason alone I'll keep buying Macs.
Your experience differs from mine :) I've always used PCs because they were cheap and I needed them for work, but last year I was working as a consultant (so integration wasn't such a big deal) and there was a tempting offer on MacBooks. I got one, I loved it.
After about a year, the bit of the case where you rest your palms started to crack. The intarwebs told me this was a known problem, and should be covered by warranty. I contacted on Apple service centre, to be told "no problem, just drop it in and we'll fix it." Of course, it would take two weeks, and there was no way to expedite things.
So I tried another Apple retailer, and was told to bring it in that afternoon. "Great," I thought, "this is why you pay a bit more for a Mac - service!" Unfortunately, when I got there they said the same thing - two weeks, no exceptions. After about 40 minutes of arguing and cajoling, the Genius agreed to do it there and then. Although I was pleased about this, it would have been better if they could have done it without the arguments.
I just bought a new Toshiba and passed the MacBook on to my daughter (she's a real Mac fanatic). The new PC is great, I'm surprised that I actually like Windows Vista, and it only cost UKP400. So if it goes wrong I could easily buy a replacement. I might even buy a Netbook with the cash I didn't spend getting another Mac.
Dell has a great Next Business Day warranty. It is worth to pay for it if it's not included with your Dell already.
My roommate spilled soup onto his Dell laptop. He immediately shut it down, tried to dry it up but the laptop didn't boot. So he called the support and on the next day a gentleman from Dell knocked on our door, replaced the motherboard and voila, the laptop was as good as new. It was interesting just to look at the man from Dell how skillfully he disassembled and reassembled the laptop.
One other friend exploits this package. When he thinks he should have a new MB or CPU or anything, he just calls them and tells it "squeaks". Next day, a man comes and replaces anything with a new piece. No questions asked.
And this package is valid throughout the world, no matter where you are. Dell rocks.
Also, AppleCare is there for a reason. And, they only offer it for 3 years for a reason.. that's how long these machines can reasonably be expected to last.
My Toshiba started dying long before its 3-year warranty was up. The cooling fans would make this god-awful grinding noise (bad bearings, I worked in a fan factory FFS), yet they refused repair, stating that cooling fans were part of normal wear and tear.
When my MBP died earlier this month I called Apple, and without any hassle whatsoever, they volunteered to replace it with a brand new unibody model.
What a world of difference in service. BTW, Toshiba charged more for the extended warranty than AppleCare.
One thing that Apple doesn't provide is the "overnight you a loner so you won't have any downtime" option that you could get with some of the higher-end support contracts from other vendors. Other than that, I agree that their support tends to be excellent.
Sorry dude. I've had a few Thinkpads that have failed on me (wireless died completely on one, screen on another). No manufacturer is immune to things dying after awhile.
Just anecdotal, but I had a Thinkpad 600 which lasted from 1998 till 2006. While all machines will fail eventually, it is nice to find the ones which last 8 years instead of 2. Similar to the decision making process for cars: getting one that lasts till 250k miles is generally preferred to one that'll last 50k miles. It would be nice to have a reliability database for laptops similar to that available for cars (http://autos.msn.com/home/reliability_ratings.aspx).
I have a Thinkpad from the last generation before the branding switched to Lenovo... pieces of plastic are falling off but the hardware is going strong.
You're quite right. I guess we could also say every thing we've ever owned, seen or ever known about has failed. Except the things that are going to fail shortly.
Can we stop screwing around with anecdotes and cite some sort of study?
In my family, we have had 5 macs. An iBook G3, a Macbook Pro, two Macbooks, and an old Powerbook 170 from 1991. All of them are still in perfect working order, and have only ever broken as a result of physical damage (drops, spills, etc.) The Powerbook 170 was used as a word processor for about 15 years, and still remains in working order.
I have had nothing but positive experiences with Macs, but I need to emphasize that my experiences are not data. They are anecdotes, and thus can't prove anything one way or the other.
To turn anecdotes into data, you need good answers to these two questions:
- Are the samples very similar? (ie, same models, same usage patterns)
- Do they vary in a predictable way from a control group?
The only things which are the same between the samples are the owner, and the brand. We don't know any specifics about internal product testing and development, so it is a stretch to say that those details are the same across all samples.
The control group is non-existent: it is assumed to be a group of computers identical in every way to those being tested, except they never fail. That is: the control group is imagined to be just what is needed to prove the desired conclusions.
Having said all that, I have had repair-under-warranty problems with all the Macs that I have owned too.
"The ACSI scores measure a consumer's overall satisfaction with a company, which includes product quality, value, customer service, and essentially anything else that impresses or annoys a customer of a particular company. Apple scored an 85 on the index, its highest score ever and a full ten points higher than second place finisher Dell."
In the past 3 1/2 years (since I started buying Apple products), I've had a 60% defect rate by computer (5 computers - though each defective computer had multiple issues), and a 66% defect rate for other products (iPod 3G, iPhone 1G, Time Capsule)
Haha yes. And in 37signals land, they're somehow still a startup, you only have to work 32 hours per week to be successful, multiple anecdotes = data, and feelings trump reality.
Feelings are reality for most people. If this were not true, religion, depression, stock market crashes and mental illness would not exist and we'd be living in a utopia.
Every pet I've owned has died (except the current dog)
One of our dogs only lasted 17 years, the other failed after just 15. The chooks weren't much good; we only seemed to get about 4 or 5 years from them. The finches are all dead, and so are the budgies. The rabbit died too.
My wife had a dog they gave away, but they kept in contact with the new owner, and after 6 years with the new owner, that dog was dead too.
But I'm leaving Apple with my next laptop. For coding, Linux is better (same dev/deployment environment, and better repos / package managers), and for gaming, windows is better. Also, the hardware is much cheaper (about $500-1000 less for an MBP equivalent non-Apple laptop). Most OS X apps are too mouse driven for my taste anyway. The only apps I'll miss are Textmate, Smultron, Dictionary. The only OS feature I'll miss is painless plug and play.
PS: Written on a 2 year old macbook whose screen flickers after sleep and which is constantly in danger of overheating due to fan failures.
The only computer I have had that hasn't eventually failed was my old Dell laptop - which funnily enough was dropped more times than I care to imagine.
The worst of which was when it slipped off the hood of my car, slid down the hill (upside down) that the car was parked on top of for about 35 metres, before coming to a rest after it collided with the curb.
2 years is pretty good going IMHO. After 2 years a laptop is starting to look pretty dated. The battery is likely to be dead, the hard drive likely to be miniscule.
Seems to me that the Mac failure rate is always going to seem higher because of the devotees - a certain class of selection bias. For instance, if a Dell fails who's going to:
1) ascribe it to Dell and not the relevant component maker?
and
2) continue to buy Dell products after a few failures?
I'm going to keep buying Dells because even though I bought the computer in the US, when the HD crashed here in Austria, they had a guy at my house with a new drive in just over 24 hours. Yeah, I paid a bit more for the service options, but since this computer is my business, that makes sense, and ended up saving me a lot of worry. The overall price was still very reasonable for what I got.
Nope, it was an Inspiron, and I was expecting a big hassle, delays, and the whole messy dance, but it was quite easy. The German support guy who I reached checked my information, and asked whether I'd prefer someone to come around or for them to mail the disk, and both being free, I chose to have someone come by with the disk as it was faster.
I guess I may have gotten lucky, but it really left a good impression on me.
Most Inspirons don't have a warranty that includes international service. I had to tell people in similar situations that they need to bring or mail their machine back to the US before it could be fixed. So, I'm leaning toward lucky.
Well, this should provide for a certain amount of conflicted ambivalence, the collision of Rails and Mac fanaticisms should be amusing.
I'd have to say that my experience of Apple hardware is even worse than his, modern Macbooks are at least user serviceable meaning you only need to undo a couple of screws to get at the hard drive, the count on the old iBooks was between twelve and 17 screws to get to the hard drive.
I have a similar experience. Every mac I've had has died (basically my last 4 computers). 2 screen deaths, one overheat, and one coffee incident.
I blame all of these on myself. Even paying 3k for a top of the line laptop, I really dont expect the computer to last more than 1.5 years at the way I use the computer. Pounding away on the computer for 60 hours a week on average, and working out of lots of coffee shops, I'm hardly the typical use case for a computer user.
Just like a consumer coffee machine cant be expected to stay functional for long if it were in use in a restaurant, I dont expect my consumer laptop to work for the same time period as an average consumer would.
However, if you're using a laptop for commercial purposes, and at such a high capacity, you should probably expect to be investing at least yearly in your equipment.
In a previous life (before I had a wife and kids), I had both money and balls and used to do a lot of dirt bike riding.
This same argument used to come up then too, in regard to the European bikes (KTM and Husky) vs the Japanese ones. Essentially, people would get upset that their new European bike, for which they had paid a substantial premium over an equivalent Japanese bike, would still break and require maintenance. I've owned both a KTM and a Husky (plus a Honda and a Kawasaki), and can attest to the fact that they are just pieces of machinery, like everything else. But... (and this is the bit people find hard to understand) ... the Euro bikes had something the Japanese ones didn't; something that made you forgive their mechanical woes and their extreme price. Man I miss those days...
every device with millions of integral connections between delicate components i've owned has been so susceptible to failure that i've got reason to wonder if this is an untapped market...so far i've not seen a class of consumer electronics that fails as beautifully as its software is expected to.
Surprised nobody has mentioned how Apple treats customers when they do have hardware failures. There are a lot of stories of hardware being swapped/upgraded in Apple Stores, even out of warranty.
Hardware failure is inevitable; the real question is, does Apple do a better job when that inevitability strikes?
Odd. I've had one Mac fail on me (dual-USB iBook, the one with the motherboard problem). They replaced the motherboard, but then I sold it anyway a few months later.
Every other Mac I've ever had since then is still running. Another iBook, a MacBook, PowerMac G4, and the Mac Pro I'm typing on.
It's a little annoying, honestly. At least the PC hardware has the decency to die and get out of the way when I stop using it. :-)
Network card on my MacBook refused to work just after 6 months. On the other hand, my 4 year old Asus laptop still works as a charm, apart from the HDD failure. Still, the HDD went on 3,5 years of heavy and tough usage.
That's a pretty normal time span for a laptop to fail. Someone working at Dell once told me that components generally start failing after or around 2 years.
My laptop rule of thumb: always buy the extended warranty.
I have a thing for second-hand 2001-era HP Omnibook 6100's, which fail after about 2 years (screen hinge, etc), but are QUIET. A recent favourite is Thinkpad T23's, which are titanium cased.
The only computer that has ever failed me was a Sun Sparc station, 'round about 1995 ('twas the hard drive). Other than that, so far I've been unscathed. <knocks on wood>
If its within 6 months, AppleCare should have replaced it for free. There were some known battery issues - Thats why Apple replaced (and still does) the batteries if you bring it in and your battery is bad.
The longest I've ever had a Mac was six years, when I used a Mac Plus from 1989-1995, when I got my dads old IIsi. Then in 1996 I bought a Quadra 605, and in 1998 I bought a PowerMac 7200, and in 2000 I bought a new iMac. In 2001 I bought a Powerbook Lombard 400, and in 2002 I bought a G4/466. Then in 2003 I bought a new Powerbook 12" 1ghz, and that worked perfectly for me for three years until December 2006 when I bought a new Macbook which needed a new motherboard six months later. Since then it's worked pretty OK though it does seem to completely lock up every now and then requiring a forced shutdown, which didn't happen with the old Powerbook 12" if I recall correctly. Our 4 year old Dell PC has worked perfectly and we will continue to use it until it blows up.
I'm not a Mac guy... Never had a PC fail me (over about a decade), except one ultraportable toshiba (screen failure). That's... 4 desktops and 2 laptops.
Of course, it DOES fail on the software side... Windows gets pretty painful as it ages.
I've always aid that Mac vs. PC is a decision of whether you want crappy-but-pretty hardware and good OS or ugly-but-solid hardware (assuming you do your research) and a mediocre OS that ages poorly.
I'm seriously considering a hackintosh for my next machine.
Most of the parts in Apple computers are the same parts used in PCs. A majority of the PC laptops are built by one of a few companies in China. As a former sys admin I've dealt with my share of PC hardware failure and in the last several years I've seen my share of Mac failures.
Hard drives are probably the component most likely to die in either and they all use the same group of vendors. Display failures are also more common in laptops and again, they all use the same group of vendors.
"Three of my older laptops have had their hard drives fail (with painful data loss in one instance)."
More like they deserved what they got. A four or five year old hard drive should b expected to die yesterday and full backups should be an absolute requirement. I have had plenty of drives die long before that and would never dare push a hard drive to such a long limit with no backup, especially a laptop one that is moved around a lot.
And just to top it off "hard drives" are not Apple special hardware. I have noticed that some comments have negative points, how do I vote down something (in this case the article)?
The first computer I ever owned had the motherboard die after a few days, maybe I have bad luck.
Almost every hard drive I have had has failed.
I just had a new 500 gig I used for backups fail after less than a year. It replaced a 160 gig that died after 2 years.
Every laptop I have owned has had the hard drive die (3, one mac).
I have had cd and dvd drives fail in various machines.
Personally the least hassles resulting from failure has been with Macs because I buy the applecare warrantee, and I just bring the machine in to get it fixed in a few hours. I imagine Dells service would be comparable, I would probably do that if I had a PC as my primary machine.
I'm not a Mac guy but I've owned 9 PC's (six laptops and three desktops) in 13 years and the worst I've had happen is a failing graphics card in one desktop (and one that's still running Windows 98 very nicely for experiments). All others have been replaced because components (usually RAM) had aged beyond decent utility.
Some statistically small time after that, I'll fail as well. Bummer.