[albertw]

spinoza2 said:

Na, I'm more ur-Mac than you could ever imagine

Ah, then. I guess that proves the point.

(You do understand I'm just having a bit of silly fun with this - don't you? No offense meant. None taken.)

[Grapho]

I had a MacBook that started to shut down intermittently, I replaced the battery, the problem went away. His battery is probably the issue. The thing was, that while connected to a power source, it never shut down.

[jpellino]

I have yet to find a Mac of any stripe that hasn't lasted at least 5 years, major accidental physical trauma nonwithstanding. That's true of my personal machines - Duo210, 1400, iBook G3 and iBook G4 (turns 5 this month). The Duo and 1400 still run. The G3 was parted out to help pay for the G4. I still have in our labs multiple Blue & White G3s, five-flavor iMacs, Cubes still churning along, ditto the blueberry iBooks. The lemon of the bunch is the original TiBook by virtue of its hinges. Reliability has not been an issue. In one of my previous EDU labs we had 16 iMacs and 4 Gateway 2000s. It took my staff the same amount of time to babysit the 4 PCs as the 16 iMacs. I think that reality sold more Macs to my students than anything else.

[spinoza2]

(You do understand I'm just having a bit of silly fun with this - don't you? No offense meant. None taken.)

Yeah, no problem. I think this article is being taken quite differently by Andy aficionados than we outsiders; you probably have to know him to appreciate his style and humor. But now that I know he is the proud carrier of a Burger King Gold Card, I'll be more careful with my acerbic jabs :-)

[alansky]

I've owned countless Macs since 1984 and have experienced maybe two hardware problems in all that time. I have also set up new Macs for hundreds of friends and clients over the years, and have always been surprised by how few problems I hear about. Most of those machines run perfectly until they're replaced. Andy doesn't know what he's talking about and should admit it if he cares about his credibility. Maybe he just forgot to take his meds.

[JoxerTheMighty]

I've been using Thinkpads for years, working for a company whose acronym is not quite HAL, in Unix development. Working on them all day, sometimes at night, or using my own Windows hardware. I would go through 1-2 show stopping hardware problems per year, and innumerable software troubleshooting issues, trying to get wireless working consistently (software for this is not standardized, every TP came with a different manager), blue screens, etc. And every so often an upgrade in hardware or recovery from a disk error that required a fresh install and a week or two of trying to get the machine set up the way I had it before - all the programs installed, configured, etc.
I bought a plain macbook 15 months ago. I started taking it to work and using in place of my company TP in order to get more 'into' the whole Mac thing (started out using my daughter's Mini when the MediaCenter PC couldn't handle many duties as well). It gets used round the clock, much more than any TP I had before. Problems? Well I did have a disk corruption of a system file. Copied the data to an external disk, re-installed Leopard, and migration assistant 1 button to get me back to exactly where I was before. No weeks of getting settings just right, configuring Hummingbird, etc, nothing. Did I mention my initial setup was using the same method to migrate my Tiger setup from the mini to the macbook? Other than that, I've only found that it seems the power controller is a little sensitive, and doesn't seem to like having the power plugged in to the mac first and then to the wall. If I do, sometimes it refuses to charge for a while. But if I always plug the Magsafe in last and unplug the Magsafe first, never an issue.
Besides the migration assistant being just brilliant, I think that having a limited combination of hardware configurations and many standard things like wireless config being part of the OS is a huge boon. If we were to switch completely to mac at the office the maintenance costs would have to go down and productivity in general would be so much higher due to the standardization of software/configuration and recovery from hardware failures. The typical method at the office is to pre-install one of the many disk images on your pc, and then have you go find all the software and licences required to do your particular job again, and then discover that the image they installed was for a slightly different model and the wireless drivers don't exactly work, etc.
Maybe the author should try using more PCs to appreciate this side of the fence.

[Grapho]

Good Point!
We have a old RIP that is running Windows NT. The mother board has built in SCSI that the native NT CD install disk does not support, so when we have had a HD failure, we need to get the CD drive to work first by using a diskette with the CD driver, then once the CD-ROM is recognized we start the process of installing NT in to the new HD, we have to get drivers for the SCSI portion of the mother board for it to recognize the HD, yet another diskette with more cryptic drivers. It sounds simple, now try to figure it out and get all the drivers necessary to be able to do this. If this was a Mac RIP running on system Mac OS 9 (this equipment is from 1997), this would take exactly 45 min to do the enter thing (including opening the Mac and swapping the HD), the first time it took me and an HP hardware engineer 4 hours to figure out and execute. Sure, things have progressed in the past ten years or so, but this is just a sample of how Apple has ALWAYS been easer then Windows, even 15 years ago.

The restore CD that has always shipped with Macs contain all the drivers necessary for any given hardware they where shipped with, not so, with Windows back in 1997, apparently. Yet one more example of how an integrated platform has always been an easer more elegant solution then the open Windows nightmare.

[Osborne01]

Guess I'm the only one besides Andy and Job who are cursed. I'm typing on my iPhone waiting for the return of my 7 month old Macbook with hard drive failure. Brand new (3 weeks) Time Capsule may also be defective. Phone isn't syncing with MobileMe. Two of three previous Macs had major repairs. One needed 2 logic boards, 3 power supplies and finally hard drive failure at 3 years.

Can't backup phone and troubleshoot until I have my Mac, but at this time all calendars have been wiped clean.
Can't say whether Apple products are less reliable. My Dell and IBM computers failed too. I prefer Apple for the OS, tech support and customer service. As bad as it has been, I'm not willing to jump out of the frying pan quite yet. Apple generally has tried to resolve my problems.

[hillstones]

albertw said:

Hey! Thank you Andy. Funny article. Good advice.

Ya know - I think a little more attention needs to be paid here to the very helpful advice Andy dishes out (check 1 thru 8 - well maybe not that advice to watch Big Brother). I keep a similar list in my top desk drawer and knapsack (panic does things to my ability to think rationally in moments of tribulation.), but I think I'll replace my list with Andy's article. Then, when I do have a problem, it'll cheer me up to know that even The Great are born unto trouble and suffering.

Finally, someone recalls Andy's SARCASM in an article. I miss his articles in MacWorld Magazine. Early MacBooks did have sudden shutdown problems and after 7 years, the latch on my PowerBook G4 Ti doesn't catch all the time. I have to flick the latch with my finger a few times so when I close it, the magnet will catch it and hold it closed. Not a big deal, but I wonder if the latch will eventually stick forever.

[albertw]

spinoza2 said:

But now that I know he is the proud carrier of a Burger King Gold Card, I'll be more careful with my acerbic jabs :-)

Thanks. :)

Yes, I think Andy is best taken with a Double Whooper (extra cheese) followed by a good night of pubbing. At some point in the evening you're bound to say, "Aurgh! Now I get 'im." ---- And the best thing? You'll wake up the next day and won't remember any of it.

[donjo]

I've had 5 (four motherboard replacements and one new machine) replacements of MacBook Pros, thanks to the Nvidia GPU problems.

[albertw]

Well, since we're going to go on and on about this... I've had my current MBP for about 2 years. It replaced my beloved 12" PB (viciously torn apart by wolves and sold for parts). The thing I like best about it, is that it gets nice and hot. This is really helpful if you're stuck in a tent in a blizzard at 10,000'. Sometimes I play Snoods (yes, I cheat - it's the gloves) on my MBP just because it generates so much heat. 2 people with MBP's playing Snoods can heat up a small tent in no time. This can be a life saver if you're ever stuck in a snow storm. (You'll need a copy of Snoods and extra batteries.) Also, you can turn your MBP over and use it to dry your socks.

[karynv]

My family has been using Macs faithfully since the Mac SE. We have never had problems with hardware failure until the MacBooks. My daughter's MacBook Pro had to be serviced three times before dying an untimely death that was her own fault (fell off the top bunk at college). Her replacement has already had a problem. And I've had to take my MacBook in twice. For the first time I'm starting to worry about Apple quality control. I probably won't buy a MacBook for my next computer -- maybe an iMac.

[ChrisLJ]

"Also, you can turn your MBP over and use it to dry your socks."

Not good enough. Now if you could use the bottom of that puppy to make a grilled cheese sandwich I would offer to buy it from you. Mmmmm, grilled cheese!