Disappearing for a Week

[CaptOblivious]

God help me, I love my MacBook, but this is the second repair for the same issue. And the fourth or fifth repair for this piece of hardware, which was itself a replacement given to me because they got sick of repairing my iBook. I've had nothing but problems with the Macs that I've owned, but Apple has been great about repairing them. I really work that AppleCare agreement for all its worth :D

 

Anyway, another repair, another week without a computer. I'll see you guys then!

[Darren Jeffries]

I feel your pain, I sent mine off 4 weeks ago and have only just got it back!

[SONIC883_de]

I had switched to Mac in pre-OS X times to a iMac DV SE 500. All fine - no problems

 

Then I had upgrade to an Powerbook G4 400. Take it out of the box - dvd drive faults -> DOA I get a new one.

After some time the graphic cards faults, the color gets of the body - after 1 year Apple change it into an 533 or 633 + Apple Care

Here display, superdrive, cpu and the best: the carbon frame brakes without falling down.

 

Allover 3y Powerbook, of the 3y the powerbook was over 7 month in repair   ::)

 

After an expencive repair for the carbon frame (it was my fault, yes apple) I sold it to a frind. he used it for 4 years without a problem. Without? No after 3 years the carbon frame was broken - at the same place.

 

So I switch back to PC. Less cost, better hardware quality and better hardware service (3y DELL at home service). Okay, no OS X. But for my work Windows it is okay. And I wont miss iTunes and iPod (touch 2G  ;D).

 

When apple do a 3y at home service I maybe decide to return to Mac 

[Bernard]

Alright Don, but I want a signed excuse note from the Mac Tech guy why you were absent.  :D

 

We are a split household. I love my Mac PowerBook and my wife, who years ago worked for IBM, hates it. (She has a Lenovo, no surprise there.)

 

When I first got my PowerBook and started it up, it didn't work. Long story short, the place where I purchased it was great, I sent it back the next day BUT I received a new PowerBook that same day Fedex. I've never had a problem since.

[Martijn Meerts]

Have a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro. The MacBook Pro has been in for repair, was my own fault it was broken, but still didn't cost me anything to replace parts (new logic board amongst others.)

 

Mac Pro, haven't had a single problem with it. I run bootcamp so I can boot to Windows Vista as well. Running Leopard and Vista Ultimate 64 bits. It is BY FAR the smoothest and most stable system I've had, I don't even have any problems when running Vista ;)

 

As for the cost, try speccing a Dell with the same components as in a Mac Pro, you'll notice the price is about the same. But yes, the laptops and iMac are too expensive for what they deliver.

[CaptOblivious]

They had to send it off to the depot, because the necessary repairs are too complex for them to do in-store. It'll be a week, at least. In the meantime, my wife is graciously loaning me her MacBook on a part-time basis!

[Bernard]

Don - I was going to answer one of your replies in another post with, "He's posting folks and he doing it without a computer.....now that's what I call innovation."  :D

[to2leo]

I am sticking with my Toshiba laptop for now, no problem for 3 years it has been with me.

 

I bet I can send this link to bug my pro-Apple colleague hahaha.

[Guest ___]

When I was getting my A+ certification, the question came up, "How do we service Macs?" The certification at the time encompassed both PC and Mac for the cert, and was covered in the training, or was suppose to be. The reply from the instructor was, "If you get called in to service a Mac, don't bother, and send it to Apple. If something goes wrong that requires servicing, don't waste your time with it, and send it off."

 

I'm a Linux guy so take this next part in stride, Mac look great, and be very pretty, but when they fail, they fail badly. I hear groaning on my blog all the time from people who have minor issues with PC from time to time, but when the Mac users get on there, it's a ten page EMO post about how they had to send their Macs in for service, and when they ship them off, they are Mac-less for three to six weeks at a time.

 

At the papers we use to have Macs until Dell under sold them so bad, that we were getting three Dells at the cost of a single Macs, and no one ever noticed a difference in the office. Best part of all was if a Dell failed (and they usually did) we were up and running with a replacement within a few hours.

 

Anycase, Mac reliability IMO opinion seemed to have really tanked when they dropped the IBM/Motorola chip sets in favor for going Intel. Whether or not they are related, I have no clue, but it does appear around this time frame when consumer satisfaction surveys on the Macs really took a nosedive (CNet Ziff-Davis)

[Martijn Meerts]

We don't often have problems with the Macs at work, and we have pretty much every one of them they currently have available. Our old G4's and G5's had failures about as often as the new Mac Pro's really. We send back maybe 1 machine a year for repair/replacement, which isn't bad considering we have around 60-70 of the things. My old G5 workstation, which was used heavily every day (photoshop, flex, flash, final cut, illustrator, maya) had an uptime of about 450 days before I had to reboot it to add some more RAM ;)

 

 

Our windows machines on the other hand crash regularly and are slow as hell. Funny enough, I run Vista on my Mac Pro at home using bootcamp, and I've never had any issues with Vista on that machine.

 

I tried Linux once, found pretty much none of the programs I regularly use are available or have a decent replacement on Linux, so I wasn't too happy with that. When I got a kernel panic because I put a scratched cd in a cd-rom player, I went back to windows (this was before I switched to Mac ;))

[CaptOblivious]

Update: Two days later, and it's back from the depot, and in my hands. While I think it's true that Macs (at least mine) have a tendancy to fail hard, generally (not always! I have horror stories too) Mac tech support is awesome, and repairs are turned around quickly. Like this one!

[Guest ___]

While I love my Linux box, and my Windows box, I won't lie and say I haven't been considering replacing my desktop with a Mac. I just can't bring myself to pay 50% more for having one. I miss the Mac clones of a decade ago.

[Sushi Train]

I've got one of those moving docks at the bottom of my vista 64bit like on mac's, thats the closest i'll ever get to one.