No, I haven't had any problems with any of my macs, save for 2 HD
failures, and 3 blown USB ports (though I suspect these were from
the ElGato EyeTV USB letting power surges through the CATV line...)
all the way from my first Mac (a Performa 475) to my latest (G4 20"
FP iMac - the kind with the round base).
On May 17, 2006, at 2:17 PM, Peter K. Stys wrote:
I'm curious about people's experience. We run many Macs in the lab,
and recently I've been upgrading people's machines with the new iMacs.
In the last few months, 3 of them have failed:
- one smoked (literally)
- one's video failed
- one's LCD lamp failed
plus:
- 2 Xserve RAID drive units failed (lucky for the "RAID" part)
All were no more than a year and a bit out of the box (the Intel iMac
with the bad lamp was just born a month ago).
Meanwhile I still have several Quadras (yes Quadras, running OS 8 and
HyperCard. Remember?) that have been running non-stop for 15 YEARS (I
kid you not) with maybe 1 or 2 drive failures.
Is it my imagination or is Apple's QC going down the tubes? Used to
be that when you paid premium for "an Apple computer", you got quality
and reliability.
It's not so much that Apple's QC is poor. It is the price pressures
which force the Chineese factories to use low cost components. In
most cases it is the high-value, small sized electrolytic capacitors
used in power supplies that have poor tolerances and are extremely
heat sensitive and let go. The first series of iMac G5, the silver
AirPort Base stations, and some of the early, slim iBooks suffered
from them. The newer iMacs are using newer components and are quite
stable. We have 5 of them in heavy use.
From the 70 or so machines I bought in the last 13 or so years I lost
several hard drives. One in a rev B iMac G3, the other in a Clamshell
iBook G3. I lost 4 silver AirPort Base Stations on bad capacitors. I
had to send back 3 PowerBooks, all within warranty: 2 had bad
capacitors in their power supplies, the other had a bad hard drive.
I'd say, this is not bad. Oh, there was another failure, A
PowerComputing G2 machine lost its cooling fan and caused it to crash
a few minutes after startup. ... and on another a dog chewed through
the AC cord so that it wouldn't run.
Chhers, Peter
To Apple's credit, they fixed it all no cost, even those no longer
warrantied, but still. When I fire up a Mac I want to work on it not
have it in the shop, even if repairs are covered.
I was wondering if my experience is unique or others have noticed the same?
Peter.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter K. Stys, MD
Professor of Medicine(Neurology), Senior Scientist
Ottawa Health Research Institute, Div. of Neuroscience
Ottawa Hospital / University of Ottawa
Ontario, CANADA
tel: (613)761-5444
fax: (613)761-5330
http://www.ohri.ca/profiles/stys.asp
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