On 28 Oct 2008, at 19:48, Andrew Fildes wrote:
>
> There's occasionally things said about Mac reliability and there have
> been problems (case cracking on white MacBooks I understand) but I
> have to contribute here. I've been sitting on my hands too long.
You've got me on it too, but from a slightly different vantage point.
I think the products are great, but have started to worry about
hardware reliability. My previous macbook had an issue which turned
out to be a the soldered connections of a chip on the mother board
gradually deteriorating with the slight flexing of the unit when, say,
picking it up by one corner. This was an something acknowledged by
apple and there was a recall program(me) for affected units, but the
cutoff was at a serial number just below mine. Support acknowledged it
was the exact same problem but just said sorry, there's a cutoff and
you're outside it. Presumably the percentage of failures in 'my' batch
was low enough that it was more cost effective to take some lost
customers than start extending the replacement service out further -
looking after the shareholders, etc. With a replacement motherboard
costing not a huge amount less than a new model, and with that
motherboard possibly suffering the same problem, that 15 month old
macbook was scrapped.
The macbook I'm typing this on has had to go back under warranty for a
screen flicker issue. It's starting to do it again and I didn't get
the extended warranty, thinking it unlikely for another problem to
surface.
And the signal keeps on cutting out to the external speakers on my G4
tower. The machine's old, but it's still annoying.
One final thing that irked me was that it used to be possible under
OSX address book to type a sms message and send via bluetooth on a
mobile (cell) phone. That was one of my favo(u)rite features, but then
it disappeared in a software 'upgrade'. The feature was removed,
coincidentally at the time of the iPhone launch. Apparently it's a
feature of the iPhone now.
So all in all I think Apple make good products, but act like any
corporation; saving money on parts used to manufacture their units,
sacrificing a certain amount of goodwill, etc. The company has to as
it only exists to turn a profit, but it still grates.
James
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