It's worth noting that the problems you do hear about are the tip of the iceberg. Most people deal with the problem, don't consider it a problem or consider it a problem and just call AppleCare. Only a tiny minority of people with problems actually post to forums about them.
We can agree to disagree on this one. My experience is that people in general are much more likely to post a complaint than post a "my purchase was problem free" report. That doesn't mean, however, that the new MacBooks/MBPs are not more trouble-prone than prior models, but the overall percentage is still likely to be quite low.
Here's an interesting site with statistics on warranty claims for some major US companies. The data is for 2004, so it doesn't apply to MacBooks, but note that Apple's overall warranty claim rate (as a percentage of sales) in 2004 was 1.6%, compared to Dell at 3.8%, HP at 3.4%, Sun at 4.7%, Maxtor at 4.9%, and Palm at 5.2%. If the other companies' warranty rates were unchanged through this year, Apple's rate could have doubled and it would still be below the competitors' rates.
If you can wait on the MBP, I would -- the Core2Duo will be out by early autumn and it delivers more power at the same wattage (or in other words the same power at less wattage when you're idling, I suppose). I do still think they run too warm but they are much better than they were the first two months of the production run. They're now on a revised motherboard design and firmware was released to run the fan properly rather than the constant switching on and off at the same temperature that led to the mooing sound.
Part of the reason I recommend waiting a bit is because of the CoreDuo being so new -- it is a new fab AND a new microarchitecture at the same time, and on top of that unusual double dose of newness for Intel, it is completely new hardware for Apple. It shows too; I don't think the Apple OS is quite there yet in terms of power management for the CoreDuo, whereas the last round of G4 PowerBooks had some amazing power management tricks (e.g. divide-by-four clock speed for long battery life and genuinely cool running for idle or light office tasks) that were fully supported by the OS. But these fixes will come in time.
I unfortunately can't wait due to work; so I am getting a MacBook which I think is farther along than the MBP to being "right", and besides it fits my current needs better than the bigger and shorter-battery-life MBP.
2Ghz (Week 21) MBP without a single issue. No whine, nothing. This thing is beautiful, and universal apps are shockingly fast.
It does get dang hot, but I assume that is normal for laptops (believe it or not, this is the first laptop I have ever owned--though I have been a Mac user for 15 years).
i have a powerbook G4. the last of the titanium powerbooks.
i've had it for 3 years. it's worked perfectly, except a couple of months ago the superdrive kind of stopped working. oh, and when it was new, a cd got stuck inside but nothing major.
i bought an external dvd burner instead of fixing my superdrive, but other than that... great computer. no problems until a couple of months ago. no dead pixels, no hard drive problems, nothing.
The only issues I have ever had with apples are/were lack of HDD and lack of RAM, both my own fault...yea...a 40 gig and 512mb ram will be fine, the mini won't be my primary unit, I just want to dabble in OSX...that lasted all of three days
Comments
Originally posted by giant
It's worth noting that the problems you do hear about are the tip of the iceberg. Most people deal with the problem, don't consider it a problem or consider it a problem and just call AppleCare. Only a tiny minority of people with problems actually post to forums about them.
We can agree to disagree on this one. My experience is that people in general are much more likely to post a complaint than post a "my purchase was problem free" report. That doesn't mean, however, that the new MacBooks/MBPs are not more trouble-prone than prior models, but the overall percentage is still likely to be quite low.
Here's an interesting site with statistics on warranty claims for some major US companies. The data is for 2004, so it doesn't apply to MacBooks, but note that Apple's overall warranty claim rate (as a percentage of sales) in 2004 was 1.6%, compared to Dell at 3.8%, HP at 3.4%, Sun at 4.7%, Maxtor at 4.9%, and Palm at 5.2%. If the other companies' warranty rates were unchanged through this year, Apple's rate could have doubled and it would still be below the competitors' rates.
Part of the reason I recommend waiting a bit is because of the CoreDuo being so new -- it is a new fab AND a new microarchitecture at the same time, and on top of that unusual double dose of newness for Intel, it is completely new hardware for Apple. It shows too; I don't think the Apple OS is quite there yet in terms of power management for the CoreDuo, whereas the last round of G4 PowerBooks had some amazing power management tricks (e.g. divide-by-four clock speed for long battery life and genuinely cool running for idle or light office tasks) that were fully supported by the OS. But these fixes will come in time.
I unfortunately can't wait due to work; so I am getting a MacBook which I think is farther along than the MBP to being "right", and besides it fits my current needs better than the bigger and shorter-battery-life MBP.
It does get dang hot, but I assume that is normal for laptops (believe it or not, this is the first laptop I have ever owned--though I have been a Mac user for 15 years).
HSE,
Mandricard
My machine works wonderfully without major flaws.
Only issue I had was a failing keyboard which was promptly replaced with a new one under warranty.
Ponder about this: if hardware-issues really would be common would the Mac crowd be so fanatic in their love for this platform??
i've had it for 3 years. it's worked perfectly, except a couple of months ago the superdrive kind of stopped working. oh, and when it was new, a cd got stuck inside but nothing major.
i bought an external dvd burner instead of fixing my superdrive, but other than that... great computer. no problems until a couple of months ago. no dead pixels, no hard drive problems, nothing.
i highly recommend macintosh computers.
For me that's been the Macintosh.
I've had far less problems and have been more productive on less powerful equipment than many of my friends on Windows.