David over at 37signals recently wrote that every Mac he’s ever owned has failed in some way. Shock! DHH admitting that Apple has a ridiculously high failure rate! This is it, this is when the entire tech community finally turns against Apple for it’s shoddy machines, right?
Wrong-o.
Macs fail a lot, yeah. But think for a minute and you’ll realize that almost every computer you’ve ever owned has failed somehow. Occasionally you’ll get the workhorse that won’t give up, the Bruce Lee of computers, but generally speaking, most fail.
Let’s definitely hold Apple’s feet to the fire for shipping units that fail, and especially so for shipping anything with a known defect. But let’s do the same to Dell, Toshiba, Compaq, and any of the other PC manufacturer’s whose products have failed on us over the years.
December 30th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
A main difference when comparing Apple to Dell or other computer manufacturers as I’ve said before is real warranty support. Do not throw Apple under the bus for having hardware failures, throw them under the bus for having terrible warranty support.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:28 am
I think part of the reason Macs “fail” is that they tend to get used for several years more than commodity PCs. A Mac dies because something wears out or breaks, whereas most Windows PCs are replaced before that can happen.