Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Very, very upset with my Powerbook. Thinking about switching back to PC
- Thread starter Drile
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
It's a video file that flashes a screen that's all red, then one that's all green, then one that's all blue, over and over and over again.
http://itasor.com/pixelmurder.MP4 (from another thread)
Right-click and save as, don't left-click or you'll have a very annoying amount of gibberish in your browser window.
http://itasor.com/pixelmurder.MP4 (from another thread)
Right-click and save as, don't left-click or you'll have a very annoying amount of gibberish in your browser window.
My issue with Apple is, while the computer may not be completely DOA, you see all too often people getting machines with some type of minor defect. It seems that the dead and stuck pixel issue is getting to be more and more of a problem. The thing is, when they do surveys for dead computers or ones that need to be serviced, the computers with dead of stuck pixel(s) sometimes slip through the cracks since Apple does not consider this a defect. Dell, on the other hand, DOES consider even 1 dead pixel a defect and will exchange the machine. This generosity on Dell's part, when looking at just numbers, can make it seem like Dell has more bad computers when all they are doing is giving customers better service (most of the time....) I know this is an apple forum and I love it for that reason. I just think you have to be realistic too when looking at the way things are. Do I own an Apple at the moment?... No, I own a Dell currently becuase it is more compatible with my school... will I buy a powerbook after the updates?... you are damn right I will! If it has a problem I will just fight to get an exchange until I get one that works. OS X is just that good and I could not see myself using any other portable computer but an Apple.
I've been more than satisfied with my refurbished PowerBook. I had read about so many problems that I didn't want a new machine. I wanted one that had the major problems repaired.
My thinking has been rewarded several times from what I've read. I feel sorry for anyone getting a new machine that has major hardware troubles.
My thinking has been rewarded several times from what I've read. I feel sorry for anyone getting a new machine that has major hardware troubles.
That might be true (about the statistical thing regarding dead pixels.) But, Apple ranks much higher in customer satisfaction surveys. If dead pixel computers counting as defects or not really had a significant impact on the defect rate numbers, it would have been reflected in the customer satisfaction numbers.
As it stands, Apple stands significantly higher than all the other makers. So overall, even taking into account a legitimate gripe about dead pixels, Apple is providing better overall experience than Dell, etc.
Well also keep in mind that it may be easier to have more "satisfied" customers when you are a much much much smaller company. I'm not saying that Apple is horrible but for the size I would think they could do better. Some people just get really burned by Apple customer service. I have personally never had a bad experience with Dell but have had many with Apple. However, to be fair within the last 3 months or so, my dealings with Apple support has been much much better than it was prior. I must say if they keep up with this type of service then I will have to agree that they have superior service. Non-the-less, Dell does a great job of support consider the number of customers they have.
Chrispy said:
Keep in mind Apple is the 3rd or 4th largest computer maker in the world, larger than most all of those other computer makers that they beat in those surveys.
It's unfortunate if you have a bad experience with Apple, but you're really making no sense in your attempts to naysay statistical information. I'm not even saying Dell has bad service (have never dealt with them), but on the whole people are more satisfied with Apple (at this point in time.) That's really all there is to say.
madmaxmedia said:
I never said people were not happy with Apple. It just seems that when Apple gives someone the shaft that they really stick it to them. I still say Apple has work to do on getting better quality control over their products and I know many many people on this forum alone will agree to that.
Also, apple may the the 3 or 4th largest computer company but they still only hold about 5% of the total computer marketshare. An eweek.com article does point out that of a group surveyed, 19% said they are likely to switch to Apple. This is a very promising number and I look forward to this day. I just hope Apple can get their quality control, policies and shipping times for BTOs up to speed as well. If not, they will have a hard time playing with the "big boys".
The PC world can have upsides....
I'm not disputing the numbers in that report, and I will concede that it is likely that Apple has a lower failure rate then other manufacturers. There is one thing that isn't mentioned there, and it may not be an option for everyone, but for me - I build my PCs. They almost never fail, and if they do I can usually replace the failed part for very little. Usually it is just a hard drive that has met its time to die after 3 or four years, or a power supply that needs swapping out. In either case its about a $100 fix. Yes the drives in Macs are the same, but if a motherboard goes or a powersupply it is easily twice as much to replace then on a PC. I have also had much experience with IBM laptops (which probably are no good anymore), which I have never seen any problems with.
In our home we have had a 50% failure rate with Apple products. Most of the time when the failure occurs we end up feeling burned by Apple. For example, a G4 iBook recently died and was just out of warranty. Cost to fix? $800. Not even worth it, so it is a 14 month old paper weight. Apple has no obligation to fix it, and they certainly made sure we knew that. We had an iPod die that was within warranty and Apple charged us a $50 'processing fee' to fix it, even though it was covered. I think that is pretty bad. We were also victims of the G3 iBook logic board issue, and have had many other problems. Maybe for the G4 iBook we should have purchased AppleCare, but that increases the cost of the product by about 25% for that iBook, and thus makes it a much less attractive buy. I did get it for my powerbook though as the percentage cost increase was much smaller.
During the same period I have had issues with my BenQ projector. They were much nicer to deal with then Apple and swapped the product out with a brand new unit the first time, and then the second time replaced it with the next model up even though it was no longer covered by the 'hot swap' portion of the warranty. The key mainly is that Apple made us feel like peons and BenQ made us feel like important customers.
Now, I do believe that Apple makes good products and I continue to buy them, but I do understand why some people from the PC world feel that things are rough on this side. Certainly Dell computers have a high failure rate, but high end custom PCs don't. After doing IT for an ecommerce company and building maybe 150 of them, we had a 24 month failure rate of maybe 5%.
I will be more interested in seeing the failure rates from 2003-2005 when those numbers are available. I have a feeling we will see a decline in reliability and satisfaction. Maybe I'll be wrong, but we can wait and see.
AmbitiousLemon said:
I'm not disputing the numbers in that report, and I will concede that it is likely that Apple has a lower failure rate then other manufacturers. There is one thing that isn't mentioned there, and it may not be an option for everyone, but for me - I build my PCs. They almost never fail, and if they do I can usually replace the failed part for very little. Usually it is just a hard drive that has met its time to die after 3 or four years, or a power supply that needs swapping out. In either case its about a $100 fix. Yes the drives in Macs are the same, but if a motherboard goes or a powersupply it is easily twice as much to replace then on a PC. I have also had much experience with IBM laptops (which probably are no good anymore), which I have never seen any problems with.
In our home we have had a 50% failure rate with Apple products. Most of the time when the failure occurs we end up feeling burned by Apple. For example, a G4 iBook recently died and was just out of warranty. Cost to fix? $800. Not even worth it, so it is a 14 month old paper weight. Apple has no obligation to fix it, and they certainly made sure we knew that. We had an iPod die that was within warranty and Apple charged us a $50 'processing fee' to fix it, even though it was covered. I think that is pretty bad. We were also victims of the G3 iBook logic board issue, and have had many other problems. Maybe for the G4 iBook we should have purchased AppleCare, but that increases the cost of the product by about 25% for that iBook, and thus makes it a much less attractive buy. I did get it for my powerbook though as the percentage cost increase was much smaller.
During the same period I have had issues with my BenQ projector. They were much nicer to deal with then Apple and swapped the product out with a brand new unit the first time, and then the second time replaced it with the next model up even though it was no longer covered by the 'hot swap' portion of the warranty. The key mainly is that Apple made us feel like peons and BenQ made us feel like important customers.
Now, I do believe that Apple makes good products and I continue to buy them, but I do understand why some people from the PC world feel that things are rough on this side. Certainly Dell computers have a high failure rate, but high end custom PCs don't. After doing IT for an ecommerce company and building maybe 150 of them, we had a 24 month failure rate of maybe 5%.
I will be more interested in seeing the failure rates from 2003-2005 when those numbers are available. I have a feeling we will see a decline in reliability and satisfaction. Maybe I'll be wrong, but we can wait and see.
bug said:
I agree that the failure rate will probably have increased and customer satisfaction ratings will have dropped some. However, I'm sure they may be true for all companies as computers are getting cheaper and cheaper. It should be interesting to see what comes of the updated figures.
Oh, and I want to thank madmaxmedia for a fun discussion last night haha. There is nothing I enjoy more than getting two differing sides out for people to see, as it is the very reason I frequent macrumors over other sites. Thank you for the intelligent and well thought-out posts
Chrispy said:
I agree with that.
...I also just felt I might point out that Toshiba laptops have the same failure rate as Apple's and their Tecras (maybe all, but the Tecras are the ones I care about) have a three year warranty standard.
Now please keep in mind here that I own a powerbook, and paid about $1000 more for it then I would have for a Tecra, so don't get the idea that I'm anti-Apple. I'm very pro-Apple. I'm sure my PC friends would think I'm a zealot - but I'm just trying to bring a balanced conversation here
I like to imagine I am platform agnostic That makes no sense (on Apple's part.) Was there any extenuating circumstances? I've never heard of others having to go through this, and would be pretty pissed if they tried to pull that on me.
My 40GB iPod just died (also under warranty,) and it took me 5 minutes at the Apple store to arrange a free replacement.
I don't think anyone will claim Apple has perfect products and support, and they do have areas in which they could improve on (in both support and hardware.) But anyone's individual problems, while still relevant (especially if you had to pay $50 to fix an in-warranty iPod!), are statistically insignificant compared to the overall defect and satisfaction rates.
If anything, Apple's lead in these areas would only increase if they worked out these areas. I think their hardware has gotten better though, the current notebooks for example don't have any significant design defects (not that that's saying a whole lot.)
One thing that is likely relevant is that it's much easier to support a vertical platform with integrated hardware and software. Many of the support and defect issues you may find with other makers may have to do with the myriad of different components they have, and Windows being able to consistently run everything. For example, my brother-in-law just bought a HP notebook and couldn't get the built-in Wifi to work. He spent a lot of time on phone support with HP, who told him to contact the hardware vendor for the Wifi (even though it came with the computer), and also told him to call Microsoft...WTF??? Turns out I was able to solve his problem in about 5 minutes. It was easy, not a defect of any kind. But HP couldn't support its own products in their default configuration, that's pretty poor.
The downside to Apple's vertical integration is that they have a lot of work cut out for them in terms of designing all the pieces that go into its machines. They're not using someone else's mobo, so they have to do a lot of work to make sure it doesn't crap out (obviously they have had some problems there.) So the differences you see in the products from different companies does make sense to some degree, you can't have your cake and eat it too. But hopefully Apple will improve, and then we as customers will have the best of both worlds...
Is Apple small or large? I don't see how anyone can not consider Apple one of the big boys. They are by no means the biggest, but by almost any measure they are up there. I guess you can divide the market into 2 tiers, with Dell and HP in the top tier, but that's it. Big companies like IBM, Toshiba, Sony, etc. are in the next tier with Apple. Heck, Apple's market cap is half that of HP, which is pretty impressive considering just how much HP sells. What's stopping Apple from growing further has less to do with support and quality level of hardware, and more to do with software (OSmarket share and network effects), price points, and other issues.
The biggest big boy of all is of course Microsoft in terms of OS share, but that's not relevant to this discussion of computer makers.
Chrispy said:Oh, and I want to thank madmaxmedia for a fun discussion last night haha. There is nothing I enjoy more than getting two differing sides out for people to see, as it is the very reason I frequent macrumors over other sites. Thank you for the intelligent and well thought-out posts
Likewise
It's nice to be able to discuss stuff reasonably w/o turning into flame bait...madmaxmedia said:
Apple is a big boy in a different and much more pleasing way than say .... Dell. While Dell is mostly focused on computer sales and just other things here and there, Apple's sales are are made up of so many different areas. For example, the iPod is Apple primary seller and it sparks people to look into buying their computers. Much like the iMac brought Apple back from the dead years go, the iPod is giving apple the attention it needs to start gaining ground.
I could not agree with you more that Microsoft is to blame for the small marketshare. However, Apple did beat out MS in the digital music realm so maybe the time is near when they will start to make significant headway with OS X over Windows.... especially if Vista ends up being less than impressive. Very exciting times ahead for sure.
madmaxmedia said:
The iPod was over the initial 6 months where you get unconditional support but within the 1 year warranty, where you have to pay this fee to have it repaired. We called multiple times and complained our best, but this fee is the way it is and it is actually documented on their site if you try to file for a hardware fix for your iPod. Actually, I just looked it up, it's $40 - listed here:
http://www.apple.com/ca/support/ipod/service/
It's for 'shipping and handling' but I still think that is pretty cheesy.
I also disagree that apple doesn't have any significant design defects. The G3 iBook logic board issue was a catastrophe - people are getting them replaced, but some people have had to send theirs back 4 times and that is lost time being able to work with your laptop. There has also been an increase in the past month or two of posts related to G4 iBook logic board failures. I could link to them on Apple's support page, but they keep deleting any thread where people start talking about trying to organize to get actual numbers of units affected. Statistics are difficult for consumers to obtain in cases like this to support their claims. Yes, maybe everyone in the world with this problem has posted and that is a small percentage of actual users. I dunno - I just know we are pissed that our 14 month old laptop is useless.
Now, certainly other manufacturers probably have even more design defects. So all computers suck, Apple's just suck marginally less. 17% failure rate is unacceptable - even if it is the lowest in the industry. Of course, it is the consumer's fault for putting up with it! I bet failure rates for other products are much lower. Imagine if 17% of all the apples you ate were defective!
But hey, here's a good link to offset my complaining:
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2005/02/08.8.shtml
That is pretty cheesy, I guess at least it's the official policy and not some weird circumstance where only you got charged. I'm actually surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.
I didn't even check the exact date on mine (I actually bought it secondhand from someone). But when I took it into the store they didn't charge me (and the receipt says zero charge), so I guess I might be within the 6 month period.
Regarding hardware defects, I said that current notebooks are relatively fine (by current I mean the generation now being sold in stores.) For sure they've had signficant problems in the past (which is why I mentioned the current line.) Again, to say our current products are basically free of design or manufacturing defects is not saying a whole lot, it should just be par for the course.
I didn't even check the exact date on mine (I actually bought it secondhand from someone). But when I took it into the store they didn't charge me (and the receipt says zero charge), so I guess I might be within the 6 month period.
Regarding hardware defects, I said that current notebooks are relatively fine (by current I mean the generation now being sold in stores.) For sure they've had signficant problems in the past (which is why I mentioned the current line.) Again, to say our current products are basically free of design or manufacturing defects is not saying a whole lot, it should just be par for the course.
bug said:The iPod was over the initial 3 months where you get unconditional support but within the 1 year warranty, where you have to pay this fee to have it repaired. We called multiple times and complained our best, but this fee is the way it is and it is actually documented on their site if you try to file for a hardware fix for your iPod. Actually, I just looked it up, it's $40 - listed here:
http://www.apple.com/ca/support/ipod/service/
It's for 'shipping and handling' but I still think that is pretty cheesy.
I also disagree that apple doesn't have any significant design defects. The G3 iBook logic board issue was a catastrophe - people are getting them replaced, but some people have had to send theirs back 4 times and that is lost time being able to work with your laptop. There has also been an increase in the past month or two of posts related to G4 iBook logic board failures. I could link to them on Apple's support page, but they keep deleting any thread where people start talking about trying to organize to get actual numbers of units affected. Statistics are difficult for consumers to obtain in cases like this to support their claims. Yes, maybe everyone in the world with this problem has posted and that is a small percentage of actual users. I dunno - I just know we are pissed that our 14 month old laptop is useless.
Now, certainly other manufacturers probably have even more design defects. So all computers suck, Apple's just suck marginally less. 17% failure rate is unacceptable - even if it is the lowest in the industry. Of course, it is the consumer's fault for putting up with it! I bet failure rates for other products are much lower. Imagine if 17% of all the apples you ate were defective!
But hey, here's a good link to offset my complaining:
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2005/02/08.8.shtml
alex_ant said:
Actually, not that I'm saying this has to be everyone's opinion, but I'd much rather have a computer built by volume maufacturers in Taiwan, with reliable, proven assembly lines than by Apple themselves in the US. Wherever they're built, you'll get some that are unreliable/DOA and considering how many manufacturers parts are sourced from in modern computer systems, it's very unlikely that Apple's pre-shipment tests are entirely to blame.
(Macs here in the UK used to be built in Ireland
)Also, the grass is not that green on the other side either-
http://www.buzzmachine.com/?tag=dell
http://www.slate.com/id/2125297?nav=wp
Customer support these days comes in a distant third compared to generating profits (good if you're a shareholder), and providing lower prices to consumers (good for most customers.)
To be honest, I don't expect any company to provide much better support than any other. I do expect them to live up to their stated warranties of course, and not put me through too much hassle if I have a broken or defective product that is covered under warranty.
http://www.buzzmachine.com/?tag=dell
http://www.slate.com/id/2125297?nav=wp
Customer support these days comes in a distant third compared to generating profits (good if you're a shareholder), and providing lower prices to consumers (good for most customers.)
To be honest, I don't expect any company to provide much better support than any other. I do expect them to live up to their stated warranties of course, and not put me through too much hassle if I have a broken or defective product that is covered under warranty.