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 all about the money. Component costs have gone down and the manufacturing is larger scale. The economic benefit of a slight percentage drop in reliability is too big for any company to ignore. Just look at the computer you can get for the money. Macs were much more expensive then especially accounting for inflation and the performance difference now is huge. Since this happens in every facet of manufacture you can easily imagine the increase in failure rate. Still it's not that bad for Apple compared to others so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Just think, you can easily afford to buy a spare now for less than the cost of a single quadra back then.
Kevin _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives of this list here: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
