My first computer, purchased by my parents after nearly a year of begging, was an Apple II+. That was 1982. I was a Windows user for the next 20 years, but went back to Mac when they switched to Intel chips a couple of years ago. Since then I’ve bought seven Macs for myself, as well as at least one of every iPod and both iPhones. A lot of these were test devices that I’ve passed on to friends and family.
My obvious enthusiasm for Apple products is fairly evident to readers of this blog. But recently I’ve had a string of bad apples come my way, so to speak. It’s time for Apple to stop screwing around and start paying attention to product quality.
I’ll excuse the one hour of battery life I seem to be able to get out of my iPhone. An arrangement of extra power cords (USB, car, wall) and external batteries gets me through the day. I’ll also excuse the fact that iTunes seems hell bent on not syncing applications from my desktop to my iPhone, and inexplicably removing apps from my phone without any notice. I love that damn phone, and it will take a lot more than lost apps and dropped calls to get it out of my hands.
But I don’t have the same blind dedication to other Apple products, and a string of costly problems has left me more than frustrated.
Mac Mini, Macbook Air, Macbook Pro and Macbook, All Failed
I was pretty excited about my Macbook Air, which packs a ton of hardware into a slim and elegant case. But it was unable to stay connected to Wifi for more than a minute or so, even on the brand new Apple Time Capsule router we’re using at the office. I took it into the Apple store – they kept it for a few days and said nothing was wrong. I argued with them and they did nothing. And since I waited more than two weeks after buying it to bring it back in, I couldn’t simply return it. That $1,800 piece of hardware has now been dismantled for parts for a project we’re working on here.
A high end black Macbook made it through one meeting before having some sort of hardware problem that shut it down for good. I still have a few days left to return it for a refund.
The one year old Mac Mini I was using to drive my living room television failed a month ago. It turned itself into a brick. Parts of it are on my coffee table.
My main travel computer, a seven month old Macbook Pro, had a keyboard failure two weeks ago. Apple repaired it and I’m using it now.
That leaves three other Macs in good working order. One is a Macbook pro that my dad now uses. The other two are iMacs that have never had any problems.
But having major issues with four out of seven computers is, um, unacceptable.
MobileMe Has Screwed Up My Work Ecosystem
I have Macs in my main office and my bedroom, as well as my travel computer. I have spent years getting .Mac, which syncs calendar, contact and email data across machines and in the cloud, working properly. It tended to break a lot, but if you kept the OS constantly up to date and were willing to tinker with it, it was a great way to keep synced across any number of computers. I didn’t really care which one I picked up to access email, write a post, etc.
Then came MobileMe and the Apple’s automatic transfer of .Mac customers over to that ridiculously broken new service. I had a suspicion it wouldn’t work at first given how touchy .Mac was, and so I didn’t touch anything on my old computers. But I have never gotten it working on the new Macs I purchased, and now .Mac has failed on all of the synced machines. No more calendar access, contacts syncing, etc.
Apple keeps giving customers free time on the service as a way to apologize for the problems. But that isn’t good enough. I’m not price sensitive to the $99/year they’re charging for the service. But I need it to work, and I need it to work right now.
The failed computers could just be a coincidence, although the wifi problem with the Macbook Air is well documented. The MobileMe debacle, though, is affecting everyone. Apple shouldn’t have merged the services, at least old .Mac customers wouldn’t be enraged today. They need to get their house in order or they risk alienating all these new customers they’ve added over the last few years. The new buyers aren’t Apple fanatics and won’t sit quietly as they try to access broken services via failing hardware.
The sheer ludicruousness of some of the anti-Apple commentary here astonishes me. Clearly most of these anti-Apple people have never used the iPhone or the Macbook Pro or the Mac Mini or just about any Apple product — and their entire argument hinges from prejudice and personal vendetta, and not on statistics and factual evidence.
I pity you poor Windows and Linux users.. you’ll never see what a computer is truly capable of.. poor you..
(opens up youporn.com to watch some high-resolution porn on his iPhone. Dig that suckaz)
I bought an iPod Touch for my son on his 14th birthday. It surprised me how easily he could use the camera to take photos. Gizmo freak that I am (I’m 40, no less
, I decided to buy the iphone 3g, and have had no issues at all. (I work for Microsoft if you must know, but that doesn’t stop me from appreciating a rival’s product 
One gripe I’ve always had is for these phone companies to have some kind of phone tracking software installed (I’ve lost two of my earlier phones — a nokia and a sony ericsson). Competition is a good thing
I can only hope the consumer wins 
I’m also surprised at how easily your son was able to take photos with the iPod Touch. Mainly because it doesn’t have a camera…
You know, this endless attacking of Apple products is more revealing of competitor’s fears than any deficiency on Apple’s part.
Wow, I was thinking I was alone in this bad Apple costumer experience. I hate the “you need our products, so just shut up!” attitude!
http://tweaklea...-doesnt-matter/
I have used Mac products since the original 128K machine. I have owned my own since a Quadra 660AV I bought in 1994 that let me do video capture right out of the box. I have also used Windows products professionally for over 10 years, as programer, QA engineer, and technical writer.
Do I have issues with Apple products? Yeah – sure. I have had times when I was ready to throw a machine out the window. But seriously think of switching? NEVER.
I have found that the :hype” about Apple products working is generally true. My work experience has always been that The Apple OS was always more reliable and LOTS easier to use.
I don’t understand the problems the author here is has with so many machines. I have not had similar problems. None of my machines have had any problems like that. My 10 year old G3 is still functional. My 4 year old G5 tower works like a charm – running Leopard. My MacBook Pro – one of the very first of the line in 2006 has seen gobs of use and runs great. I have had a few problems there. The built in chat cam does not always work. But it has traveled to more than 5 countries for extended periods of time, processed hours of video and almost 20,000 photos. It is going to college with my daughter next week.
Finally – if the products were really as bad as all that, then I do not understand why Apple’s satisfaction ratings are so much higher than any other company’s.
As for the comment “pay twice as much…” Come on – get real. That is such a bunch of hooie! Yeah – if you want to take your time to build a machine from scratch from second hand parts you may be able to build a comparable machine for half the price. But if you match the CPU memory and other specs, you are lucky to find a 15% price difference. Then add in the software and away it goes. If you really prefer a Windows machine – go ahead and buy one. But quit blindly repeating all the bs mantras that never really were true to begin with.
There’s more than a 15% difference betweenApple products and other major manufacturers spec for spec. It’s even more when you consider that it takes more processor power to get equivalent performance relative to a Windows PC because of the Mach kernel in OS X. And you certainly aren’t getting better quality hardware for paying tha Mac tax. According to Consumer Reports, the Apple laptops have a marginally higher rate of major failure over a five year period than the industry average. None of the other brands in the survey scored worse than Apple. It really undercuts the myth of Mac reliability that is used to justify the Mac tax. And you’ll get hit with the Mac tax again when one of your major components fails. The Macbooks and iMacs are plagued with bad logic boards. There’s a lot of discussion of bad logic boards in Mac forums, and it’s not just the bad capacitors on the rev 1 G5s. The random shutdown syndrome and bad screens that were so famous on the early Intel Macbooks are still with us and on the iMacs as well.
The denial, on the part of the loyal cadre of Mac dittoheads, of significant reliability problems with Macs, and their venom towards those who suggest that there are, amazes me. I have never encountered such persistent and expensive hardware problems running Windows PCs as I’ve had with Macs. And I gave my old Compaq latop some serious abuse. There isn’t even a reliability advantage to the Mac OS anymore, unlike the old days. I haven’t seen a Windows crash in years (XP SP2 or later).
Kool-aid Apple partisan here, nonetheless, out of last four Apple computers, two of them experienced hard drive failures after about 48 months each time. Apple response: “that’s normal life of HD’s”. Still I buy Apple, I just like their stuff. But agreed, 50% failure rate after 4 years (reason why extended warranty is only 3 years?) is evidence of shoddy manufacturing.
Ummm. All I can say is that your problem with Apple is totally USER ERROR.
Allen, Apple doesn’t make the hard drives. I have had drive failures in both PC’s and a Mac. It’s the drive vendor. Duh! Read the warranty and reviews before buying replacements or spares, then you will be enlightened.
Also, Vista SP1 killed my VPN connection. My friend experienced the same, then I Googled and found it was common. Sometimes software updates are bad.
Also, I read that some Swiss? tech company had determined that the iPhone hardware was NOT the problem with dropping calls, but it was the networked and the same thing happened with Blackberry’s in the same location. I am not sure the method of testing, so I would not exclude hardware if they both use the same chip, but what do I know? My Treo 650 dies after 2 and a half months. That’s why it’s good to read consumer ereports. BTW, Apple had the highest satisfaction rating for computers [based on many parameters including crashes and hardware problems], so I don’t know what some the Apple haters in this thread are posting about, other than FUD. Uh, grow up people, cause it’s just a computer. I’m talking to bioth sides while sitting on top of the fence.
I’m waiting for iphone, but it plays me disappointing
So I got iphone video converter http://www.dvd-...-converter.html
My family has four macs….Two iMacs, one Macbook, and one 15 inch powerbook (4.5 years old). We had some minor issues with the powerbook but otherwise, all four units work wonderfully. My Macbook travels with me every day to and from work and is used heavily.
I find it amazing that someone would have such poor luck with all his Apple products given the solid performance we have seen. Guess it’s just bad luck??
Mac Plus: still running.
First LC: died after a year
Second LC: died after six months
Quadra 630: died after two months–needed a motherboard replacement. It was obsolete when I bought it, thanks to the PowerPC processor switch.
After the Quadra…I said “never again, Apple”. Then OS X came out. I like Unix. So…
iBook G4: dead after two years
Intel mini: dead after SIX MONTHS
I have an iPod that is still perfectly useable, but that’s it. Never again, for real this time.
Contrast that with my PCs. I have two early commercial Pentium III machines that each have to be ten years old or more. They are largely unchanged from when I bought them; I have added RAM and changed video cards, but they’re still using their original CPUs and mobos. They are used every day. I have a homebuilt P4 that’s five years old, and an Athlon box that’s four years old. Both still run, one of them 24/7. I have a ThinkPad that I use every day, three years old.
I want to buy an iPod Touch…but I’ve had such bad luck with Apple hardware that it scares me.
I had two hard drives die on my powerbook…first the one that came originally with my powerbook then the apple provided replacement hard drive (it was still under warranty when the first hd failed). This is within a period of 3 years say.
Never had (knock on wood) a hd fail on any of the pcs I had owned previously. I’d second the need for Apple to re-consider their hardware and put in the best possible hardware…particularly since they already over-charge, sometimes dramatically, for hardware relative to comparable pcs.
I have a PowerBook G4 with 1 pixel multi-color vertical lines coming down. I called Apple and they did nothing. I found the receipt today and it turns out I paid $3,800 for this piece of c&%$. Because I depend on Apple-only software Apps for my business, I’ll be forced to continue using their products, but make no mistake about it – I will never recommend their products to anyone ever again!
Dude, this is nothing new. Though I’m not exactly what you’d call a veteran, I’ve been on the A bandwagon since 2001. Through that time there have been numerous design flaws with hinges (iBook, TI), loosing contacts with Graphics Chips (iBook), etc.
While poor quality is unacceptable, you have to take in to account that Apple products do have more passionate users than say Dell…
More passion -> more dissapointment when the product fails -> more public complaints.
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I have family pictures in i photo. Recently a message came up that “you cannot use this version off the application I photo mac os!” That is it ! I cannot access my photos! What the he– is Apple doing? We have all Apple in our home. BILL GATES HERE WE COME FOR PUR NEXT PC
Oh! That’s really very interesting.
I switched to a MacBook Pro last year, and after years of PC laptops that rolled over and played dead at the first sign of adware, I am loving the firewall. Aside from one freeze, which the Genius Bar fixed in about 30 minutes