
Every Mac I've owned has failed - zaveri
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1489-every-mac-ive-owned-has-failed
======
noonespecial
Every _computer_ I've ever had has failed. Even the ones that are working now,
I expect to fail sometime relatively soon.

Some statistically small time after that, I'll fail as well. Bummer.

~~~
brent
You haven't had a Thinkpad :-) (ducks).

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Zev
Sorry dude. I've had a few Thinkpads that have failed on me (wireless died
completely on one, screen on another). No manufacturer is immune to things
dying after awhile.

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sdurkin
Can we stop screwing around with anecdotes and cite some sort of study?

In my family, we have had 5 macs. An iBook G3, a Macbook Pro, two Macbooks,
and an old Powerbook 170 from 1991. All of them are still in perfect working
order, and have only ever broken as a result of physical damage (drops,
spills, etc.) The Powerbook 170 was used as a word processor for about 15
years, and still remains in working order.

I have had nothing but positive experiences with Macs, but I need to emphasize
that my experiences are not data. They are anecdotes, and thus can't prove
anything one way or the other.

~~~
qqq
> Can we stop screwing around with anecdotes and cite some sort of study?

But he said he has enough anecdotes that it feels statistical to him.

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fallentimes
Haha yes. And in 37signals land, they're somehow still a startup, you only
have to work 32 hours per week to be successful, multiple anecdotes = data,
and feelings trump reality.

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petercooper
Feelings _are_ reality for most people. If this were not true, religion,
depression, stock market crashes and mental illness would not exist and we'd
be living in a utopia.

~~~
fallentimes
Right, but that's sort of a strawman. I was mainly referring to this:

 _But he said he has enough anecdotes that it feels statistical to him._

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cubicle67
Every pet I've owned has died (except the current dog)

One of our dogs only lasted 17 years, the other failed after just 15. The
chooks weren't much good; we only seemed to get about 4 or 5 years from them.
The finches are all dead, and so are the budgies. The rabbit died too.

My wife had a dog they gave away, but they kept in contact with the new owner,
and after 6 years with the new owner, that dog was dead too.

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jayroh
Didn't this guy (along with Jason Fried) make a _commercial_ for Apple?

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zaveri
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTM19XLnzPU&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTM19XLnzPU&feature=related)

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ojbyrne
That almost makes me want to rethink my mac usage.

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jamesbritt
I'm pretty sure it was a parody.

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tome
What a great way to direct a lot of traffic to your blog.

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jonursenbach
Welcome to every 37signals blog post.

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mattmaroon
Oh man, I know from experience that nothing good will come from this.

Let the torrent of anecdotes begin.

~~~
bk
It's always best to quote yourself. ;)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=323829>

Totally kidding. :)

But I'm leaving Apple with my next laptop. For coding, Linux is better (same
dev/deployment environment, and better repos / package managers), and for
gaming, windows is better. Also, the hardware is much cheaper (about $500-1000
less for an MBP equivalent non-Apple laptop). Most OS X apps are too mouse
driven for my taste anyway. The only apps I'll miss are Textmate, Smultron,
Dictionary. The only OS feature I'll miss is painless plug and play.

PS: Written on a 2 year old macbook whose screen flickers after sleep and
which is constantly in danger of overheating due to fan failures.

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axod
2 years is pretty good going IMHO. After 2 years a laptop is starting to look
pretty dated. The battery is likely to be dead, the hard drive likely to be
miniscule.

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robg
Seems to me that the Mac failure rate is always going to seem higher because
of the devotees - a certain class of selection bias. For instance, if a Dell
fails who's going to:

1) ascribe it to Dell and not the relevant component maker?

and

2) continue to buy Dell products after a few failures?

~~~
davidw
I'm going to keep buying Dells because even though I bought the computer in
the US, when the HD crashed here in Austria, they had a guy at my house with a
new drive in just over 24 hours. Yeah, I paid a bit more for the service
options, but since this computer is my business, that makes sense, and ended
up saving me a lot of worry. The overall price was still very reasonable for
what I got.

~~~
dag
Note: International warranty only valid on 'business model' laptops - mostly
Latitudes.

Also, you often have to be a PITA to Dell to make sure that international
service happens.

That's my experience, as a former Dell business tech support dude.

~~~
davidw
Nope, it was an Inspiron, and I was expecting a big hassle, delays, and the
whole messy dance, but it was quite easy. The German support guy who I reached
checked my information, and asked whether I'd prefer someone to come around or
for them to mail the disk, and both being free, I chose to have someone come
by with the disk as it was faster.

I guess I may have gotten lucky, but it really left a good impression on me.

~~~
dag
Most Inspirons don't have a warranty that includes international service. I
had to tell people in similar situations that they need to bring or mail their
machine back to the US before it could be fixed. So, I'm leaning toward lucky.

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olefoo
Well, this should provide for a certain amount of conflicted ambivalence, the
collision of Rails and Mac fanaticisms should be amusing.

I'd have to say that my experience of Apple hardware is even worse than his,
modern Macbooks are at least user serviceable meaning you only need to undo a
couple of screws to get at the hard drive, the count on the old iBooks was
between twelve and 17 screws to get to the hard drive.

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jpcx01
I have a similar experience. Every mac I've had has died (basically my last 4
computers). 2 screen deaths, one overheat, and one coffee incident.

I blame all of these on myself. Even paying 3k for a top of the line laptop, I
really dont expect the computer to last more than 1.5 years at the way I use
the computer. Pounding away on the computer for 60 hours a week on average,
and working out of lots of coffee shops, I'm hardly the typical use case for a
computer user.

Just like a consumer coffee machine cant be expected to stay functional for
long if it were in use in a restaurant, I dont expect my consumer laptop to
work for the same time period as an average consumer would.

However, if you're using a laptop for commercial purposes, and at such a high
capacity, you should probably expect to be investing at least yearly in your
equipment.

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cubicle67
In a previous life (before I had a wife and kids), I had both money and balls
and used to do a lot of dirt bike riding.

This same argument used to come up then too, in regard to the European bikes
(KTM and Husky) vs the Japanese ones. Essentially, people would get upset that
their new European bike, for which they had paid a substantial premium over an
equivalent Japanese bike, would still break and require maintenance. I've
owned both a KTM and a Husky (plus a Honda and a Kawasaki), and can attest to
the fact that they are just pieces of machinery, like everything else. But...
(and this is the bit people find hard to understand) ... the Euro bikes had
something the Japanese ones didn't; something that made you forgive their
mechanical woes and their extreme price. Man I miss those days...

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fendale
I don't think it's fair to put a hard disk failure down as a failed mac ...
It's one of those things you think are supposed to fail someday!

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tdonia
every device with millions of integral connections between delicate components
i've owned has been so susceptible to failure that i've got reason to wonder
if this is an untapped market...so far i've not seen a class of consumer
electronics that fails as beautifully as its software is expected to.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Toys, and almost anything manufactured by Nintendo. Things designed for abuse,
in other words.

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matthew-wegner
Surprised nobody has mentioned how Apple treats customers when they do have
hardware failures. There are a lot of stories of hardware being
swapped/upgraded in Apple Stores, even out of warranty.

Hardware failure is inevitable; the real question is, does Apple do a better
job when that inevitability strikes?

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MaysonL
I once had a minicomputer fail on me when one of the TTL chips fell out of the
CPU.

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bprater
Every Mac I've owned has not failed. Seriously, they are all still chugging
along.

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randrews
Odd. I've had one Mac fail on me (dual-USB iBook, the one with the motherboard
problem). They replaced the motherboard, but then I sold it anyway a few
months later.

Every other Mac I've ever had since then is still running. Another iBook, a
MacBook, PowerMac G4, and the Mac Pro I'm typing on.

It's a little annoying, honestly. At least the PC hardware has the decency to
die and get out of the way when I stop using it. :-)

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maurycy
That's why I wish I could have ThinkPad with OS X, without spending too much
time on non-standard configuration. ;-)

~~~
river_styx
ThinkPad + Ubuntu FTW

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chaostheory
I've had a powermac g5 tower dual 1.6 for over two years now and it still
works fine (though flash seems to be a lot slower now)

My other old mac a G3 (i forget how old it is) is still working well with
Tiger (albeit a bit slower compared to everything else)

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mcxx
Network card on my MacBook refused to work just after 6 months. On the other
hand, my 4 year old Asus laptop still works as a charm, apart from the HDD
failure. Still, the HDD went on 3,5 years of heavy and tough usage.

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jherdman
That's a pretty normal time span for a laptop to fail. Someone working at Dell
once told me that components generally start failing after or around 2 years.

My laptop rule of thumb: always buy the extended warranty.

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zandorg
I have a thing for second-hand 2001-era HP Omnibook 6100's, which fail after
about 2 years (screen hinge, etc), but are QUIET. A recent favourite is
Thinkpad T23's, which are titanium cased.

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mhartl
The only computer that has ever failed me was a Sun Sparc station, 'round
about 1995 ('twas the hard drive). Other than that, so far I've been
unscathed. _< knocks on wood>_

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acangiano
I have the same identical problem with my MBP. I'll be forced to get a new
laptop in January, as being without one is a huge inconvenience.

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rob
Post seems pretty spot-on.

My Mac Pro's RAM failed within 6 months.

My MacBook Pro's battery died and had to be replaced within 11 months.

~~~
Zev
If its within 6 months, AppleCare should have replaced it for free. There were
some known battery issues - Thats why Apple replaced (and still does) the
batteries if you bring it in and your battery is bad.

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antidaily
moral of the story: buy applecare.

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vondur
Hard Disks and Optical drives only fail on Macintoshes?

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qqq
Every bias I've owned has failed me.

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weegee
The longest I've ever had a Mac was six years, when I used a Mac Plus from
1989-1995, when I got my dads old IIsi. Then in 1996 I bought a Quadra 605,
and in 1998 I bought a PowerMac 7200, and in 2000 I bought a new iMac. In 2001
I bought a Powerbook Lombard 400, and in 2002 I bought a G4/466. Then in 2003
I bought a new Powerbook 12" 1ghz, and that worked perfectly for me for three
years until December 2006 when I bought a new Macbook which needed a new
motherboard six months later. Since then it's worked pretty OK though it does
seem to completely lock up every now and then requiring a forced shutdown,
which didn't happen with the old Powerbook 12" if I recall correctly. Our 4
year old Dell PC has worked perfectly and we will continue to use it until it
blows up.

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agentbleu
every pc I have owned has failed!

~~~
webwright
I'm not a Mac guy... Never had a PC fail me (over about a decade), except one
ultraportable toshiba (screen failure). That's... 4 desktops and 2 laptops.

Of course, it DOES fail on the software side... Windows gets pretty painful as
it ages.

I've always aid that Mac vs. PC is a decision of whether you want crappy-but-
pretty hardware and good OS or ugly-but-solid hardware (assuming you do your
research) and a mediocre OS that ages poorly.

I'm seriously considering a hackintosh for my next machine.

~~~
anthonyrubin
Most of the parts in Apple computers are the same parts used in PCs. A
majority of the PC laptops are built by one of a few companies in China. As a
former sys admin I've dealt with my share of PC hardware failure and in the
last several years I've seen my share of Mac failures.

Hard drives are probably the component most likely to die in either and they
all use the same group of vendors. Display failures are also more common in
laptops and again, they all use the same group of vendors.

~~~
icefox
"Three of my older laptops have had their hard drives fail (with painful data
loss in one instance)."

More like they deserved what they got. A four or five year old hard drive
should b expected to die yesterday and full backups should be an absolute
requirement. I have had plenty of drives die long before that and would never
dare push a hard drive to such a long limit with no backup, especially a
laptop one that is moved around a lot.

And just to top it off "hard drives" are not Apple special hardware. I have
noticed that some comments have negative points, how do I vote down something
(in this case the article)?

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gregf
What do you expect from subpar parts at a 300% markup?

