Slashdot Mirror
Apple Laptop Reliability Survey
Nikopol writes "The venerable Macintouch site recently released the results and analysis of a survey on Apple laptop reliability." From the article: "Our survey spanned every laptop capable of running Mac OS X, encompassing 41 models sold over seven and a half years. A challenge in ascertaining the reliability of any device is that more time gives them more opportunity to break, so new devices should always look more reliable at first glance. Our survey asked participants when their laptop first needed a repair -- 'first year', 'second or third year', and 'fourth year or later.' These correspond to the duration of Apple's standard one-year warranty, the AppleCare extended warranty program, and any repairs that might happen outside any warranty coverage period. We also asked participants if they purchased AppleCare for their laptop."
We strike again!
As much as people like to quote the macintouch surveys, they are still self-selected unverified Internet studies. As such, they are not useful for any real-world decision making, any more than Slashdot polls.
Macintouch claims that this is not a problem, but they have no way to support that claim.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I was thinking, could someone make a program which takes URLs out of slashdot's RSS feed and automatically hits the Coral cache to ensure that a cached copy is available ? If a subscriber did it, all the better.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
I've had my 17" Powerbook for about 3 years now and haven't had a single issue. Awesome!
yeah, let me know how cheap it is to replace a full board if it goes bad.
Come on, we should know better about extended warranties. Applecare on a Powerbook is $349. That's a pretty steep bet that you're probably going to lose. After all it doesn't cover accidents like drops or spills, which are the primary cause of laptop demise. The second leading problem is hard drive failure, which, if it happens, can be repaired by a tech for less than $200 (cost including the new drive.) Third are logic board or screen problems, which are expensive but not so likely. You may be out $700 if that happens (and it's a small chance), but if you go with Applecare you are certainly out $349 either way.
Remember, you get a year's warranty with purchase. If the model has a defect that will show within the year. If not, it will probably last for three or four years without trouble. The chances of a serious problem (other than drive failure) within the second or third year are pretty slim, and if there's not a problem Apple keeps the cash. If you're anything like me in two, three or four years you'll be eyeing a new notebook anyway, and the $349 you blew on Applecare would go a long way towards a brand new model.
If Applecare was less-- like $100-- I'd say it was good insurance. But right now, it's just a cash cow for Apple.
I have yet to see even my Toyota not need to have something fixed after 3-4 years.
I expect my Apple laptops to require the same after that length of time. I get my money out of them as they are heavily used and I'm not surprised when something bonks out. And yes I buy extended warranties just because of the screens and other fragile expensive parts, and they have saved me more than they cost over time.
My Dell laptops seem to require even more service, so on a subjective scale the Apple's have about half the repair frequency for me.
Insisting that a complex, somewhat fragile product should have no repairs in years is a bit unrealistic at the least.
well, my hp was bought in the spring of 2001, has gone all over the us and europe on many trips, and has not had a SINGLE problem, so I would say your ibook really kinda sucks...
How on earth can you be happy with something that has one major failure and a problem ? would you say an automobile was goood if only th transmission needed to be replaced after a year ?
Despite the limitations on the accuracy of the data, this is interesting and seems to describe well behavior I've seen. I have about 12 Apple laptops for student use (they develop code to run on our clusters and having their own laptops works great for that) and have had several for my own use since 2000 and have been very happy with the machines overall. AppleCare has worked very well- it's quick and effective. I used to use Sony Vaio subnotebooks, which were nice laptops and ran Linux nicely, but they were quite flimsy and Sony's repair process was ridiculous. They seemed to think it was reasonable to have the laptop sent to them for a month- being without a machine for a month is a huge hit, especially if it is your only/main machine. So for the Sonys I would wait until there were three or four problems before sending them in, since the process was a huge, slow hassle. For the Apples, they express mailed a box and you expressed it back at their expense, and they were never gone for long, and the process was very smooth, especially compared to Sony's nightmare repair process. I gave up on Sony and don't know if they have improved things, but a company that things that it's no big deal to keep your computer for a month and keep you in the dark about when its coming back isn't selling anything to me anymore. I did more repairs on the Apples than the Sonys, since I got a batch of iBooks which were vulnerable to the motherboard video weirdness, but the repairs were so smooth that it was no big deal so I wasn't waiting until there were a bunch of things wrong to send them back.
I found Apple very generous with the motherboard replacement on our iBooks, doing several for free even after the period and AppleCare expired. They did refuse to do the replacement until it actually failed, so there were a couple that we were just waiting to flake out, but overall that process was quick and painless, so all those high replacement motherboard failures in the 2001-2003 G3 iBook range really aren't as bad as they might look.
A few quibbles with the analysis on the table:
1) They don't normalize "dropping" for age of the computer, so that column is essentially meaningless. The fact that only 2% of the 17" PB G4 HRs have been dropped has a lot more to do with the fact that the machine has only been available since October 2005 than anything else, so highlighting that as "better than one standard deviation below the mean" is meaniningless.
2) There are different populations for the iBook and PB crowd, so it's a bit unfair to compare their reliability. That is, the iBooks are more likely to be used by students and the PB are more likely to be used by grownups. I think the iBooks are significantly sturdier machines (given how well they've held up to my students use) but given that on average they are subjected to less careful treatment (on average- I know some very careful students and some reckless faculty, but those are exceptions), their sturdiness doesn't show up as much in the table as a true apples v. apples (sorry) comparison would show, I suspect.
3) As in point #1, it appears that they didn't normalize for age of computer in any of the "component failure" columns, so the machines that are worse than 1 std. dev. are all older machines which have had more time to fail, so that should have been explained or corrected for.
4) The power brick/dropped correlation is described but not explained well. Those little white bricks have failed fairly often and I think are a significant problem. I think they don't hold up well under rough treatment (frayed cord where it joins the brick and frayed cord at the computer end were the most common problems) and "rough treatment" correlates well with dropping the computer, presumably. Certainly I have seen many bricks fall to the floor as they are dragged by their cords and repeated dropping takes it toll. I got several extra bricks to keep in our campus lab since students would often want to borrow mine after they left theirs at home.
Those are quibbles- I think the data there is interesting. Even though it has shortcomings, you can only work with the data you have...
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.