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Apple's Growing Pains
Tyler Too writes "Is Apple having an unusually large number of quality control problems since its switch to Intel? Ars Technica runs down the litany of problems MacBook and MacBook Pro users have experienced since their launch. From the article: 'Is Apple's quality control slipping through the cracks with this Intel transition? Given the volume of available evidence that has appeared in such a short timeframe, it's simply impossible to say that Apple isn't having problems.'"
I do not think it is as much as an issue that Apples Quality Dropped but just the fact their entire Macintosh Product Line is now Generation 1, systems. Normally Apple Spaces out their system releases and refresh their product line in 3 year cycles. This time they did major changes internally to their entire product line. Normally the rule of thumb is to wait for Gen 2 but with all their products Gen 1 there is little to choose from. The MacBook Pros seem to get some minor fixes.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Is Apple having an unusually large number of quality control problems since its switch to Intel?
Sheesh. EVERY product of Apple's has unusually large number of quality control problems. From iPod batteries, to laptop fires, to cracks in the cubes, to motherboard defects, on and on and on.
Seriously, where does this idea come from that Apple never has problems? They have constant hardware problems.
Is it that there are so many problems per capita, or just that the company is so high-profile?
To me, it's arguable that these are no different than the other problems Dell or HP/Compaq have, there's just a somewhat higher profile when it's a Mac. Granted, no transition is seamless, and I know that there are a good number of people that are having issues, but I haven't spoken or interacted with anyone who's said that any issues they are having would make them rethink their buying decision.
Well it is the first time after all, but then jobs shouts so load IBM where probably glad to be rid of the echos he was creating ;)
No computer company is perfect, like the article says, but Apple prices its hardware premium-style because their reputation is strong and customers expect Apple hardware to be better than stuff from Dell. Doesn't Apple win brand studies all the time? I mention this because I think it influences the way people report problems. Apple users may expect more and therefore complain more. How do you account for that?
Our Uni store sells Macs, Compaqs and Thinkpads. Compaqs are by far the worst for support, but Apple has truly shipped some bad mojo this last time around. Discoloration is common and the "whining" (I would describe it more like a pitch) is something we've sent out to Apple for more than once. The iMacs have been great, or maybe their users are easier to please. Less work for me is a good thing.
Apple is having Q&A problems, but they'll get them fixed, they always do.
Isn't Apple notorious for having issues with products that are "1st Generation"?
I thought it was pretty common amongst macheads to always wait until at least the 3rd iteration of a product so it becomes stable
... then they knock you down. Dvorakitis is spreading IMHO - Ars will get a lot of page-hits (and hence ad revenue) from people wanting to read about this. Sure, Apple have had problems, but not as many as Dell, and I doubt Dell are any worse than any other random manufacturer.
:-)
Apple actually have it worse than most - to an extent they sell on style, and "shiny goodness". People are *more* vocal when something goes wrong with something they like, rather than some random notebook work gave them to use at the weekend... I'm actually surprised the vocal minority haven't been louder. Perhaps Apple ought to release the figures for their return/repair rates - I seem to recall someone saying they were well below industry norms - even *with* all this hullaballoo.
Can I also just say I bought an MBP pro, and it hasn't exhibited any of the problems mentioned in the article... because normally you never hear about it when it works fine - only when it's broken in some way. As a software developer, I knew all about that
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
It took me three attempts to get a working Macbook. The third one isn't all that great either, the battery latch turny thing is a bit wonky.
Unlike Microsoft, which has a lot of customers that are concerned about legacy application support, Apple has a customer-base that generally uses newer software, and tends to be more forgiving to these kinds of problems. OS X updates have frequently broken all kinds of old applications, but their market share continues to go up.
By now most folks know that purchasing Revision A hardware is a gamble - to be honest I think that some of the fun that comes with living on the "bleeding edge" is the knowledge that if things work, you've really survived something.
The biggest problem I have with the apple transition was that they had a 32-bit intel architecture that now must be supported for years to come. I honestly am not quite sure why they did that, as there will undoubtably be some support headaches for apple developers for the next few years.
It's Apple's supplier that's having the quality problem's. Their CM (Contract Manufacturer) is like all other companies in the EMS industry and suffering under the demand for price concessions and supply fullfilment. Like all OEM's Apple wants their product now, perfectly built and cheap, and like all OEMs doesn't realise they can only have 2 of the proverbial 3.
Working in the industry I can tell you that as the OEM demands you meet shipments, units that should stay behind for debug or rework tend to float out the door to meet revenue/demand numbers. Apple's resurgence in popularity probably has everyone in the supply line getting every possible unit out the door to meet demand.
I work in an operation where we service about 300 new Mac computers per month (and, of course, many more PC computers). At this time, about one-third of our service involves brand new Intel-based Mac computers. I can say that the amount of problems coming through related to these brand new machines is no different from the amount of the problems we have had over time with PowerPC-based Macs. My personal experience is that there is no basis for any claim of any increase in problems. I have, however, observed Apple being more responsive to problems than ever before in their history. Our PC's are generally Dells and it looks like Apple is taking on the leader of the Windows makers. I can only expect good things from vigorous competition.
What stupid IT manager figured to get Generation 1 Macs for your business. Any IT manager who knows anything it is to be more conservative and wait for Gen 2.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
the hell knows? They won't say, and the public isn't likely to find out the truth. In reality, most rev1 products have problems, and laptops take a hell of a rough beating, especially compared to stationary computers. Does Apple have more problems than any other OEM? Not likely, considering Apple contracts the manufacturing of their products to the same people that make everyone else's products also. If Apple were experiencing massive quality control problems, we would see it across the channel, not just at one company and one product line. And please, it's not as if Intel hardware is especially fragile compared to ppc hardware, so far as I know "Intel Inside" was never meant to be a marketing slogan for "fragile"
One of the original and most widely covered issues with the MacBook Pro was the mysterious "whining" noise.
That's weird. I thought that problem went away when you let the design department buy the macs in the first place?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Yeah, as if Dell doesn't have massive quality problems. Several Optiplex models have horrendously bad motherboards that fail within 2-3 years, Dell's warranty support is a real pain to deal with, and they never acknowledge quality problems. At least with Apple, you don't have to speak to Indian tech support who really doesn't give a shit.
*shrug*
Apple is the most closely scrutinized hardware company *ever*. If my MacBook appears to make an elusive noise beyond the hearing range of the average dog, it makes the cover of Time. If my Packard Bell shitbox releases its magic smoke and dies, it doesn't even get on Digg.
It's just the story of the month, and people will get bored of it eventually. The alternative conspiracy theory, of course, is that it could keep being fuelled by Microsoft's astroturf budget.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
From the comments of other, long-time Mac-users, I'd conclude that the current generation of products is not too bad, especially not for "Gen. 1" products.
Talk to long-time Mac-Addicts and they will relay horror-stories about virtually any Apple-product in the last years.
But who cared about Apple notebooks 3-5 years ago?
It's only recently that they moved themselves into the limelight.
One reason why they moved so slow on all the Macbook-motherboard-issues may be that they first wanted to do a complete assessment of the problem, rather than do a messy "trial and error" exchange, like so many vendors do where you get the notebook "repaired" with the original problem still persisting and new errors added... (could probably get an Apple-Repair-horror-story about that, too...).
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Of course Dell and HP will have the same problems as Apple. For most of their lower-end systems, they also use processors from Intel. Of course, most Apple systems aren't considered as low-end as what Dell and HP puts out today. It's more apt to compare Apple systems to those low-to-midrange workstations from Sun and IBM.
One thing we notice is that Sun uses Opteron processors in many of its lower-end workstation products, but they hardly have anywhere near the quality problems that Apple has experienced lately. That was even the case when they first released their various models, so it's not a matter of the Apple equipment just being "first generation". Sun's first-generation Opteron workstations worked just fine, even being a completely new line.
It may be painful to admit it, but the problems likely do stem from their use of products from Intel. Lately, things haven't been going so swell for Intel, from a technical standpoint. Between the Itanium and Pentium4 debacles, it's no wonder that people are running into problems with their newest processors.
Most of us Mac users who did buy first-generation systems now wish that Apple had instead dealt with AMD. I see my colleagues with their new Opteron systems from Sun, and how they haven't had any problems with their computers. Meanwhile, my new MacBook Pro suffers from severe heating issues. As an Apple user, I think Apple made a horrible mistake. AMD was the way to go, but it's too late to fix the problems now. I just hope that Apple's name isn't tarnished too much by these Intel-tainted products.
I find this to be fairly disturbing. I personally wouldn't ever buy an iPod, but buying an Apple desktop or laptop, is definitely in the realm of possibilities (well, once I have the money and they fix these problems).
I have to say that I am somewhat surprised that the problems don't appear to eminate from the actual boards and such; but rather from the way in which they were sandwiched together.
Hopefully, this won't turn out the way that the intel processors have recently. Released with a long list of known bugs, and without a significant discount to try and compensate for such defects.
They're being measured against a high standard - their own. I've got a ca. 2000 PowerBook G5 500 (Firewire) for which - the LCD - the battery - the case - the sound card and - the DVD-ROM are all broken. But the amazing thing is that it still works, for all these problems were caused by me: dropping the machine on hardwood, concrete, and pressboard, among other abuses. At one point I patched a split in the bottom part of the case with masking tape, and left it that way for ~2 years. I'm running the machine now, with an external monitor, keyboard, mouse, sound card and speakers. It still runs. When I get a new machine, it'll become a media center at the cabin (with an external HDD and DVD-RW). Apple hardware has a history of being extremely good. I hope they return to that level of quality, so I can buy a new laptop!
Magic 8 ball says no, try again later.
There's no point for repeating the same dumb thing over and over and over...
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
It's more apt to compare Apple systems to those low-to-midrange workstations from Sun and IBM.
Price or performance?
paintball
No "Could this be the end for Apple?" question at the end of the description?
I have been a MacBook Pro user since early May. I know many people have had the aformentioned issues, but the numbers they draw seem to be coming from know where. They says "hundreds" of people have complained. I have not seen any statistics. The most vocal people are the ones with problems. They are the ones who stand out the most. They also compare it to the iBook G3 crisis. I don't think that it is anywhere near that level yet. I could be wrong, but again I have seen no hard numbers from anywhere. Also, these are all first generation products. Apple has always had problems with first generation products. I think that everyone is now seeing a chance to sink their teeth into them since they have been so successful as of late and some people are sick of hearing about it or are upset that Apple can't produce something revolutionary every 4 months (some large companies never produce anything revolutionary).
(See subject.)
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I bought a MacBook almost two weeks ago (this is the first OS X Mac that I've ever owned; I have an old Mac SE and Performa 6220 that I received 2 years ago from a teacher's friend). I've dreamed of owning a Mac for over two years now, and when the MacBook came out, it was the Mac notebook that I've always wanted. It had OS X, was the right screen size for me, and did everything that I wanted. I was a bit worried about the purchase, due to some of the problems that I've continued to hear about on the Internet (heat so much that it can cook an egg, discoloration within a few days, mooing noises, etc). I was also a bit worried with some technical details (integrated graphics and OS X performance, plus glossy screen).
However, once I bought the machine, I couldn't be happier. I have no problems with my Mac. I've never heard the fan (it is silent), I see no discoloration occurring at all (although I should clean it often in order for it to continue looking new), and the heat is warm enough for me to feel confortable on a cold day (it's even confortable on a lap), but not hot enough to burn myself. The glossy screen is never an annoyance for me (I forget that it is glossy whenever I am working in a non-floursecent environment), and the integrated graphics do a great job handling OS X's graphics and video playback; quite better than the Voodoo 3 in my old PC. Since buying my Mac, I haven't turned on my desktop PC (an old 950MHz Duron with 384MB RAM, running Windows XP and FreeBSD; a generally trouble free computer) once.
Now, it is less than 2 weeks old, so it is probably too early to tell. However, I advise people looking into getting a MacBook or MacBook Pro to just buy one (unless they want to hold out for a Core 2 Duo Mac). Everybody that I know who has one has a wonderful experience with them. They are wicked fast, quite elegant, and comes with all of that OS X goodness. Plus, since these are of a later generation of the first generation, all of the problems should be generally fixed.
And, no, I do not work at Apple, nor do I get paid by Apple to make this. This is my personal experience. I'm just a computer science student, that's all.
We've had a lot of problems with certain Dell Optiplex models, like leaking motherboard capacitors and bad hard drives. Dell never acknowledged a defect with them even after every single computer from one order died with the same problem. However, they were fast about shipping out new parts or an on-site service tech next day when we did have a problem. So no problem getting hardware warranty support. Don't bother calling for any software support, though.
I think it might just be a small, vocal group of people having problems.
The only "common issue" I have with my black MacBook is the "mooing" which isn't even noticable with headphones.
It runs much, much cooler than any other laptop I own, and it's infinitly quieter.
The only quality control issues I've had are that the hinge is a bit squeaky and the power brick makes odd noises.
That's *it.*
Maybe I just got lucky. Who knows?
No, these are not growing pains or any other phenomenon with a common unusual cause. They are all unrelated QC issues that could've happened and do happen with all products of such complexity. The only correlation due to a common cause related to Apple the company is the fact that these are all first generation products with radically new engineering compared to the old Macs all released within a short period of time.
Most of this apparent correlation is due to the fact that the Intel macs are getting unprecidented attention. The attention and scrutany is also amplified by the fact that forums and things like flickr are more popular now then they were during the previous launches of Apple's producs such as the original iMac and iBook lines - both of which had their share of QC issues. I would argue that Apple's Intel Macs have received orders of magnitude more publicity and attention then any of their previous products, as well as their competitors. I mean when was the last time a Dell product was featured in /. WITHOUT it having to first explode or something...
So, no, ars technica - your article is a non-story about a non-issue.
PS: Not that this is suprising - /. has been featuring many of these lately...
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
I'm not being my regular Apple fanboy self here; Consider that these are the first generation of a major architectural change. I'm not buying a MacBook -because- of this alone. My 12" PowerBook will do me fine for the next two years at least. I'd even give MS the benefit of the doubt if they were in the same position (and I'm giving them LOTS of slack on Vista, even when I raz them).
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Still they have gotten to the migration 210days pretty slick. Quality and customer support should be a higher concern. They could easily lead in that area.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Is Apple sourcing their parts from Gateway 2000 now?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I've had numerous problems with my PowerBook and 2 of my friends had problems requiring them to take their Powerbook to the Apple store. Those same 2 friends had their iPods die on them. It's not them or me, I think it is more a trend of Apple to push the scale from robust heavy duty ugly hardware, toward pretty, fragile hardware.
Within a week of buying my AlBook, the corner was dented by a cab driver who dropped my bag 3 feet to the street. That also pushed metal in the hinge which made the luscious (but thin) screen not want to stay shut, even though the elegant (but non-fault-tolerant) magentic hook tried its best to hold onto the screen.
Because all the parts, motherboard, everything is housed in that aluminum core, it cannot be repaired, only replaced.
Don't get me wrong, the AlBook is GORGEOUS as is all Apple hardware, but to me, a portable needs to be RESILIENT. These computers are taken everywhere, put on countertops, are spilled on, and fall off chairs.
For that reason, a MacBook is my next purchase. I'd much rather have a plastic case that's strong than a peautiful metal one that's fragile.
As a designer I tend to question Apple's practice of prototyping and testing hardware and software.
It would seem that time constraints and secrecy overshadow the cycle of design > prototype > data collection > design (repeat).
I can't imagine they're able to get enough real world data under such a vale of secrecy. They seem to test products in the market place... which means rev 1 Apple products are almost always questionable.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
"it's simply impossible to say that Apple isn't having problems."
Apple isn't having problems.
See? I can make stuff up too!
(The above is a joke, not a troll. Please mod accordingly; it's not like I've got karma to burn.)
I deliberately bought a 20" iMac PPC a few days after the first intel model shipped. I figured it would be my last mac for a few years because it always take them a long time to get a major change right. The same thing happened on their Motorola to IBM transition.
Nobody's ever satisfied.
We want Macs, you all said, but they're soooooo expensive! If oooonly they were cheaper! Apple gives you your wish, builds the stuff cheaper, and predictably there's an uptick in equipment failures.
Do you think the Macs of today are of the same build quality of the oh-so-expensive, damn-near-bulletproof Macs of yesteryear? Do you think they cost relatively the same to build, and Apple is just charging less and eating the difference in cost to make you happy? No, they are cutting corners to save you cheap bastards a few bucks, and you're getting what you paid for, just like you wanted, and now you're gonna cry about it?
Pfft.
Apple has become a jewelry company specializing in audio appliances - it's certainly not a computer company, in the sense of Dell or HP. look at where Apple's revenue is! the computers they sell are primary offshoots of the audio-jewelry line, so how important is it that they work perfectly? as part of the fashion industry, Apple focus is and should be to manage their spin and buzz, mainly through appearance and drama, rather than reliability, price/performance, etc. it can't slow down the pace of product intros to iron out all the little flaws, since the sudden unveiling is a standard fashion-industry technique. who ever heard of Armani trumpeting the beta2 of rev 4.3 of the italian, 3-button pinstripe suit? Apple is the Manolo Blahnik of the computer-electronics industry.
quit judging Apple by hardware-vendor standards! it's a fashion company, and should be measured appropriately. I'm just waiting for Steve Jobs to literally walk the runway with some new do-dad (bluetooth earrings?).
I was the only one who read the headline as "Apple's Growing Penis", wasn't I?
Ok, let's feed the troll...
Where I used to work they standardized on mid to high end IBM laptops and workstations which didn't prevent a fair sized epidemic of motherboard failures and the ethernet cards on the ThinkPads failed so regularly the IT department gave up on having them sent in for repair and issued ThinkPad users with slot-in ethernet cards. The Sun server systems I have worked with have also had their share of hardware issues.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I've had my MacBook since 1 week after they went on sale. I only hear the fan when I inadvertenty block the port, I use it on my lap all the time without cooking the boys. I have no discoloration except for a slight smudge on the "y" key. I haven't had it spontaneously shut down. Never been bothered by screen glare. No issues at all. Except it could use a bigger screen.
Personally, I think it's just the internet amplification effect.
PS - It's my first and only Mac. I'm no fanboy.
Wasn't it a few years ago PC makers products had a 11% defect rate. I wonder what the percentage is for the full Intel Mac line, and what was it during the PPC years?
I never buy the first off the line. Rev B or C is usually worth waiting for.
photosMy Photostream
I work for a major, major, Australia Apple authorised Reseller with a service center that services many, many Macs.
Is Apple having problems? Nope. They did with the first batch of MacBook Pros, but since then, it's been smooth sailing.
Apple's biggest problems are the iBooks.
You also have to remember Apple are selling, a lot more Laptops then they have ever done in the past. Sales in Australia have skyrocketed so high that almost no-one can keep up with demand.
If we could find a thousand users with dead new Macs last quarter, would that be a big problem?
Apple shipped 1.3 million Macs last quarter. If you found a thousand examples of bad quality in the same quarter, that's a rate of 0.08%...any company would be proud to have such a low defect rate. Even 10,000 bad machines would only result in 0.8% failure rate. Does your own company do better?
Yet it only takes a couple loud bloggers to cause a ruckus in the media.
Do you find it acceptable that there QA is so bad they feel the need to field test their designs on all of their early adopters?
One of my coworkers who purchased the Macbook Pro when it was announced needed a motherboard replacement. Then last week we purchased one for a new employee. It died the after arrival. So now we have to wait two weeks to get a replacement in. Good thing I had an extra G4 desktop I could press into usage temporarily.
I know the whole "don't by gen 1 Apple products" belief, but really I mean why is that acceptable?
On the other hand we have several Intel based iMacs and have no complaints with them at all.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
If a company's tech support should be berated for buying gen 1 macs, should Apple be berated for failing to continue to sell non-gen-1 macs during the transition?
Or, indeed, for not simply introducing the iNTEL lines and keeping the PPC lines going.
Yes, the market would have supported that.
One problem, of course, is that Apple would have had to keep the lines up to date in the year before the "switch". No complaints about fake unavailability.
Here's my experience with my MacBook...
I bought it.
It works.
I know that it's in vogue to criticize Apple now, and I know that Apple is high profile, but their QC issues are no different than they've usually been. The first-gen products have a higher lemon rate.
Woohoo.
Anyone remember the first-gen TiBooks, where the antenna design sucked so much that getting beyond 50 feet of Airport range was a miracle? Or the cubes with the power button that was so sensitive it would sometimes trigger itself? Or the cube's cracking acryllic? What about the PB 5200's Lion battey?
Moral of the story: first-gen products have high failure rates. Courtesy of the architecture switch, most of Apple's product line is first-gen. Therefore, much of Apple's product line has a higher than normal failure rate. Apple's not suffering, they're not dying, and they haven't decided that "Hey, why don't we take our reputation for quality, and flush it down the toilet? Let's shaft all our customers just because!" To Dvorak, and indeed pundits all around the world (like the author of TFA, for example) I have this message: grow the fuck up.
The real litigious bastards...
(emphasis mine)
It's pretty funny to read a sentence about quality control followed up by something spellcheck could catch. Then again, this is Slashdot.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
"It may be painful to admit it, but the problems likely do stem from their use of products from Intel. Lately, things haven't been going so swell for Intel, from a technical standpoint. Between the Itanium and Pentium4 debacles, it's no wonder that people are running into problems with their newest processors."
Wow. Just wow. Let's take a look at this:
1. Apple's history of first generation hardware problems goes WAY back before the Intel switchover.
2. Intel's problems in terms of the Pentium 4 have to do with processor performance per clock speed versus AMD. This is not true of the Core series of processors. The higher clocked P4s do run hot but they don't break despite the heat. P4 chips detect overheating and drop the processor speed so that the chip doesn't fry. Try yanking a heat sink off of a P4 cpu and watch what happens. Slows to a snails pace but doesn't fry.
3. If Intel were the cause of the problem wouldn't these same problems be affecting other PC manufacturers?
4. If the Intel chip were the problem wouldn't the whole line of Macs suffer the same problems? The mini and iMac are both Core Duo based and yet there have been no major problems reported with iMacs or minis.
These problems which are affecting Macbooks and Macbook Pros have to do with the overall design of these laptops - not with the chips inside them.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
We've bought many, many first generation Macs over the years - going all the way back to the IIcx. There were minor problems here and there but the extra money we paid was worth it. And the same for my personal Macs I've bought - every single one was a first gen Mac IIcx, 8500/9500s, and G5s.
From the mod-bombing the Apple zealots are doing in this thread, I don't regret leaving Apple behind. It was fun while it lasted, though.
Dells and HPs have problems, of course, but the few Intel Macs we bought this past six months are both more expensive and more problem prone than any of our x86 OEM machines.
I'm surprised at all the negative threads about Apple. After twenty years with Microsoft products I recently started switching over to Mac and couldn't be happier. On a bad day I have a tenth of the problems I have on a Windows system on a good day. There are fewer things to configure but that's in part due to a lack of need which is a good thing. There is a little less control for things like file viewing and searches but Leopard is going to blow past Windows with those features. There are far more user features in Mac. I avoided them at first but I've got to admit they are fun and useful and quite addictive. I recently got hooked on Dashboard and the Leopard version is a drastic improvement on it. They are in a transitional period but I'm using one of the Intel Macs and I'm very happy. The new Quad Xeon rival Boxx systems only they are cheaper. Leopard gives full 32 as well as 64 bit support which was the decider for me to finally switch completely to Mac. For prebuilt name brand systems the Macs are starting to beat the Windows systems for price and the stabilty is drastically better. If you love to tinker stick with Windows or Linux. If what you are after is to use software with the lowest number of hassles go Mac. I was loosing 25% of my time to crashes on my Windows systems. That's unacceptable. To me the difference is like having an old junker that you have to work weekends on to keep it running. Getting it running again may give you a sense of accomplishment but there's nothing like going out in the moring, turning the key and the car simply runs. It may be hard to give up on the Windows clunker at first but what do you own a computer for in the first place? Is it to use or to work on?
Yes, but they needed more efficiency in terms of work done (by processor) per watt (helping with cooling issues).
Once you enter the realm of x86 PC based hardware, poor quality is the result
and there is nothing Apple or anyone else can do about that. Now that's a
pretty placative thesis here but before rolling with your eyes, bear with me
and I will tell you why that is so. The gist of what I'm saying is, that
beefing up quality assurance is not the magic bullet here. The tremendous
extra effort that would have to be spent on having _reasonable_ quality
here is vastly in excess of staying with the former, reliable technology.
I'm not here to bash Apple over the head with this and they're not the
only ones that has gotten burned here, even Sun Microsystems came up a while
ago with cheap entry level intel-based boxes. Sadly these blew up on them
(well the machines blew up on their customers, and THEY in turn blew up on Sun).
Among several annoying minor issues there were tremendous problems with the
IDE interface.
So what is the problem here? Why I can't they get things to work before they ship?
Well, as opposed to admittedly more expensive but tested technology, X86-PC
hardware is fast tracked to market where everybody, from the manufacturer of the
mainboard to the designer of the chipsets expect it to evolve over time to
stability, from revision to revision, pretty much recruiting the user as an
involuntary beta tester. Pretty upsetting that thought but that is exactly the way
it is. The main reason this market works like it does is on one side the fierce
competition among and on the other side the fact that most of the buyers there
have a high tolerance for product defects.
There are good reasons for why things are the way they are but of course if you
want to build a reliable system then there are certain choices to be made and
certain things to be avoided. Apple is just now repeating an extremely painful l
esson it could have observed from Sun but it seems that human behavior sometimes pretty similar on the organizational level as it is on the individual: No matter
how often you are told, You have to touch the hot stove yourself to find out.
That was one of teh justifications I always heard from Maccies aobut the cost. "Oh well Apple makes higher quality products than PC makers." Ok fair enough, quality is a justification of price. However if the best that can be said for quality is "Well it's not any worse than Dell," that's not saying much. I'll forgive Dell some quality flubs given their low prices. Well these days, quality is really all Apple can use to justify the price. They use the same processors, graphics cards, memory, etc as PCs so the only real justification is quality of manufacturing. Thus I think people are justified in demanding a higher standard. I demand a higher standard out of an Audi than I do out of a Kia for the same reason.
lol, dell is a hardware company not a software company, why the hell should they care about your software?
Got my macbook a few weeks ago. Started to shut down randomly even after VRAM (I think that's what is reset) and PMU resets. I narrowed it down on other mac forums that it might be a Logic Board problem. Supposedly, similar probelms plagued some earlier iBook models, but this is my first Mac. Overall, I'm still satisfied, but from the looks of it I may have to utilize my Warranty to get the issue resolved.
I'm not saying that all the problems people are having are made up, but I'm just not seeing any of them. Then again, I custom ordered my MacBook from Apple and I did not buy one from the Apple Store.
:-)
;-)
I bought mine at the beginning of July. It arrived on the 17th. I have been using it non-stop since then for software development, and I haven't seen any problems at all. No yellowing. No heat issues. No scuff issues (although I'm not tossing it in a backpack--I have a satchel I use with all sorts of nice padding). It works fine. As a matter of fact, I love it
Does it run pretty hot? Sure. But no worse than my PowerBook (same really). Battery life? Same. Screen? Soooooo much more beautiful
My understanding from talking with one of the store guys is that they had some assembly issues at first with the MBPs in terms of heat. They were apparently leaving the plastic on the parts even when they were put together--thus blocking the vents. But that was apparently resolved.
I have seen scuttle butt around about not getting machines direct from the Apple store and getting a custom build through Apple. The idea is that they have to assemble one fresh from China for you (well, that is where they ship from--I can dig up my shipping label from around here somewhere). I guess the thinking is that there were some kinks in the assembly line/supply chain, and that "fresh" systems don't suffer as bad.
In my case, that seems to have worked--no issues here.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
no text
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
"Sure, Apple have had problems, but not as many as Dell,"
Are you able to back that up with any kind of figures?
Mac apologists are just scary...
MA: "What? Macs are failing and having all sorts of issues? (read the post further up for someone's experience so far)... well that's just Gen 1."
Me: "Erm, so why is ok for the machine to break and have all these faults just because it's a new one? You don't see people saying. 'Well, those Dell's broke, but it's ok, it's a first gen, you expect that'. WHY IS IT OK?"
MA: "Well, it's Mac... Macs are just better, they're cutting edge, you have to expect to be cut when you're on the edge"
Me: "Not at that pricepoint I don't"
What a load of crud.
And yes, I own a Dell laptop, and it's running A+ perfect since I got it... as does a Dell server we have here at work.
I bought an iBook G4 five months ago and it shipped with an optical drive that behaved erratically and sounded awful. I shipped it back for repairs twice, and both times they shipped it back still broken. Eventually a local Apple tech fixed it after I brought along some discs that showed off the error.
Turned out they'd crimped the IDE cable during manufacture. Apple's QA and repair guys didn't catch it because they only test with pristine discs; the drive would only fail with older discs. Still, the drive *sounded* terrible. Any competent and diligent tech would have realized something was wrong. At least I learned something new about the potentially bizarre effects that can result from a crimped cable.
My point is, Apple may be cutting corners in QA in response to the lower premiums they've been able to charge over the years. Lower wages, less staff, less diligent testing, who knows. I've been a fan of theirs for about 15 years and have never had such a problem.
Support NRA, America's oldest civil rights group.
I'm not completely sure I buy your logic, but I'll admit, you might be on to something.
I have two Macs myself a 17" G4 PowerBook and a dual 2.3 G5, and even between the G4 and the G5, there are little things that aren't quite right on the G5. Yet (knock wood) nothing weird ever happens on the G4. On the G5 for instance my IMAP mail client truncates emails (yet the same emails are fine in the G4--even days later), a couple of applications randomly decide they don't want to open the associated files... just weird stuff like that.
My theory isn't that it's x86 per se, but that it's a time-from-launch related thing (i.e. generations). I wonder if the x86 swap will indeed magnify these types of issues.
A couple of things have always puzzled me with the x86 selection: why not use AMD or Sun 64 bit processors if you're moving off the PowerPC? They're cooler, lower power, and arguably better performing. Aside from the comments of another poster about the qualty of those Sun machines running x86 chips, Sun's reputation for quality is *very* high. Very.
I have many Sun machines (maybe 20)--even old SPARCstations--and they're all still chugging away. Those that are on the shelf still power on and run when asked to; others still serve as day-to-day machines in a variety of roles.
In contrast my x86 machines from the same era have all died and gone to PC recyclers. Hmmm... maybe your *are* onto something with the x86 thing....
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
It's well known what the whine is. When one of the cores is not in use, the MacBook Pro puts it in a low-power sleep mode. The mode Apple picked was a bad one and it casuses the processor to whine. When both cores are being used, no sound. It's trivial to kill the whine too. Just install the Apple CHUD tools, which includes a CPU preference pane and menu. Using the menu, select "Single CPU" instead of "Dual CPU", which disables the CPU entirely.
Only Apple would be so self-enamored as to refer to their techs as "geniuses" and not mean it sarcastically. Especially considering the fact that most store technicians aren't above the level of such stunning detecrive work as "Your processor is smoking and giving off a burning smell. I think it's dead."
I've been a Mac basher throughout my life. Not because of the hardware, but because of the software.
Now I'm a Mac convert.
The hardware is slick and well spec'd, but the reason I am moving to Mac at home and at my workplace has everything to do with the software. There simply is not a comparable product on the market. It doesn't matter if you buy a machine from Dell, HP, IBM, Sony, Gateway, Acer, or etc they all run Windows.
OS X is the only OS I've ever used that allows me to spend more time working (or more time posting on Slashdot) then tweaking the machine to keep it running.
I'm an experienced Windows, FreeBSD and Linux user, but nothing compares to OS X. I love FreeBSD and use it on all my servers. I've used Linux on many of my desktop machines in the past. Bottom line, nothing else out there touches OS X for a general purpose OS.
Though Linux and BSD both have their niche uses where they are much more suitable.
Windows is just a nuisance still around for reasons of compatibility as for as I am concerned.
All that being said. In the last year I've purchased several Apple systems both for myself and my colleagues and the experience has been excellent.
I have a PowerMac G5 (my primary workstation at the office) an iMac G5 (the machine I'm working on now and my main machine at home) two 15" MacBook Pro's and a 17" MacBook Pro. All of these machines have been running flawlessly since they were purchased.
I may just be very lucky, but so far I couldn't be more impressed.
I don't deny that they have the odd manufacturing defect. Though I haven't personally run into any. Even if the hardware stunk, there is no alternative. Anything that isn't running OS X just isn't comparable.
I think Apple the near impossible task of building an OS that a novice can use while not getting in the way of the hardcore geek.
My MacBook 1.83ghz rocks- no technical issues *yet*... a little discoloration that Apple will fix (and has acknowledged), but other than that it has been awesome. However, I feel VERY unsure about it, and that is almost worse than having problems at all. A search for "random shutdown" on apple.com is very revealing of the scope of the power issues, which worry me the most:
1 8&search=Go&q=random+shutdown
http://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?objID=c2
Wow! This must be a PERSONAL letter, just for me!
The comments here seem to be individual experience. While I don't know of any systematic surveys, you can do better than this by reading the Apple discussion boards regularly. Of course every product will have failures. But it seems clear that the Macbook Pro had more than usual. The primary issues were heating and various noises. It also seems that those problems have been fixed (for about a month), by a combination of things: replacing bad inverters, an update to the firmware to change fan behavior, and a new motherboard. The fixes were done in that order. The most recent is the motherboard replacement. Since that was done I haven't seen signs that the MPB has an abnormal level of failures. As far as I know, the iMac and Mini have not had abnormal failures. I haven't been following the Macbook discussions, so I'm not going to summarize the situation there. There is at least one worrisome problem (staining of the white plastic), and there may be others. The G3 iBooks had several endemic problems, although not at the level of the initial Macbook Pro problems. The G4 iBooks seem to have been fine. I'm not in a position to comment how this experience compares to PC architecture.
It's pretty obvious why you shouldn't get the first-gen machine out of the gate. When Apple announces a new machine they are flooded with orders and they care far more about filling them than quality control. Hell, you should expect to take it back at least once or even swap it out and consider yourself lucky if your computer is problem free.
Wait a few months and get a refurb. I've found their refurbished products to be rock-soild, and from what I've heard from a few, ahem, "genius" friends they go through an extensive check up (including repairing any known defect.)
The subject says it all, but to add, I cannot think of a macintosh line (68k, ppc, intel) that hasn't had lots of problems within the first year or two, and several revisions.
slashdot
I understand this Version 1.0 stuff -- and if, in fact, their v2.0 equipment has remedied all the issues they've had with their 1.0 equipment, then great. That being said. I support about 60 or so folks in the field. Up until recently they all were owners of IBM Thinkpad or Dell Latitude laptops. Just recently we've added about 5-6 MacBook Pro's to the mix, one of which is mine. (Disclaimer: This is my first Mac)
Problems we've had so far...
- 1 Dead Power supply (MagSafe connects, but no charge) - replaced at the store
- 1 Power Management system confused - Power management system reset
- 2 Lid latches dislodged, making lid not close well - Fixed at store
- 1 Hard Drive dead - replaced at the store
- 1 Machine doesn't know how to sleep, or wake up - Pending issue
- 1 Display frame separating from the lid, doesn't close properly - Pending issue
- 2 Left side of power button has sunken into chassis - Pending issue
- All the machines run too hot (and no the "It's a portable not a laptop" argument can blow me) - Pending issue
- No batteries have swollen up yet -- although I did get the Apple KB article RE: the 15" MBP's being officially on recall, I've told my users to watch out
These problems are so widespread (no one issue consistent across all machines except heat), I'm wondering about general build quality from Apple.
By contrast my Dell Latitudes have been a dream in the field. Haven't had one die yet. Admittedly my Thinkpads kinda sucked (to my suprise), but then IBM sold the Thinkpad division and I said "ah hah!".
Thanks for posting the article.
... weren't they?
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
Picked up a black macbook as soon as it was available (yes, I paid the $150 color tax), slapped in 2 gigs of ram from newegg and use it no less than 8 hours a day ever since. No problems, no quirks, and no fires. I guess I got the good one.
Why not AMD? Cost. No WAY AMD could match the pricing Intel probably gave Apple. Likely the same reason - and the lack of manufacturing capacity that they likely had - that AMD lost the place it had as the CPU for the original Xbox before Intel won. Honestly, the fact that Intel's EFI architecture - and some tasty proprietary Intel firmware - gave Apple a nice way to ensure that normal PC's - for the time being - couldn't run the Mac OS. Why not Sun chips? Two reasons. 1) X86 is an obvious choice because it's a commodity. Dirt cheap, standardized architecture. A proprietary architecture based around a Sparc wouldn't be cheap, and wouldn't be a commodity. 2) For quite some time, the majority of the Darwin codebase ran just fine on X86. Meaning (IMHO) it wasn't nearly the task to make the Mac OS run on X86 that it would have been to have it run on a Sparc. Not that it was likely easy to get it onto X86. But easier.
Have you read the latest stuff on the new Intel chips? Those Core 2 Duo's are running faster and MUCH cooler clock for clock than anything AMD can contemplate. i'm sure the technology from the Conroe and Merom chips will traverse to the Xeon family (at least it would be logical)...and these will be nice in future Apple products. What would be dreamy is if Apple gained all that market that Microsoft has in the OS department...and sell OS' on the x86 arch, of course we know who will win in terms of reliability :P
Of course, it's always a back and forth battle.
"In the kingdom where everything dies, the sky is mortal."
Deny, yell, insult and have a fit. But they will never admit anything bad against Apple. Its why you should never by stuff from companies that have rabid fanbois like Apple.
Nah, it's always been this bad.
I recall reading on digg (I'd go and get it to give you a link, but the way the site works makes it hard to find older stuff) a month or 6 weeks ago about how Dell have had this exploding laptop thing going on for a couple of years, but have just carried on selling them, and replacing them when customers complained. As soon as the Apple one went up in flames, it all came out of the woodwork that there'd been a couple of hundred cases over 2 (maybe 3, can't recall exactly) years...
I don't have a problem with Dell - I have one of their servers too, and I think it's well engineered. I just think Apple come in for more-than-their-fair-share of criticism. If you disagree, fine - it's a big world, plenty of space for multiple opinions.
Apple do push the limits, I think. More than most (not all) manufacturers, anyway. It hasn't stopped me from ordering a Mac Pro though (4x3GHz will *really* help on those FPGA place-and-route calculations. I've had them run for 2 weeks before now). Of course, I chose it on price as well as it being a Mac - the equivalent Dell was ~$2400 more expensive ($6638 vs $4249).
And I'm very, very rarely scary. I have to try *really* hard, and even then it doesn't really happen [sigh]. I don't put words in people's mouths then say "what a load of crud", though, either.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Internals, yes, but externals no. I've noticed that practically every MacBook Pro I've seen has fit and finish issues, most noticably a "bent" lid that curves up at the corners in sort of a "U" shape, the bottom of the U at the latches. This means the lid rocks and compresses when it's closed and you pick up the MBP. Is it so hard to make a flat lid?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Funny, I saw a Dell that was reporting "correctible ECC error" over and over. Dell's solution to the problem was run a memory tester on it. Of course, the hardwre could correct the errors so their simple read/modify/write/verify test passed and Dell won't replace the faulty memory. *grr*
I drink to make other people interesting!
We've purchased 18 Intel-based Macs at work over the past couple of months and haven't had any hardware issues. Most software works fine, too. At first we had a few issues with PowerPC software (MS Office, naturally) but recent system updates seem to have fixed 'em. We do have one custom OS X app that flat-out refuses to run through Rosetta.
We bought 16 Mac Minis, a MacBook and a 15" MacBook Pro (2 GHz). All are great machines, 'specially the MacBook Pro. The Minis are perfectly happy with Dell Ultrasharp monitors (15", 19" or 20" widescreen) and Microsoft mice (5-pack is $60!).
Performance is outstanding. I ran XBench and the MacBook Pro is slightly faster than a full-size dual 2.0 GHz G5 desktop in most categories (aside from hard disk speed, of course).
This is probably one reason they upgrade so much, although in reality it is either to show off, and/or just part of their addiction.
More on topic, I have a 2Ghz White Macbook and it is the best machine I have ever owned. In the last month the only issue I had was waiting for my 2GB of RAM to arrive and dealing with slowness. After the upgrade all has been good. Technically I may have the moo, very occasionally, typically on battery, I hear the fans pulsing. It is very quiet though, and I would never try to get the machine replaced just for that.
I also have two friends with Macbook Pros, one has had his for several months, and the other for less than two months. The later is a switcher and bought it on my recommendation, so if anything goes wrong I'm certain to hear about it. So far neither has had any serious issue other than installing old software drivers or startup apps that caused lag or flakiness in specific applications.
From what I can tell, having researched the Macbook for a while before i bought mine, and reading up everything I can, the Macbook and Macbook Pro both have failure/defect rates similar or lower than other companies, and even other Apple products historically. The issue at hand has more to do with the vocal users, and a lot more switchers at this time who are also vocal as to their disappointment. For some reference, Macintouch recently did a survey on these machines. Just take that info with a grain of salt, as the vocal elite and a number of vocal switchers are involved, and many people not having any problems have a tendency not to respond to these sorts of things.
Shawn's Tech Articles
I have been so completely appalled by Apple's "quality control". I have been through FIVE "refurb" macbook pros. I'm on the fifth, I should say. This one has *fewer* issues than the previous ones, but I've been worn down by them and don't feel like playing their games anymore. The good thing? I've decide to write about my weird technical exploits, because these failures are not limited to Apple. Demand is high, customers are impatient, and everyone is under pressure to deliver because there are so many other options. In the case of Apple, they have a contingent who is used to paying a little extra for better quality, and now they're just making me feel like I'm buying a generic. Anyway, my post about my experiences can be found here:
http://aspiringcto.com/?p=3
[c]
Jobs & Co. have been down the Intel rabbit hole before with NeXT Computer Inc. transition to the little endian architecture.
Quality control problems reflect variances, limits and defects in Intel hardware mfgr's product as a result of being stressed by the new-for-Intel operating system MacOS X. Jobs & Co. learned on the earlier trip down this path with Intel that the hardware mfgr's products are stressed by the mach kernel OS in ways MS doesn't. Apple engineers push hardare specs harder and faster than MS.
The bottomline is that the Intel mfgr's are the best in the business. Problems associated with MacOS X will be addressed almost immediately and better than in the MOTO mfgr's. Downstream the Intel mfgr's will design better and faster hardware than MOTO mfgr's for a couple of reasons Jobs & Co. learned:
1) Intel is a much more competitive environment
2) Intel is the center of R&D world (gaming, graphics, etc...) it has more and better engineers
3) Intel can respond to challenging specs and exceed expectations provided with a more demanding OS
4) Apple benefits from the rising tide effect from the richer, quicker and better engineers
QC problems from a new OS are stressing Intel hardware. They will be addressed. The Intel hardware will be fixed. Apple, its OS and hardware will ramp up performance in Intel in ways it never could with Moto.
Even though you and me have a lot in common here's something I will not ignore and I have the guts to tell you this
right out in the open without hiding behind AC:
Even though you happen to work for a background check and drug testing company there really is no reason to flaunt that.
I particularily resent the drug testing side of it since the choice of what someone will put into their body and what not
is a natural right not for employers and least of all for governments to regulate.
Btw, especially hideously delightful are the FUD messages
"over 30% of all offenders are multi-state offenders"
"embezzlement costs billions of dollars"
I understand you may need the job but beyond that all understanding and sympathy ends.
Other than that taking back up the issue here, I see that you love sun machines like I do. You're onto something here too. I actually have
a SS20 sitting under my desk and it still works just fine and down in the cellar there's a E3K and a couple of U60s humming away. Likewise
the PCs I had eked out the last days of their lives as firewalls and caching proxies and died slow and painful deaths.
Other than that at work we are likewise heavy into Sun but even though I could brag about working for that organization I wont.
Regards
"why not use AMD... They're cooler..."
AMD cooler? What alternate dimension are you from?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
No I didnt RTFA...but! I know 6 people with intel macs. 1 of them had a bad logic board in her mac. She took it in to and apple store and they replaced it on the spot. Swapped the HD out and put it in the new one. no harm, no foul. BTW she had it for 2 or 3 months, ordered it the day it came out.
Does Apple actually make anything themselves, in a factory with Apple employees? Or is everything outsourced? Apple closed their Sacramento plant in 2004, which was the last US plant. The Cork, Ireland plant is still open, and may still be manufacturing something, but probably not one of the volume products. Singapore is the hub for controlling the outsourcing operation in Asia, but Apple doesn't actually manufacture there.
And furthermore, you're not just saying that this is even remotely ACCEPTABLE, you actually describe it as "TRIVIAL"?!?
Forgive me here if I get flashbacks to Clerks here, what do Apple have to do to make you lose any faith in them? "Anally rape your mother while pouring sugar in your gastank?"
First off, i'd like to take the time to point out that I'm not an Apple apologist or fanboy or freak. I write this comment because I find it ridiculous that so called "journalists" and "writers" can ask such questions as "Quality control problems or growing pains at Apple?" without looking at numbers. This is irresponsible reporting, on the level of internet forum rumour mongering.
Yes, there have been problems. There have always been problems. Any product has problems. Remember the 12" pbook warping? (I'm talking about when they were new, not two years later when some people forgot about it and started reporting the issue again as if it were a new problem.) What about G5 fan whine? Screen probs in a number of pbooks. Mobo probs in iBooks, etc., etc. The real question is "Is the percentage of owners hit with faulty units higher than before?".
The only time actual numbers are mentioned in this article (or any related article I have seen) is "at least three separate accounts of MagSafe connectors melting down in some way... which also seem to be a statistical anomaly among MacBook and MacBook Pro users."
That's a nasty thing to happen to anyone's computer, but come on - three? How many hundreds of thousands of units has Apple shipped in the last year? There's not even any mention of the question of what proportion of owners have had problems. No hint of any curiousity about the topic.
Apple is selling a lot of units to people who have never bought a CPU from this brand before, and they surely have high hopes. Expect the new buyers to make a lot of noise it things don't work out well. We should just be aware of whether one person is making the noise of ten or if it's really ten people. That is how we can tell if Apple products have taken a quality-control nosedive or not.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
One, Apple is experiencing more problems because Intel has more problems than the PowerPC or,
Two, Apple is experiencing more problems because they are selling more computers.
The author of this article seems to believe this is a new thing for Apple. I've been using Macs for years and they've always been afflicted with various problems. Mac users just seem to tolerate a lot from Apple.
What they adore is the brand; it fits this image of what they want to represent. And that's often important enough that they're willing to put up with a lot more than the average person would.
Dell computers might have as many problems. However, given the premium paid for a Mac over a Dell, or most PCs for that matter, I'd expect a higher degree of reliability.
Look,
There are three kinds of complaints related to the new Macs. Unfortunately, most of them are red herrings and just end up obscuring the real problems.
1. Aesthetic issues. Staining, mooing, etc. The "whine" could mean poor EMF design, but for now it's just another aesthetic complaint. As others have said, these "problems" are simply amplified by the "pickiness" of Mac users.
2. "Switcher" issues. The Intel Macs have attracted a lot of former Windows users and people who simply haven't upgraded in a while, who clutter the boards with "problems" that are not new, and in many cases workarounds are available when you start doing things the "Mac way". "Heat" complaints go here. Yes, it's hot compared to your old computer. Duh.
3. Serious issues. Exploding/bulging batteries, sudden shutdowns. As I said before, sudden shutdowns don't occur until MONTHS after purchase, so you can pretty much disregard all those people who say "I just bought a MacBook and it works fine!" -- they will not really know until much later.
Just like in SW engineering, there are AESTHETIC "bugs", NON-BUGS, and FATAL bugs. If we want to have a clear discussion about supposed Apple quality control problems, we need to ID the bugs accordingly.
Otherwise we're just weakening our case and making it easier for Apple to ignore the problems. The Ars Technica article doesn't mention the FATALs until the very end. Most readers would probably read about heat and mooing and shrug them off as a bunch of whiny Mac users.
As I said before, you're going to be hearing more about sudden shutdowns...
the c2d xeon is called woodcrest, i don't think it is readily available yet but will be soon. C2D pretty much stomps the snot shit out of K8 though and sun's multi-hyper-quadruple-super-ultra threading processors can't do shit when it comes to heavy lifting, not to mention the premium price of Sun hardware.
As the OEM, they're responsible for supporting all the OEM bundled software like Windows, Office, etc.
Problem is they should have used AMD instead of Intel. And it's a lie that AMD would not have been able to supply Mac with plenty of units. Mac only choose Intel because of marketing reasons. They are now paying for that decision. I know many people that will not by a new Mac because of the Intel. Too many people have had bad experiences with Intel. Just won't do it.
Actually that's the chip in the Mac Pros that were announced on Monday. The release got moved up a few months ago.
/Shrug.
I've had the following first gen Apple products:
- G4 Lampshade iMac
- G5 Powermac
- MacBook Pro
No problems with any of them. I guess I'm very lucky.
Then again, only people with problems bitch about these things. For every problem you read about there are probably dozens of satisfied customers.
I know at more than 10 people who have at least 15 Intel machines between them, and I myself have two. One(!) of the Macbook Pro's (my mother's) emitted the whining sound, which still means it's quieter than most Dell laptops. Apple simply completely replaced it without a hitch about a month ago. Other than that, zero problems, and happy faces all around.
A good friend of mine works for an Apple reseller, and he says the don't have any more problems and returns right now than usually, after accounting for the freaking huge number of people who bought a Mac in since the switch.
What people seem to be forgetting is that Apple just had the strongest Mac quarter since God knows when. More people getting new Macs, many of them new to the platform, and stronger media attention give the impression that there are more quality problems than usual. And that's just bullshit.
In fact, the quality of the machines is outstanding in 99% of the cases, and that is absolutely amazing in and of itself, considering that they are based on a completely new hardware platform.
But if what the know is what you know, then no one really knows.
The problem is plain and simply coil buzz.
Laptops use switching power supplies, because linear ones aren't efficient enough. Switching power supplies use wire wound inductors to store energy while converted it from one voltage to another. These switching power supplies are constantly filled and emptied of energy. This often causes the coils to vibrate slightly. It's the same thing you hear from a power substation, only in a power substation it is at a fixed 60Hz as the coils in the transformers constantly empty and fill as the AC voltage dips above and below 0V.
In a laptop, the frequency depends on the switching power supply design. There are fixed-frequency switching power supplies, but these are not efficient across a wide range of power draws. So they have to use a variable frequency switching power supply. The problem is that the frequency ranges the power supply uses include the range 300Hz-3KHz, where the ear is very sensitive to the buzz.
When the power draw is high, the frequency is high, when it goes down, the frequency drops. If the frequency sweeps through the audible range, you hear chirps, like the G5 towers exhibited or moos (although the moos are often a 2nd order effect). If the frequency stops in the audible range, you hear a whine, like the laptops can show.
If you modify the power settings to keep the power supply outside the audible range, then you either limit your CPU speed (by going single core) or significantly increased your power draw (by turning off CPU napping). There is another whine which comes from the backlight power supply, it will also change frequency (to often be inaudible) if you change the backlight to be higher or lower.
Apple didn't pick the wrong mode, they need to go to that mode to save power and reduce heat.
Apple should do everything the can to reduce the whines. But it's not practical to remove it completely.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
...that keep putting 'FUD' tags on EVERY Apple story that isn't overly positive about Apple?
/. is becoming synonymous with 'FUD'.
It's starting to get annoying; 'Apple' on
Huh? Are you conveniently forgetting the myriad of problems that PPC-Macs had? Hell, Apple had a laptop in the past (the model escapes me at the moment) that had the tendency to go up in flames. How about all those logic-board problems in the PPC-portables? Poor USB-performance in G5 PowerMacs? Windtunnel MDD-PowerMacs? And some of the problems Apple is having today are not related to the architecture at all. How could the architecture cause discoloration of the case? Swelling batteries? No, the reason for those problems are elsewhere.
The machine with IDE-problems was Ultra 5, and it used SPARC. Sun has used x86. First attempt was so long ago, that it hardly matters anymore. Then we have the current Opteron-machines, and I don't think that you can complain about those.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I think Apple are having problems not because of the switch but simply a gain in popularity. Even without Intel switching, their markets have been only going up (PowerBooks and iBooks were very popular, not to mention non-computer stuff like the iPod).
Teething troubles trying to produce more systems than they have ever sold before? Yeah. Everyone has that though. Apple just have a lot of dieherd fans and over-zealous non-fans, so when they make a tiny mistake (that nobody would ever notice on an HP or Sony device), there are 100 articles and a million consequent banner clicks which fund some hack journalist who wanted to cause a fuss.
At least it ain't Dvorak though, eh?
I have to second that.
The Agency I work for bought 100 Dells in 2000 - all GX-240s. Before the first year was over, we had the following failures:
7 failed HDD
2 failed mobo
2 failed power supplies
2 failed cd readers
2 failed floppies
over 5 failed mice
In all, over a 20% failure rate in the first 12 months. Of course, Dell replaced everything with overnight replacements, but putting up with it all was a pain, especially the failed hard drives. We lost a lot of data, since this was a transition period where we still had a lot of people using the HD for storage of data instead of the newer server storage online. Things settled down a bit after the first year, but we still saw failures in those machines.
Now, I work for a different org within that same Agency, and now we use Thinkpads (IBM outbid Dell!). In the last year, in a group with fewer than 30 Thinkpads, we have seen over 5 Thinkpads, either T-23s or T-30s, experience sudden catastrophic hard drive failure. One lost the mobo and had to be sent back twice before it came back fixed. Took over a month!
I think that a lot of what we're seeing is that Apple gets a lot of press because of the Apple slogan It Just Works. Writing about Apple failures sure gets the attention, doesn't it?
I mean, jeeze! If you're gonna claim that kind of thing, people are certainly going to notice when they don't...
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
Besides the whinning and temperature, I haven't had any problems with my MBP. I know that my MBP is a 'revision' from the original.
I have never used laptops on my lap, because I think any laptop gets uncomfortably warm... not to mention that any temp increase near the groin area will make a decline on world population: You gotta your crown jewels cool! =)
I will bring it to AppleCare though to see what can they do about both issues.
I am saving some moolah to be able to get a MacPro... that thing is just awesome!
My first gen Intel iMac is rock solid. Admittedly, I bought it refurbished directly from Apple, so it may be that refurbs are given that extra human touch. It's also equally likely that it was just a returned unit, reboxed, and sold. I dunno. Also admittedly I added an extra gig of RAM to the stock 512 MB. Also my final admission is that I really was worried about the quality of my iMac until I added the extra RAM. It would sometimes have a kernel panic; it would sometimes have an interminable spinning beachball; it'd refuse to launch apps (like Terminal for issuing reboot); it'd refuse to shutdown or reboot. I really, truly, though I'd bought a lemon until I added the memory. In most cases the apps I use are becoming native, but all the Adobe and MS stuff still counts on Rosetta.
I can't stress this enough: Rosetta (the PPC instruction emulator for the two of you who don't know that yet) needs more memory than you're used to needing on a Mac.
--Jim (me)
Just bought a 15" MBP. Worked great for 7 days while I burned it in. It had the whine, did'nt get that hot compared to my 15" Powerbook. Anyway, this morning it wouldn't wake up. On reboot, it was silent, no chime. Did the usual stuff - zap pram, reset PM, etc... Still dead. Called Apple service. No problem. I explained what I'd done, the rep understood that I knew Macs and didn't take me through all the usual - "Is it plugged in" routines. It's probably the logic board, and Apple will ship a box out to return it for repair. Hopefully, it will only be a week or two in transit. We'll see how that goes. I've bought about a hundred Macs for myself and clients. This is the second dead system I've had, the other being a PPC IMac that was DOA. Not a bad track record in my book.
I bought my first iBook in April 2002. It was an open box closeout special at Circuit City since they were dissolving their relationship with Apple. Loved it so much, I sold it in 6 months and replaced it with a newer iBook. This one went almost 1 year before the infamous video problem surfaced. Sent it in for repairs to CompUSA who kept it for almost a month. Issue resolved. Less than one year later, same problem. Sent it back to Apple directly and got it back in 3 days. Issue resolved. Then about one year ago, same thing happened again. Sent it in to Apple and got it back in 2 days. Except this time, they swapped out my upgraded 40GB 5400rpm drive for a 20GB 4200rpm drive. Took about a month to get the drive replaced. And when it came back it was a 40GB 4200rpm drive. I just gave up. Wasn't worth the hassle anymore. My wife uses it now and its still kicking.
My PowerMac 2.0ghz Dual G5 has worked flawlessly for 2 years. I bought a Mac mini 1.2ghz G4 about a year and a half ago. Played with it for two weeks and sold it to my neighbor. Been working ever since for her. And my new 17" MacBook Pro is amazing. Gets hot, but quiet. No whine out of it. I would prefer the 15" but with the problems they were having I didn't want to take a chance. Now if only the 15" would support 1680x1050, I'd probably sell my 17" and get one of the new ones.
every single one we have purchased this year has had hardware failures out of the box.
whether it's bad ram, shorted out keyboard, bad optical drives and even bent dock connectors, EVERY single D820 has had to be worked on!
the local Dell tech that services our hardware is saying he has never seen a new product with as many problems as the D820 and he's been recomending against it to all his corporate customers.
its not just Apple!
the history of the world
Apple rushed out new systems based on an entirely new processor family (for them) and with much higher power and cooling requirements than anything they've dealt with in the past. Most of these problems would have been found with an extended testing period, but Apple wanted to get them out the door.
The two most worrisome problems are:
1. Heat. These new Macs just aren't as convenient to use as old iBooks, because you can't just slap them down anywhere. Ditto for just about any recent Windows notebook.
2. Shutdowns. This completely flies in the face of OS X being more reliable than Windows.
Apple isn't having problems.
See, was that so hard?
Geez.
I've never had to spend more then 10 minutes on the phone with a Dell tech when a PC goes bad. I tell them, for example, that the Disk is bad, or the power supply. They ask a half-dozen questions to be sure that I know what I'm talking about, then they ship me a new one. Sometimes I send the broken part back on their dime, sometimes they just have me toss it out.
I've got nothing but good things to say about Dell support.
Their sales staff, however, leaves much to be desired.
This was my first Macintosh (A White 1.8Ghz MacBook) in 13 years after the last 7 years with Think Pads. I had some bad experiences with IBM service and thought I'd give Apple another try.
The first three machines were poorly built (odd bits of plastic sticking out, yellow glue smeared on the case, as documented elsewhere on the web, the top or bottom inner case splitting off the outer case. All in all just plain poor build quality. I bought the machine because I expected better than average build quality, and I didn't get it.
I'm pretty much wishing that I'd stuck with a mainstream PC brand (perhaps I would have tried DELL), at least I wouldn't get the Apple attitude from the service staff.
And one thing I came to realise is that Apple is a consumer electronics company, they don't care that you are making a living off using their hardware, they aren't set up to support mission critical activities. At least IBM and Dell offer on-site and guaranteed turnaround service.
I don't care whether Apple is going down hill, perhaps they've always been this bad, but there's no convincing me that they are making machines for serious users.
I meant it was a trivial fix in the sense that it reliably and straightforwardly fixes the problem. I didn't say it was an acceptable approach. Apple's had eight months since the introduction of these machines and they still haven't automated turning the processor cores off when unneeded.
I love what the /. tagging beta did to this story. fud, notfud, yes, no, apple
/. today :-)
Look's like there is some disagreement and quarreling on
Apple's quality control started slipping long before Intel, reportedly because Apple discovered they could fix 5% cheaper than testing 100%. It was no joke: out of the box problems were rare before the first iMac's (I never heard of one from 1986 to 1994; I have 15 year old machines that still run w/ no issues.) Starting with the first iMac, Apple quality deteriorated drastically. I have a (dead) Powerbook that went back 6 times before managing to expire its warranty; I sent it to a 3rd party shop that replaced a defective used part dating to the first Apple repair.
At their worst, though, Mac's are better across the board than any Wintel PC's I've ever had: I never buy preassembled Wintel's any more, while I'd probably not bother building a Mac even if it were possible.
That said, I'm in no hurry to buy a MacTel. They obviously need a little more shaking out to be practical. Once they do, though, I can't wait to have Linux, XP, and OSX all available without a reboot.
Its all very subjective. I've done tech support on plenty fo Dells, HP's and gateways as well I know what you're talking about. Still, I can't trust that magazine. I've seen way too many terrible reviews of computers in it to trust it to tell me anything tech related. I think they are written by compusa salesmen. Sure, its good at rating cars and ice cream, but thats about it. I remeber my parents bought their yearly guide on how to buy anything, there were entire sections missing. It would start out on a paragraph end mid sentance then on the same page start over again at the begining of the section. Their quality control is far worse than anything they actually review.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
no, you just have to fight to get a spot in line or mail your system off to get help.
2 or 3 years is great compared to my mac experiences. i've own 3 mac's and all have had mb failures. the mini in 1 month, the powermac after 10 days and the MBP after 3 months.
Is Apple having an unusually large number of quality control problems since its switch to Intel?
No, personally I thought Apple was doing pretty darn good in the complete platform switch between PPC and INTEL. In fact I have seen so few problems (hell they completely changed processors and I can still get my work done on them) I went out and bought one, and I am not an early adopter of anything. I would have to say kudos to apple for making the transition as painless as they have. By the way, most of the problems cited in the article are all related to what was obviously a bad batch of batteries that Apple got. I have a macbook I bought 6 months ago, that thing stays cooler than any windows based laptop I have ever owned, so the problem has been sorted out.
I haven't measured the heat out the fans from the machines with a thermometer, but it is a *substantial* difference. The Xeons are definitely hotter.
I *still* have to wonder about the AMD chips though--sure they might have been a few bucks more (as another poster commented), but let's face it, the PowerPC chips weren't coming in boxes of cereal. I'm sure when the chips were down (pun intended) the PowerPCs were more expensive that Intel procs. And in the overall scheme of things, we're talking very minor price differences in that volume.
Oh, and since you're asking, I hail from Zoron, but let's do be hush-hush about that, eh?
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
but your Dells still suck.
Keep spreading the smear campaign!
After all, if you won't makeyour machines better just claim the other guy is building his worse.
I worked as a bench tech at a local Mac shop when the eMac was first released. We had a 75% failure rate on sold eMacs. I became very familiar with the innards of the eMac. Based on what I've been reading about failed MacBooks and other first-gen Macintels they are performing quite well compared to first-gen eMacs.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
why not use AMD or Sun 64 bit processors if you're moving off the PowerPC? They're cooler, lower power, and arguably better performing.
I think one of the big issues was low power chips for laptops. You will note that the first Intel-based Macs were low-power cool chips like you would use in a laptop. (I am trying to include the iMacs and Mac Minis here which seem to be midway between laptops and desktops).
Another reason is that Intel makes a lot of the support chips that surround the processor. Apple most certainly used their clout as a first-tier manufacturer to demand a motherboard model that would really scream. They also certainly demanded to be "the first on the block" with Intel's newest technology -- at least for a certain amount of time.
I would also imagine that Apple wanted to get on board with Intel with a minimum of reinvestment and re-engineering. I do recall that IBM developed the bus structure for the G5 Mini-towers and it came from their midrange and mainframe products. Apple will, presumably, add value in the form of engineering innovation as time moves forward -- or they may just choose to be the first on the block with any new Intel innovations.
This is not to suggest that AMD does not innovate. They're a good company and they make excellent products. Without AMD, I don't think Intel would be as innovative or driven as they are. But in view of all of what Intel offers in making a motherboard for a computer, it was a good choice.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
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I decided to ask about a few of these at an Apple store yesterday, as I've been considering a MacBook Pro but am a little hesitant.
The guy I talked with seemed like he has gotten these questions before and been trained how to reply to them, because he had quick comebacks. For instance, about the whining, he claims that that noise is just something that it makes and it's not a problem and there's nothing you can do about it. And about the heat, he also admits that the machine runs hot but says that's how it's designed and there's nothing wrong with it. When I questioned whether it was a good design to have a laptop that ran so hot that you couldn't comfortably keep it on your lap, his response was that it's not a laptop -- that Apple calls it a "portable computer". Sure enough, if you go to the MacBook Pro web page, the word "laptop" does not appear. Nevertheless, I think I'd rather have a machine that one can reasonably treat as a laptop.
I'm probably going to wait for the second generation. Oh yeah, his response to that was that these aren't first generation machines, and that they're already on to the third generation. I suppose it's a matter of opinion whether you consider minor hardware revs a generation. He's free to call them that, but I think I disagree.
One more point, he says they have had (in his store) no larger amount of hardware problems reported with the MacBooks and MacBook Pros than with any other machines. But I doubt he really knows the statistics on that.
It's not impossible. Let me prove it to you. Apple isn't having problems.
yay for 270s! at one point Dell had a department specifically to deal with 270 problems. We pulled 12 SX270s out of a server farm that have been running for months. 6 of them needed motherboards replaced as they wouldn't boot up after (busted caps). I've called in 3 more since then.
One thing that I haven't seen mention on here, but have on the apple discussion boards is the wireless problems macbooks have. With the 10.4.7 upgrade they constantly drop your wireless connections. And even before then both my macbook and my girlfriends can't get download speeds higher than 80KB/s. I have to use a RT2500 dongle (Dlink DWL something or another) to get on my wireless. With that I can get 2.3MB/s. Anyone else experienced these problems?
I Think apple is better for creating Movies and video edditing etc.
Yes, I've heard the whining noise problem with the Macbook Pro, the tech blogs don't stop whining about the Macbook Pro ;-)
(You should hear the fan noise that comes out of the Dell laptops where I work!)
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
What stupid IT manager figured to get Generation 1 Macs for your business. Any IT manager who knows anything it is to be more conservative and wait for Gen 2.
It's not like they had a lot of choice, given that Apple pretty much stop selling the PPC version of a system once they released the Intel version. And sometimes you just don't have a lot of choice when it comes to the time to buy new systems.
And of course, there is always the the people who absolutely needed an Intel Mac, because they had to dual boot or because they were developing software for the Intel Mac.
Being one of many who has suffered through multiple motherboard replacements on my Power Mac G5, how can the parent be marked troll?
... if it wasn't painfully true. ;)
It should be marked funny
Well normally if the company was running OK before the transistion they would still run OK for 6 months to a year After the transistion. I am sure they got pressure from the users to get New Macs, but in all reality they could have lasted without them for a long time (espectially sience the majority of the software is still PPC and Most of the others are Universal So they work on both. There is only a very small portion that is Intel Only.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Things have definitely changed. For example, the last shipment of G5s we received at work consisted of 4 machines. Out of the box, 3 would not power on. The fourth powered on after a struggle but quit a week or two later. Apple's techs fixed three fairly quickly. The fourth required every component to be replaced, including the case. At that point they found that during manufactuing the wire leading to the power switch had been squashed under the motherboard and was short circuiting.
But there's a more objective way to look at this. I looked at Apple's financial statements for 1995, 1996, 2004, and 2005. In 1995, they set aside about 1% of sales for warranty repairs. In 1996, that was upped to 2% because there were "serious quality problems" in a couple of their product lines that resulted in large warranty expenses. In 2005 and 2006, the percentage has gone from the 1% back in 1995 when things were well, to 1.75% today. Note that this is almost as much as when they had "serious problems" in the past. If 1% is "rock solid" days and 2% is "serious problems", where does 1.75% put us? I'd say a lot closer to problems.
Then of course, there's OS X itself. Secunia shows that while Windows XP Pro had almost 3 times as many security advisories issued during the year to date, none of those was marked as "extremely critical". During the same time period, 33% of the advisories for Mac OS X were marked as "extremely critical". If Windows XP deserves all the media hype it gets for bad security and its worst flaw has been "highly critical" while 66% of Apple's flaws have been "Extremely Critical" or "Highly Critical", doesn't OS X deserve a far worse reputation for security than it gets? Linux should have an EVEN BETTER reputation than that, since not one of its flaws this year has been marked as Extremely or even Highly critical.
See:
http://www.themacsucks.com/
And those are 51xx-series Xeons? (If they're not, those aren't the same processors as the ones Apple's using; they're probably NetBurst Xeons, and much of the reason for the switch to the Intel Core Microarchitecture(TM)(R)(LSMFT) was to cut power consumption and heat output.)
You buy the coils preglued.
This still doesn't keep the coils from moving completely, but it does help.
If the coils are currently too loose, then adding superglue can help make it quieter. If they're already glued well, it won't help.
It kinds of depends. Are the coils glued less than they should be? Or is there just too much flux through them so that even glued they vibrate too much?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Again, it all depends on the power draw.
At some draws, the power supply uses fixed (inaudible) frequencies.
At moderate draws, it can switch between the two modes.
At lower draws, it uses PFM mode. At these draws, the amount of current drawn determines the frequency.
At high draws, no noise, as it is operating at an ultrasonic frequency.
At low draws, no noise, as it is operating at a low frequency that your ear isn't sensitive to and the total energy in the noise is lower as less power is going through the coil.
As you pass through a certain range of current draw, it produces the chirp.
Your argument that it's the sleep mode Apple picked and not coil buzz is ridiculous. In which modes exactly does a chip make noise? Where's the speaker (or other transducer) on the chip? An inductor is a wound coil, just like you use in a dynamic (regular) speaker, which is why it is prone to making noise. Chips do not make noise. There is another way for switching power supply noise to become audible though. I know it. Do you?
Yes, it seems Apple could have turned of the power to one core and have avoided most of the noise. But turning the cores on and off on the fly is impractical. It can be done, but not fast enough to get you the dual-core performance you paid for. You end up unable to utilize the second core well.
My AMD X2 4200+ has massive power savings modes, it changes its voltage from 1.1V to 1.4V, it changes its speed from 1GHz to 2.2GHz. But it never actually turns one core off either.
If Apple is lazy, everyone is lazy, and perhaps you should get off your lazy ass and show them how it is done.
Instead, Apple could redesign the power supply so that in normal operation it doesn't pass through the audible range. This involves other tradeoffs, and it isn't simple. But it's better than wasting power or robbing you of CPU by choosing other power modes or making one core unavailable.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95