What happened to Apple quality control?

[Paddy]

Good point about the CD drive, Krissel - though they may have muddled up the IDE cables (which, when I peer inside my G4, doesn't look all that easy to do...but you never know...) and got both the CD drive and a HD on the same cable, both set to "master"...which presumably would have caused the problem - though that would leave the other drive on a separate cable - it would have started up if set to "master", but maybe not if set to "slave"? Well...we can but surmise at this point. Good to know that at least THIS one wasn't Apple quality control at fault.

We've only had one problem with a new Mac - my husband's Lombard had 4 keys stop working about 3 days after we got it home. It had been a demo machine, but had a full year's warranty. We called Apple, they sent out a special packing box on a Friday and we got it back (round trip from MA to TX) on the following Tuesday, with a new keyboard. I was impressed!

All our other problems have been entirely self-induced...

[Gary S]

All in all, considering the number of Macs I have owned over the years, I'd say Apple has done pretty well.

Consider how much the Hardware has changed over the years. My Mac Plus still runs...after a solder connection broke. I remember when I got my first Pizza box Mac, color screen and everything!

Now I look at the G5s and think...how do they figure this stuff out?

[danf63]

I've dealt with Apple support quite a bit in school, since we have over 300 macs.  At times I've had bad service or have been given a run-around, but almost always the tech help is very good.  We still have powermac 5100s and 5400s, they were education models from about 7 years ago, and most of them are still running nicely.

The times I've had bad service or have been given a run-around, I've called the Office of the CEO and I've always been able to get further help.

Like Kelly said, it comes down to the human factor: sometimes it can come down to a person's mood (incl. mine) or something that happened that day to raise the person's level of frustration.

Dan