** Shawn Wright <vwdiesels@GMAIL.COM> wrote: **

>> A disconcerting trend in the past 12 months is the high failure
rates on MacBooks. ....
>> We have some students with Macbooks on their 4th time in for
warranty service. By
>> comparison, our directly managed fleet of Dell PC/laptops consists
of about 300 systems,
>> with an average of one hardware issue per month. The current
MacBook failure rates remind
>> me of the PowerMac Performa problems about 10 years ago.

My last post.. I'll shut up now, if you want to continue
blabbing about this, shoot me a pm, happy to talk about it,
since Friday is nearly over!

Or the old Powerbook 5300c fiascos of the mid to late 1990's  It was that
run of crap that turned our shop from an exclusively Apple to Dell shop.
(that and a fight between IT divisions.. winners in Portland, which is only a
 few hours south of the Redmond mothership and the losers in Mountain View Ca.
 even closer to Cupertino)

We're full on into the whole Microsoft thing now, merged Unix and Windows
registries, Sharepoint.. uugh.. MS Exchange.. Any of us Apple folks are
running undercover these days, trying to not draw attention to ourselves
and our 'renegade hardware'.   I have to use a Dell D620/30 laptop for
work.  It's not bad..goes weeks without rebooting, can close the lid and
it hibernates, open it up and its right back on the network, in/out of the
dock etc:  Basically, it works well (Win XP) only when the hard drive gets
filled up less than 1Gb free, do I find it to be doggy and hard to use.

It's been the first Dell Laptop with Windows I've had on it, that has
let me, not reboot, dock, undock, sleep, hibernate whatever and
not have crashes.

It basically works like my circa 1995 PowerBook 540c did.. just
nearly 10 years later ;-)

Apple laptops have always been way too pricey.  We ended up buying a
factory refurb for my wife direct off the Apple website (look for the red/blue
tag sale deal on the frontpage)  You get the same year warranty, can add
Apple Care (if you want) if you can settle for a  slightly older model.

At the time (2+ years ago) Most of the applications were still not universal
binaries (meaning they would run @ full speed on the newer x86 based
hardware) so I decided to go with the final PowerPC based systems they
had.

Now I'm just hoping the radiators.. (yes the G5 is liquid cooled) dont
start leaking.  Since It's a refurb, I'm hoping that problem was addressed
'knocks on wood"

For laptop folks and Apple, I'd always get the extended warranty.. every
system I've put it on, has paid for itself in one shape or another.

For desktops, I wouldnt bother