mac failure reports/ reliability

damontgo said:

what do you mean by failure, exactly? like the machines dont work?

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Q: What do you mean by "failure"?

A: We define it as "a hardware failure requiring repair or replacement of a Mac subsystem", such as power supply, CPU, memory, storage or video. (We'll look at getting more information about failure severity in the future.)

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Groups of Macs
One good cross-check is to look at sets of Macs versus results for individual computers. What we found was the same sort of variability seen for individual Macs with similar overall results. Part of this may be the "bad batch" phenomenon, and environmental factors may also play some part, but details aren't yet clear.

One school has 40 original 17" iMac G5's with no problems. Another has 22 of the 17" and 20" originals with only one hard drive failure. By contrast, another school had 3 failures out of 14 original 17" and 20" iMac G5's; another 4 failures out of 14; and a newspaper had 17 failures out of 37 of the original 17" models. That person commented, "Apple isn't agreeing that there is a problem with the iMac G5 but because we have lost so many they are agreeing to fix any iMac G5 until we no longer use them."

Looking at Power Mac G5 collections, we saw fewer examples of a high failure rates but saw some alarming troubles with certain batches of Dual 2.0 models. Unfortunately, we didn't distinguish between two different Power Mac G5 Dual 2.0 models sold by Apple at different times.

Of twelve Dual 2.0 models purchased together by a publisher in Dec. 2003, three had CPU failures and there was one bad motherboard. In addition, six hard drives failed. A second collection of Dual 2.0 machines had eight CPU failures between 2 and 12 months of age out of 57 computers. Another publisher who bought Dual 2.0 models in July 2004 experienced five immediate CPU failures and two later CPU failures out of 27 computers.

By contrast, however, one school listed 110 Dual 2.0 Power Macs with only 1 power supply failure and a few problems with hard drives and video cards; another had just 1 failure among 52 of these computers; and another company has been running 48 of them in a classroom for six months without failures.

The Mac Mini, as shown in our totals, has been remarkably trouble-free. One person reported a single failure out of 100 Minis, and another experienced a single dead-on-arrival unit out of 50 computers. Problems were few and far between - a bad RAM module, a Mini that kept shutting down until Apple replaced it, one that wouldn't power up after two days, a bad audio card, a number of optical drive problems, a few logic board replacements and several video problems and monitor compatibility issues - but the overall failure percentage was amazingly good in comparison to the G5 models.

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