Soapbox! Apple quality decline...

This may a bit of a rant, but I don't care, because the people at Apple don't care much so I need somewhere to vent.

I'm a lifelong Apple user and I've just about lost it with Apple's quality of hardware (and software updates for that matter). The past two years I've had 2 iMacs die because of faulty hard drives. The worst part is that one of the hard drives ruined my time machine's hard drive. Essentially my faulty hard drive in my iMac sent corrupted files to my time capsule, brilliant. I lost all my music, movies and shows. To add insult to injury I just recently found out that iTunes will no longer let you re-download your music. Although I can see all my purchase history in my itunes, I cannot re-download any of it. When I asked a question on the Apple threads they told me that I should've backed up my hard drive. Oh really, Apple? You mean I should've bought a time capsule and hooked it up to your faulty hard drive and let it all go to crap? Thanks for the pointer "genius bar". Anyways, I lost nearly $1000 of purchased music, movies and shows that I had been passing on between computers since 2003. If it had not been for my iphone which had a good chunk of music on it I would've likely lost much more. I'm pretty happy that I was one of the goons that was supporting iTunes back when it seemed so asinine.

It goes beyond this however. Two years ago I lost a G5 to fan issues which resulted in a hard drive crash.

Please tell me I'm not the only one that has noticed a sharp decline in Apple's hardware. I never thought I'd say this but I'm afraid Apple is stretching their abilities too thin. My most recent iMac had so many problems that I actually began feeling guilty for taking it in so many times to get the hard drive fixed. I'm no idiot, I know how to take care of my computers, keep them clean and running properly.

Sorry, I don't see either of those issues being Apple's fault. Especially the HDDs. Apple doesn't make them, just put them in their computers. Hitachi, Samsung, Western Digital, etc. are to blame for a faulty HDD.

Same thing with the fan. Certain components come from other suppliers. Sounds like you just had a string of bad luck with bad "parts". Not Apple's fault. I've had my MBP for almost 3 yrs and not a hiccup once. I replaced the internal HDD for more storage and the new one works great too.
Electronics aren't perfect and they do go bad, which is why Apple is so gracious to replace and repair when they do. 99 times out of 100, it's a part made by some other manufacturer that is causing the problem.

Yeah, no I've heard this defense many-a-time by the fans, the problem is that this isn't unusual. I've heard complaints from many people about Apple's decline in hardware (from long-time users as well) but never took it as anything more than isolated cases. My fear is that this is much more than a series of bad luck. I realize Apple does not make the components, but they do choose who they do business with. You don't see Mercedes putting cheap engines in their cars and saying "hey, all we do is make the frame, we wash our hands clean of the rest". If Apple's defense is this, then it's bad business ethics. And just to clear it up, I've taken these two particular iMacs into the genius bar plenty of times now, when my extended warranty runs up this Summer on my 08 iMac I'll be left in the cold because I know it will likely fail again.

Apple does take your computer without question, they're good about that. But when I have the same problem with the same computer after repeatedly taking it in for getting fixed then it sends up some red flags. I'm hard on my computers because I'm a designer, I work on my G5 for well over 50 hours a week, but I never had these problems 5, 10 years ago.

Well I can tell you that all hardware in the electronics business it self is on a major decline in cost cutting. I have been a PC Hardware tech for almost 20 years now, and I think the quality control is crap and cheap. but everyone wants those huge hard drives and large sticks of ram. Apple used the best parts available to them. It is not there fault. now if you could prove that it was the motherboard that failed causing the glitch then that is a different story. but there again it is just electronics.

I keep my items on a raid sever in backup like my music and movies and such. I never trust my stuff to an automated backup even though I do use Time machine. also you should have an older copy of the file on there as well make that every time it changed you should have that history on your time capsule, I know that I do and have looked at the different dated files.

ring up Apple's iTunes support and ask them to renew your purchases. sometimes they make exceptions for cases like this.

Hard drives fail, get over it, or get an SSD. blame Hitachi, if you want to complain about them, they (or they did, as of 2010) supply Apple's HDDs.

you are very unfortunate with hardware.

malicho said:

Yeah, no I've heard this defense many-a-time by the fans, the problem is that this isn't unusual. I've heard complaints from many people about Apple's decline in hardware (from long-time users as well) but never took it as anything more than isolated cases. My fear is that this is much more than a series of bad luck. I realize Apple does not make the components, but they do choose who they do business with. You don't see Mercedes putting cheap engines in their cars and saying "hey, all we do is make the frame, we wash our hands clean of the rest". If Apple's defense is this, then it's bad business ethics. And just to clear it up, I've taken these two particular iMacs into the genius bar plenty of times now, when my extended warranty runs up this Summer on my 08 iMac I'll be left in the cold because I know it will likely fail again.

Apple does take your computer without question, they're good about that. But when I have the same problem with the same computer after repeatedly taking it in for getting fixed then it sends up some red flags. I'm hard on my computers because I'm a designer, I work on my G5 for well over 50 hours a week, but I never had these problems 5, 10 years ago.

Click to expand...

I'd tend to agree here. Apple might not make all (or, actually, most) of the components in the system, but they should still stand behind it. Particularly with the premium pricing on their products.

With that said, I have seen them step out on occasion and make things right when they have badly gone wrong. Personally, I'd give Apple a ring (not the Genius Bar) and just explain the series of events and ask them what they can do to help. Be sure to do this calmly and politely and maintain an even, but assertive tone - this works wonders, with just about any company.

I know it can be hard not to lose your patience, but I think if you go in with a reasonable tone, they'll do right by you.

Another thought on that external hard drive - I'd be willing to bet that you can still recover most of that data with a tool like Drive Genius or Disk Warrior. Filesystem corruption can almost always be recovered from.

I'm fairly certain there were just as many crashes and hard drive corruptions (proportionally) years ago when you seemed to have no problems at all. You were lucky back then, you're unlucky now. I've used Macs for about 8 years now and I'm also a designer who pushes the machine fairly hard. I've yet to have any serious issues with the hardware in my Mac and my time machine. If there has been a decline in quality, I guess I'm the lucky one at the moment.

Not being able to re-download your music is a massive blow though. That's one reason I avoid purchasing through iTunes... the other is, I just love album art and hard copies.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

I realize hard drives fail. This rant wasn't intended to display how much I dislike Apple, which I don't, I'm a lifelong Apple user. I was rather wondering if anyone else has noticed a decrease in quality of Apple hardware. The thought of switching to something else is immiscible to me, by the way. But it does trouble me when an 8 month old iMac goes on the fritz, then just a year later another iMac goes on the fritz (only a year old). Logically, it can only be two things—(1)I'm a rare case with bad luck or (2) Apple products are declining in quality. I personally believe Apple products are declining in quality. To add to the oddity of my case, one of our Macs at work today crashed due to a hard drive. It's one thing if you're putting tons of mileage and generally not taking care of your system, but it's another for a very new computer's HD to flake out despite being well managed.

No worries, I don't call up Apple and lose my temper, it's not the customer support's fault anyways. Apple is very willing to take back the computer every time the HD gives out, which is great, it's just frustrating that it happens so often.

@RobDuckyWorth
You're right about SSD, perhaps that's the solution from now on...

@cwa
I did manage to recover most of the files on my HD, the itunes files were mostly corrupted unfortunately.

Having administered an Apple LAN back in the mid to late 90s as part of my job (no, I wasn't the "official" LAN guy, just the one with a clue), I can say that Apples quality and workmanship is significantly higher now than it was back then. But this was the 90s when Apple wasn't faring too well, their build quality wasn't so good at one point and hardware issues were becoming common on new machines.

Since then though I've had one machine go south (my Quad G5 with heat issues) and another have motherboard issues (wife's CD iMac). Overall though, both of the iBooks I bought in the early part of this past decade lasted 5+ years each until they needed to be replace by obsolescence (or abuse) and my old G4 ran for a number of years with a few upgrades and no issues. The 2 new MacBooks I've bought in the last few years have been great and my new iMac has been superb so far.

I don't see a dip in their quality but it could just be me.