Kokopelli said:
Well, I feel for the author. The sad fact is that his problems are not unique, but part of a pattern. A significant minority of mac purchases turn out to be lemons. A far higher percentage than I think is acceptable.
It does not make Apple a bad company, but there have been some significant quality control and build issues. Heck I would rather get an Apple product at the end of it product cycle than at the beginning since any problmes that are likely to come up have been seen. That is the opposite of my practices when building a Windows machine.
Yeah the real issue is that we are paying a premium for these machines. I mean people almost expect those kind of QC issues with budget PC's, but Apple has convinced many people that you get what you pay for.
So, you pay twice as much for a computer and it turns out to be no more reliable, and the support sucks-- what are you paying for then?
Fortunately, my mini has been problem-free, and I haven't heard any mac mini horror stories like this.
To Apple's credit, these capacitor problems weren't their fault. Their capacitor supplier had stolen a design from another company but implemented it wrong, causing them to leak. Abit (PC motherboard manufacturer) went through the same thing a couple years ago.
So this probably created an immense amount of support issues that Apple wasn't prepared to deal with. Hopefully they are learning some lessons here.