Every Mac I've owned has failed

Every <i>computer</i> I've ever had has failed. Even the ones that are working now, I expect to fail sometime relatively soon.<p>Some statistically small time after that, I'll fail as well. Bummer.

Can we stop screwing around with anecdotes and cite some sort of study?<p>In my family, we have had 5 macs. An iBook G3, a Macbook Pro, two Macbooks, and an old Powerbook 170 from 1991. All of them are still in perfect working order, and have only ever broken as a result of physical damage (drops, spills, etc.) The Powerbook 170 was used as a word processor for about 15 years, and still remains in working order.<p>I have had nothing but positive experiences with Macs, but I need to emphasize that my experiences are not data. They are anecdotes, and thus can't prove anything one way or the other.

Every pet I've owned has died (except the current dog)<p>One of our dogs only lasted 17 years, the other failed after just 15. The chooks weren't much good; we only seemed to get about 4 or 5 years from them. The finches are all dead, and so are the budgies. The rabbit died too.<p>My wife had a dog they gave away, but they kept in contact with the new owner, and after 6 years with the new owner, that dog was dead too.

Didn't this guy (along with Jason Fried) make a <i>commercial</i> for Apple?

What a great way to direct a lot of traffic to your blog.

Oh man, I know from experience that nothing good will come from this.<p>Let the torrent of anecdotes begin.

2 years is pretty good going IMHO. After 2 years a laptop is starting to look pretty dated. The battery is likely to be dead, the hard drive likely to be miniscule.

Seems to me that the Mac failure rate is always going to seem higher because of the devotees - a certain class of selection bias. For instance, if a Dell fails who's going to:<p>1) ascribe it to Dell and not the relevant component maker?<p>and<p>2) continue to buy Dell products after a few failures?

Well, this should provide for a certain amount of conflicted ambivalence, the collision of Rails and Mac fanaticisms should be amusing.<p>I'd have to say that my experience of Apple hardware is even worse than his, modern Macbooks are at least user serviceable meaning you only need to undo a couple of screws to get at the hard drive, the count on the old iBooks was between twelve and 17 screws to get to the hard drive.

I have a similar experience. Every mac I've had has died (basically my last 4 computers). 2 screen deaths, one overheat, and one coffee incident.<p>I blame all of these on myself. Even paying 3k for a top of the line laptop, I really dont expect the computer to last more than 1.5 years at the way I use the computer. Pounding away on the computer for 60 hours a week on average, and working out of lots of coffee shops, I'm hardly the typical use case for a computer user.<p>Just like a consumer coffee machine cant be expected to stay functional for long if it were in use in a restaurant, I dont expect my consumer laptop to work for the same time period as an average consumer would.<p>However, if you're using a laptop for commercial purposes, and at such a high capacity, you should probably expect to be investing at least yearly in your equipment.

In a previous life (before I had a wife and kids), I had both money and balls and used to do a lot of dirt bike riding.<p>This same argument used to come up then too, in regard to the European bikes (KTM and Husky) vs the Japanese ones. Essentially, people would get upset that their new European bike, for which they had paid a substantial premium over an equivalent Japanese bike, would still break and require maintenance. I've owned both a KTM and a Husky (plus a Honda and a Kawasaki), and can attest to the fact that they are just pieces of machinery, like everything else. But... (and this is the bit people find hard to understand) ... the Euro bikes had something the Japanese ones didn't; something that made you forgive their mechanical woes and their extreme price. Man I miss those days...

I don't think it's fair to put a hard disk failure down as a failed mac ... It's one of those things you think are supposed to fail someday!

every device with millions of integral connections between delicate components i've owned has been so susceptible to failure that i've got reason to wonder if this is an untapped market...so far i've not seen a class of consumer electronics that fails as beautifully as its software is expected to.

Surprised nobody has mentioned how Apple treats customers when they do have hardware failures. There are a lot of stories of hardware being swapped/upgraded in Apple Stores, even out of warranty.<p>Hardware failure is inevitable; the real question is, does Apple do a better job when that inevitability strikes?

I once had a minicomputer fail on me when one of the TTL chips fell out of the CPU.

Every Mac I've owned has not failed. Seriously, they are all still chugging along.

Odd. I've had one Mac fail on me (dual-USB iBook, the one with the motherboard problem). They replaced the motherboard, but then I sold it anyway a few months later.<p>Every other Mac I've ever had since then is still running. Another iBook, a MacBook, PowerMac G4, and the Mac Pro I'm typing on.<p>It's a little annoying, honestly. At least the PC hardware has the decency to die and get out of the way when I stop using it. :-)

That's why I wish I could have ThinkPad with OS X, without spending too much time on non-standard configuration. ;-)

I've had a powermac g5 tower dual 1.6 for over two years now and it still works fine (though flash seems to be a lot slower now)<p>My other old mac a G3 (i forget how old it is) is still working well with Tiger (albeit a bit slower compared to everything else)

Network card on my MacBook refused to work just after 6 months. On the other hand, my 4 year old Asus laptop still works as a charm, apart from the HDD failure. Still, the HDD went on 3,5 years of heavy and tough usage.

That's a pretty normal time span for a laptop to fail. Someone working at Dell once told me that components generally start failing after or around 2 years.<p>My laptop rule of thumb: always buy the extended warranty.

I have a thing for second-hand 2001-era HP Omnibook 6100's, which fail after about 2 years (screen hinge, etc), but are QUIET. A recent favourite is Thinkpad T23's, which are titanium cased.

The only computer that has ever failed me was a Sun Sparc station, 'round about 1995 ('twas the hard drive). Other than that, so far I've been unscathed. <i>&#60;knocks on wood&#62;</i>

I have the same identical problem with my MBP. I'll be forced to get a new laptop in January, as being without one is a huge inconvenience.

Post seems pretty spot-on.<p>My Mac Pro's RAM failed within 6 months.<p>My MacBook Pro's battery died and had to be replaced within 11 months.

moral of the story: buy applecare.

Hard Disks and Optical drives only fail on Macintoshes?

Every bias I've owned has failed me.

The longest I've ever had a Mac was six years, when I used a Mac Plus from 1989-1995, when I got my dads old IIsi. Then in 1996 I bought a Quadra 605, and in 1998 I bought a PowerMac 7200, and in 2000 I bought a new iMac. In 2001 I bought a Powerbook Lombard 400, and in 2002 I bought a G4/466. Then in 2003 I bought a new Powerbook 12" 1ghz, and that worked perfectly for me for three years until December 2006 when I bought a new Macbook which needed a new motherboard six months later. Since then it's worked pretty OK though it does seem to completely lock up every now and then requiring a forced shutdown, which didn't happen with the old Powerbook 12" if I recall correctly. Our 4 year old Dell PC has worked perfectly and we will continue to use it until it blows up.

every pc I have owned has failed!

What do you expect from subpar parts at a 300% markup?