I held out for the new iMac and now it’s here! (Unfortunately, Belle’s cute little white Macbook just up and died. Poor thing was only 16 months old. Motherboard dead. Battery toast, too. Repair cost: roughly the same as replacement cost. Sigh.)
by John Holbo on March 4, 2009
{ 52 comments }
scott 03.04.09 at 3:29 pm
Whoa. And Apple is usually more reliable than most! Gives me the shivers. Me and mine have no less than three Apple laptops in service right now. Couldn’t afford to replace any of them at the moment!
sanbikinoraion 03.04.09 at 3:36 pm
Macs are an absolute rip-off. I’m amazed that people still buy them.
john holbo 03.04.09 at 3:45 pm
And we’re off!
Andrew Watts 03.04.09 at 4:00 pm
Did you not have AppleCare on the Macbook? I’ve had my PowerBook for 5 years, use it every day, and not had any problems (so, Mr. Troll, comment #1, no, they aren’t a rip off or crap), but I know a couple of people who have had bum parts on their Macs and AppleCare seems to be worth it as a just in case measure. Though, even without it, Apple is often nicer than they need to be. My wife’s hard drive died when her PowerBook was 13 months old, and because she was a student they replaced the drive for the cost of parts only, even though she didn’t have AppleCare.
Anderson 03.04.09 at 4:07 pm
Oy. I broke down and bought my kid a Macbook for Xmas. Not glad to hear that.
It seems scandalous to me that *anyone*, PC or Mac-maker, won’t warrant items as expensive as laptops for at least 3 years, without charging hundreds of dollars extra.
(The lawyer in me wonders whether anyone selling a laptop for $1000 – $2000 can really say with a straight face that the buyer shouldn’t expect it to work for more than one year … or 16 months as the case may be.)
Ben Alpers 03.04.09 at 4:15 pm
AppleCare is most definitely worth the extra cost. It’s the only extended warranty I ever purchase.
Anderson 03.04.09 at 4:17 pm
AppleCare is most definitely worth the extra cost. It’s the only extended warranty I ever purchase.
Well, sure, but there’s something wrong with the scenario “this computer we’ve made is such a piece of crap, it’s not likely to work more than a year — give us hundreds of dollars more to replace it if/when it goes bust.”
Maybe laptops are still in the 1950s Detroit mode, where the manufacturers assume you’ll want next year’s model anyway, so quality schmality.
Andrew Watts 03.04.09 at 4:46 pm
Re: Anderson #6:
I agree that the warranty should be longer, but it seems like everyone charges extra for a warranty beyond one year. No need for Apple to be singled out at least.
That being said, everyone in my department has a Mac desktop or laptop that is expected to last at least 5 years. A lot of the students in the CS department also buy Mac laptops (and it was the same way at my undergrad/masters institution). My point being that I know dozens of people who have Macs, and I can only think of 3 problems with Macs belonging to people I know in the last 5 years.
On the other hand, I have never encountered a Dell that hasn’t required warranty service at some point (although surely some must, else they’d be out of business), and ditto for most people I know with HPs.
I don’t doubt there’s some degree of an Apple premium that you’re paying for the brand, but I think a lot of it is that Apple generally (but not always and exclusively) buys better parts.
Jake 03.04.09 at 4:47 pm
Repair cost: roughly the same as replacement cost. Sigh.)
Have you checked out MacResQ.com? They’ll often repair machines for far less than Apple. Of course, if the motherboard is toast AND the battery is dead, the repairs still might be more than the cost of the machine (which is one reason I tend to prefer desktops).
Oh, and if you decide not to repair your MacBook, MacResQ might still buy it. A couple bucks for a dead machine is a major improvement on nothing—or on contributing to a landfill.
dr 03.04.09 at 5:06 pm
Anybody who assumes that a laptop must last three years hasn’t ever used a laptop heavily over the course of several years. My Macbook is closing in on two years with no significant problems, and I don’t expect to have trouble getting another two years of service out of it, but like my iBook before it, it’s starting to get beat up.
This summer I spent $600 fixing an 18 month old Toshiba laptop, so I’d say service agreements are a good idea all around.
Yarrow 03.04.09 at 5:08 pm
AppleCare is most definitely worth the extra cost. It’s the only extended warranty I ever purchase.
Yes. You really have to roll the cost of AppleCare into your purchase price. In my experience there’s at least a fifty percent chance you’ll need a repair shortly after the initial warranty expires.
CK Dexter 03.04.09 at 5:20 pm
My first Mac, probably the same cute little white one, has been disappointingly troublesome. A dead battery within months, a total unrecoverable hard drive crash within six months, constant freezing and slowness, and random failures to find the hard drive.
My office Mac, on the other hand, has been a joy. I don’t know what to think of Apple, now.
Slocum 03.04.09 at 5:34 pm
It seems scandalous to me that anyone, PC or Mac-maker, won’t warrant items as expensive as laptops for at least 3 years, without charging hundreds of dollars extra.
As opposed to including the cost of the warranty in the price, thus giving the consumer no option? Why is that a superior approach? I’ll never buy another extended warranty on a laptop again — but then I doubt I’ll ever spend more than ~$500 on one again. Wife and one kid both have $500 laptops that are a couple of years old now and work as well as new (and should last years more). If we’d bought warranties on both, we’d have nearly paid for a new replacement already (and they’d be out of warranty in a year anyway). And if we’d bought MacBooks instead and extended warranties, we’d be about $2000 poorer ($1500 more for the computers and $500 for Apple Care warranties — ouch).
Doesn’t work so well for Macs (unless you want to do this), but my general computer-buying recommendation now would be to skip desktops and all-in-ones, and buy a low-cost laptop, a $150 22-inch monitor, a keyboard and a mouse, and run the laptop with the lid closed when at home at your desk.
c.l. ball 03.04.09 at 5:57 pm
The 1-year warranty is the industry standard now, whether it is a Mac or a PC. Whether a Mac is over-priced depends on what feature set you need. When I bought my first Mac in 2001, it was the only laptop with a 15″ screen that weighed less than 5.5 pounds. If you wanted to maximize screen size and keep weight down with good performance, it was the best laptop available at the time.
My beef with Apple is that they really don’t respect their customers. They yank products without any explanation (e.g., stand-alone iSight cameras disappear with no official reason why), are deceptive about product limitations (e.g., Ti PBs Airport reception problems), are closed to external innovation (e.g., iPhone store problems; no Flash in iPhone; no iPhone files storage) and almost never make amends (the iPhone rebate was the one, laudable exception).
The trouble with laptops is that most of the components are on a single board. I have a 2001 PowerBook G4 Ti that still runs, except that there’s a problem with the power — if it is shutdown or runs out of power, then it takes all sorts of multiple reset button fingering to restart it, so I never detach it from the power adaptor. Since the power controllers are on the mainboard, the repair cost was astronomical because the entire board would have to be replaced. Of course, this happened in 2007, well after the 3-year warranty had expired. If your in PC land, a white-box is much cheaper and more cost-effective than a laptop.
Righteous Bubba 03.04.09 at 6:06 pm
I’ve never been able to convince my knee-jerk-Mac-boosting self that an Apple laptop is worth the money.
Anderson 03.04.09 at 6:26 pm
but then I doubt I’ll ever spend more than ~$500 on one again. Wife and one kid both have $500 laptops that are a couple of years old now and work as well as new (and should last years more).
Sounds like the way to go, to me. What brand(s)?
Of course my 13YO wanted a Mac b/c they are “cool” and b/c the bastards opened an Apple store right near my neighborhood. Marketing, marketing, marketing.
owl 03.04.09 at 7:11 pm
My video card in my 16 mo. MacBookPro recently died.
It was out of warranty, but with a little research, I found that MacBooks made when I bought mine came with potentially defective video cards.
You should check to make sure that’s not the case before you give up on the MacBook.
I got mine repaired for free.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377
Slocum 03.04.09 at 7:32 pm
Sounds like the way to go, to me. What brand(s)?
I don’t worry about it much, to be honest. Of the two trouble-free two-year-old notebooks we have, one is a Gateway and one is an Acer, but the differences in repair rates are really relatively minor:
http://www.pcmag.com/image_popup/0,1871,iid=212926,00.asp
I would suspect that this has a lot to do with them all using components (chips, panels, hard disks, batteries) from the same few vendors and mostly being assembled under contract in the same Chinese and Taiwanese factories. Just for example, kid #2 is going to need a notebook pretty soon, and I was thinking about this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114613
Only 5 1/2 lbs for a 15″ laptop — that’s pretty good. The integrated video is a bit weak for games, but given this would be intended for school work, that’s probably an advantage ;) But the best deal may be some other brand by the time we get around to buying.
We have had good luck with the Acer LCD monitors like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009145
Which do have a 3-year warranty and produce a nice sharp image even with just a VGA input (rather than DVI).
Anderson 03.04.09 at 7:47 pm
Thanks, Slocum — I am actually the kind of person who would, unadvised, buy a laptop at Wal-Mart out of sheer ignorance, so advice is welcome.
scott 03.04.09 at 7:51 pm
Whether Macintosh computers are worth their price is a matter of opinion. What’s not a matter of opinion, however, is the fact that they are at the top of the heap in terms of reliability and service and have been for years.
Anderson 03.04.09 at 7:57 pm
at the top of the heap in terms of reliability and service
Indeed, that seems to have been Belle’s experience.
salient 03.04.09 at 9:39 pm
I’ve never been able to convince my knee-jerk-Mac-boosting self that an Apple laptop is worth the money.
Did a double-take here — okay, so with “knee-jerk-Mac-boosting” you weren’t talking about compulsively stealing Macintosh computers. :) I guess that would be “knee-jerk Mac boosting.”
Right up there with Eats, Shoots and Leaves for punctuational dependence.
Righteous Bubba 03.04.09 at 9:50 pm
I figured someone would go for that. In fact my most recent Mac was suspiciously cheap…
geo 03.05.09 at 5:34 am
run the laptop with the lid closed when at home at your desk.
Slocum, what do you mean by this? Close the lid when not in use?
Kenny Easwaran 03.05.09 at 6:06 am
geo – I think he means to plug it into some sort of docking station connected to the monitor so that the closed laptop functions basically like the tower or whatever it is that you call the part of a computer outside of the monitor and peripherals these days.
sanbikinoraion 03.05.09 at 10:25 am
Seriously. For £950 you could get a PC that would utterly blow away the spec of the new entry-level iMac. I just put some bits together on eBuyer that total £750 for a 3core 2.8ghz, 4gb ram, 1tb disk, 22″ monitor, GF9800GTX+, Bluray/DVDRW drive and microATX case. Better in every single respect than an iMac and £200 lighter. Yes, they’re a rip-off.
Matt McGrattan 03.05.09 at 11:14 am
Add in the cost of the O/S and you aren’t that far off the Mac price.
sanbikinoraion 03.05.09 at 11:19 am
Matt, that was including an OEM cost of Vista. Sorry.
sanbikinoraion 03.05.09 at 11:20 am
…for which read “OEM copy” – of Vista Home Premium 64, to be precise.
sanbikinoraion 03.05.09 at 11:24 am
(Cranking all the specs down to the £950 iMac, I can build a PC for £450, which isn’t far off half the Mac price!)
belle le triste 03.05.09 at 11:29 am
and what’s more you agree to build this PC for me, and ship it to me, for FREE!
sanbikinoraion 03.05.09 at 12:35 pm
Belle – I would do it for £100, if you like, presuming that you’re in the UK.
Slocum 03.05.09 at 1:31 pm
geo – I think he means to plug it into some sort of docking station connected to the monitor so that the closed laptop functions basically like the tower or whatever it is that you call the part of a computer outside of the monitor and peripherals these days.
Right — except there’s no need for a docking station. Plug in your mouse, keyboard, and external monitor and you’re good to go. The only small trick is to change the power setting for what the computer does when you close the lid from ‘sleep’ or ‘hibernate’ to ‘do nothing’ so it will keep running with the lid closed. Or if you have enough space on the desk, you can use the external monitor and the laptop displays at the same time as dual monitors.
If the power of a modern notebook computer is powerful enough for you (and it is for almost everybody), then you have a small, quiet ‘desktop’ computer that runs on little power and has it’s own built-in uninterruptible power supply (e.g. the computer’s battery), driving a big monitor and a real mouse and keyboard when you’re at your desk — and in the same deal you get a notebook you can untether and take with you when you go. If you keep your eyes on the sales, you can do the whole setup for around $600 (or about twice that, if you’re an Apple person and do it starting with a white MacBook).
Jon H 03.05.09 at 1:51 pm
“Better in every single respect than an iMac and £200 lighter.”
You’d have to pay me way more than £200 to get me to use Windows. Buying cheap PCs is penny wise and pound foolish when you’re stuck with crappy software.
Kaare 03.05.09 at 2:02 pm
All folks make valid points based on his/her tastes interests personal preference and budget constraints.
I chose the mac because like most, but not all folks, mine has been relatively trouble free. I also am blind and don’t much fancy paying the same price for a single upgrade of a voice package such as Jaws/window-eyes or pick one, then on top of it get a large print program for my lady for magnification at $800. By the way, Jaws last I checked for the version that works with pro not just home starts at $1500 and each upgrade costs last checked in the order of $300.
Now, mac comes with leopard, which includes a fairly robust speech package that allows me to manipulate many but not all things for free, and the ability for my girly to perform tasks that require enlargement for the same price of $0.
From this view point, which I admit is a unique one and doesn’t come around often, I save a lot when buying apple:).
sanbikinoraion 03.05.09 at 2:38 pm
Slocum, that’s exactly what I do – I also have an external USB hub with mouse, keyboard, printer, backup drive etc to save on fuss when plugging/unplugging.
Jon H – OSX and Windows are not that different, they’re each annoying in their own special ways. The days of Windows being horribly unstable are pretty much over, but Macs still only come with one mouse button :)
Buying a Mac when equivalent software costs more and is less performant and/or stable is penny-wise, pound foolish. MS Office is not only more expensive on the Mac, it’s also substantially poorer. GIMP & Eclipse both have problems on Mac that just aren’t there in Windows.
Righteous Bubba 03.05.09 at 2:58 pm
Untrue.
In any case there are a bunch of free operating systems out there, some of which are quite pretty and usable. Nobody needs to go Windows or Mac.
Jon H 03.05.09 at 4:18 pm
“Buying a Mac when equivalent software costs more and is less performant and/or stable is penny-wise, pound foolish.”
I’m a developer, and the development and performance tools that are free on OS X cost quite a lot of money on Windows, if equivalents are available at all. (I don’t believe there are free tools for Windows that are as good as the Shark profiler or the Instruments gui for dtrace.)
Also, I use USB trackballs with my Macs.
sanbikinoraion 03.05.09 at 4:44 pm
Jon – I (web) develop on Mac at work, too, and Eclipse is definitely considerably ropier on Mac than either Linux or Win. Shark might be great, but I bet there’s a ton of free Windows tools that Windows developers swear by that aren’t available on Mac either.
Anyway, let’s be reasonable, we’re on an academic group blog – John Holbo will almost certainly never need such things. My major complaint is that people are paying vastly over the odds for shiny rubbish :)
strasmangelo jones 03.05.09 at 5:10 pm
In any case there are a bunch of free operating systems out there
Free operating systems such as Windows. I didn’t pay a dime for my copy.
Beryl 03.06.09 at 12:34 am
I think Slocum has it right; a (relatively cheap) laptop with extra monitor/keyboard/mouse is probably the way to go.
I’ve had about a dozen computers since 1983, among them three varieties of Mac (including the original) and a few roll-your-own generic PCs. Saved a bundle not buying extended warranties. Only one machine truly failed (first the HD went, then the motherboard) and a favourite NEC monitor had to be discarded after a power surge; all the others were still working when I traded up. I currently use three computers – an older Mac desktop in my office, a Dell desktop at home and an Acer laptop (15-inch screen, 3GB memory; 320 GB HD, dedicated video card, &c) for travel. I’m seriously thinking of giving away the two desktops (but keeping a monitor and keyboard), and adding an external HD backup and a proper mouse. No loss of computing power and a smaller carbon footprint!
Jon H 03.06.09 at 12:57 am
“Shark might be great, but I bet there’s a ton of free Windows tools that Windows developers swear by that aren’t available on Mac either.”
Oddly enough, there don’t seem to be. Over here a Second Life developer documentation wiki discusses profilers, mentioning Apple’s Shark, a linux command-line profiler, and two commercial Windows profilers which cost $599 and $699, respectively. Of one product, from Intel, they write “sampling and call graph profiler. The UI is terrible – but there aren’t many other sampling profilers available on Windows.”
Here’s a comparison of VTune and Shark by someone on the Mozilla team:Why can’t VTune Be More Like Shark.
I can see how another platform would be better for Eclipse (though there’s always Windows in VMWare! Heck, at a prior job everyone used Eclipse in Windows on VMWare on Windows. Made it easy to distribute new iterations of the development environment and framework as new images.) but I do Objective-C and C++ coding of neurobiology lab experiment-driving software – near real-time OpenGL, displaying stimuli, collecting data, etc.
mpowell 03.06.09 at 10:52 am
I was never a big fan of macs, but I had no idea they had these kinds of reliability issues. For a company that prides itself on quality design, a system where the long term warranty is ‘required’ is a major liability in my opinion. The only computer part I’ve ever had trouble with is an old CD ROM drive, which I could replace pretty easily if I needed to. Those macs are even more expensive than I thought.
If Microsoft wasn’t forcing Vista on everyone, I would never consider anything but a barebones PC with XP on it for the forseeable future. Of course, given the enormous turd which is Vista and the inconvenience of using an alternative OS, my next computer purchase will be a tricky one. I may just go find a hacked version of XP. No guilt included.
Slocum’s advice is pretty good here, but I would actually recommend considering significantly upgrading your monitor. They have very nice flat panel displays now in the $500-600 range that won’t need to be replaced even as frequently as your desktop/laptop and for many users a better monitor will do more to upgrade your experience than anything else.
sanbikinoraion 03.06.09 at 12:36 pm
Just make sure that your current graphics card can drive the new monitor! I discovered just before buying a lovely-looking new Samsung 22″ that my laptop’s builtin graphics only drive up to 1280×1024 when 1600×1050 was needed.
Beryl 03.06.09 at 12:52 pm
MPowell,
$500-600? I haven’t seen anything in the 20-22-inch range selling for more than about $300. What sort of specs are you thinking about?
Slocum 03.06.09 at 2:02 pm
sanbikinoraion: Just make sure that your current graphics card can drive the new monitor! I discovered just before buying a lovely-looking new Samsung 22†that my laptop’s builtin graphics only drive up to 1280×1024 when 1600×1050 was needed.
Hmmm–are you sure? Unless your laptop is very old, I think it’s more likely that the 1680×1050 display option is just hidden until a monitor capable of that is connected. I you know anybody with a 22″ monitor you can attach you laptop to as a test, you might try that. Or just buy a monitor from a store where a return is easy.
Beryl: $500-600? I haven’t seen anything in the 20-22-inch range selling for more than about $300. What sort of specs are you thinking about?
He may be thinking about more expensive monitors based on true 8-bit IPS or MVA panels instead of cheaper TN panels. But unless you’re a graphics professional who needs a color-calibrated monitor, you probably don’t need to worry about it. A simple test — if the colors on your laptop display look fine to you, then don’t worry about it (since virtually all laptops use TN panels — Apple has even been sued a couple times over this). And I don’t think there’s any reason to think more expensive IPS or MVA based monitors will last longer.
mpowell 03.06.09 at 4:34 pm
45: I’m thinking of something more than 24 inches. You see a lot of them at BestBuy now. A couple friends of mine got 27 inch, I think, displays a couple years ago when they went on sale and they make using a computer a more enjoyable experience. I guess it depends on what you use your computer for. But for being able to view a lot without using a tiny font size, a larger screen space is the best solution. The sale price from a couple years ago is the standard price today.
David 03.06.09 at 4:47 pm
I follow CT on my over 4 year old G4 Powerbook, which I bought on Ebay. I have used it almost daily for the 3 years I have owned it. One loose key, some screen marring (but no dead pixels) and the battery is getting long in the tooth. You’d have to pay me to willingly (and even then I’d be lying) to use Windows. Of course, my experience is as anecdotal as the problems enumerated here. However, aggregated, Apple is consistently rated as one of the most reliable across its entire product line.
mpowell 03.06.09 at 5:40 pm
48: I would certainly have hoped so. But if that’s the case then you shouldn’t be buying warranties! Apple should, in theory, be making money on those.
Slocum 03.06.09 at 7:02 pm
I follow CT on my over 4 year old G4 Powerbook, which I bought on Ebay. I have used it almost daily for the 3 years I have owned it. One loose key, some screen marring (but no dead pixels) and the battery is getting long in the tooth. You’d have to pay me to willingly (and even then I’d be lying) to use Windows.
Just for the hell of it, I’m posting this reply on a 14-year-old AST laptop I pulled off the shelf (one that’s long outlived the company that made it). No loose keys (but Netscape version 4 sure doesn’t render modern web sites very well). Incidentally, I feel the same way about OSX when I have to use it. I’m sure I could get accustomed to it if I had to, but I’d rather not have to. Various flavors of Linux, on the other hand, I don’t mind at all–they’re quite natural to a Windows user, but OSX annoys me
Beryl 03.06.09 at 7:36 pm
@50
I started in CP/M, and went through several flavours of DOS and even more of Windows, with side trips into OS/2, Unix, Xenix and Linux. I use OSX (irregularly) but, like you, don’t find it nearly as intuitive as its proponents claim. Mind you, the last true bits of programming I did were in Basic and Turbo Pascal, so maybe I’m just behind the times.
Chris Bertram 03.07.09 at 9:06 am
I converted to OSX about two years ago. I haven’t looked back. Program installation/desinstallation is far smoother, I don’t waste time clearing my hard disk of junk temp files etc, I don’t get plagues with Malware and viruses, and my photos reliably look like they should on screen. Quicksilver is a pretty cool program too. One person above is absolutely correct that Microsoft Office runs better on Windows, but, then, I try to avoid using Microsoft Office if I possibly can.
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