Comments on: Why are there so many Macbook problems lately?

By: S

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:53:42 +0000

Bought a refurbished macbook thinking it would be cheaper and still a quality product, given ‘stringent’
QA process they document about on their website, but alas the DVD drive has been replaced and now static is coming from the speakers. Prior to my ownership, the power adapter and speakers were replaced…..leaves me with a dilemma: – return to the darkside (windows) and deal with vista (sigh) or stick with apple, whose OS and interface I really like.

By: Aman

Aman — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:03:54 +0000

I got MacBook on 10April. On 20 April, it screen started flickering and day by day it finished, When I asked Apple Store to fix, they took whole to find solution and fixed. But within 5 days, DVD-Drive started making problem. Finally asked to replace instead of repair, yet waiting for it from last week:-(

By: Leandro Ferreira

Leandro Ferreira — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:02:26 +0000

I’m also having problems with my new Macbook Pro 17″.
I was doing a massive text job in Final Cut, subtitling stuff. When working with the Text Tab in the viewer, blocks of text remain showing on the viewer even after loading a different text there, sometimes I had to close the viewer to get it cleaned up, also reopening Final Cut and restarting the Mac seemed to make things OK for a while, but not long. I reinstalled the system and Final Cut but, one lost night, but the problem persists.

Any help?

By: obi

obi — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:54:35 +0000

German magazine CT makes an annually survey amongst its readers
regarding notebook and service quality. They stated that although
Apple notebooks only have a minor market share in Germany
(behind Acer, FSC and HP) they are number one in the failure statistics
(17%) . Although CT states that the survey is probably not representative,
they suggest that the Apple notebook failure rate remarkably increased after the switch to Intel hardware.

By: jadedcritic

jadedcritic — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:42:48 +0000

@zippi

Oh, we can demand all we like; but the vast majority of companies won’t replace unless they have absolutely no alternative. Europe’s employment and consumer laws are frequently allot more people-friendly then our own.

By: zippi

zippi — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:03:07 +0000

In german law there’s a part that says the company gets 3-4 attemps to repair the product if it’s malfunctioning and subject to warranty – and after that the customer can demand a replacement of that product… Isn’t there something similar in U.S. warranty law?

By: elminno

elminno — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:19:36 +0000

I agree that mac users probably just care more than an average PC user. I can only confirm that there are problems with other manufacturers as well. A friend of mine is having major issues with her HP Pavilion laptop at the moment, for instance.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:37:36 +0000

I do think that there are also issues with other computer manufacturers notebooks, the difference is that the kind of person who buys an HP notebook doesn’t blog about the issues he is having with it and he also doesn’t spark the same sort of fire in the blogosphere that Mac users do.

We’ve heard time and time again that Apple is a great target for building traffic on a website, if anything goes wrong with Apple and you write about it, you get a lot of traffic, so I think that these issues may be blown out of proportion. But it is also possible that some of these issues are widespread while others aren’t.

I don’t think that the keyboard or graphical issues are so widespread but I do think that the problem with MacBook’s cracking was a big issue.

By: elminno

elminno — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:56:07 +0000

Well I sent you an email recently where I described problems with my own new MacBook Pro in detail, so I don’t think these are just isolated incidents.

By: krye

krye — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:27:09 +0000

In the past few years Apple’s popularity has grown exponentially. Perhaps Apple has had to ramp up the production of units past the point in which their QA system can manage. With an increase in production, QA also has to be increased. If you have 10 guys build 100 machines, and 1 guy in place for QA, you can’t expect that one guy to do the same job when you now have 1000 guys building a million units. I think Apple’s QA dept. has not been growing in step with manufacturing. This may be the reason for the rise in issues we’ve been seeing.