Apple's quality dwindling: My MacBook Pro sob story

My Macbook Pro 17" had the defective Nvidia board. I bought AppleCare (when I first purchased it) but despite that, I was out a notebook for nearly 10 days. When I would call for an update, I was met with a lot of apathy.

Same week, my iPhone 3G dies and had to be replaced at the Apple Store.

Apple's products being higher quality than anyone else's? Nahh. They crash and suck just the same as any PC I ever had. Turns out though, their service department might not be that much better either.

I have been seriously contemplating a MacBook Pro (switching over from Windows), but have real concerns about Apple and recent "quality issues". We purchased two iPhone 3G's soon after release and each one has had to be replace twice in the first 6 weeks....that's four faulty iPhones (and two that have been doing well) for one customer. The Apple Store tries to say "isolated case", but it seems to be hard to believe that 4 failures out of 6 is "isolated"...
That being said, it makes me wonder if I should buy a current gen MPB instead of waiting for the (possibly) new one's to be released....maybe they are more stable than the new ones will be before "debugging"...?

dude that a crazy story i hope everything is well with your mac lol

I recently upgraded from a 3 year old 1.5GHz PowerBook to a year old 2.16GHz MacBook Pro, bought for £600 from eBay. Guess what... It's absolutely fine.

Consumer electronics tend to fail relatively quickly if there's an inherent defect, and if an item can survive its first six months it's probably going to be fine for the rest of its working life.

This is why I'm more than happy to buy a year old laptop - if it was going to fail it would most likely have done so by now ;-)

RE: apple care. THe trick to getting repair/replacements in a timely manner is to go to a good genius bar at non-peak weekday hours, make the problem as reproducible as possible. Like in San Francisco, don't go to downtown, go to the suburban stores at mid-morning or early afternoon.

RE: this website: what's the minimum number of CDN hosts i have to unblock in FF noscript to see comments? It's a waterfall, unblock one, you see 3 more.

Welcome to the "Strange Vertical Lines" club one and all!!
I have had this problem on and off since I bought my MBP in March. This has been a hot item on the Apple Discussion Board since March. Some 60,000 view until Apple closed the thread. Something they love to do when they aren't going to do a thing about the problem. APPLE is so busy with the iPhone that they are willing to ignore all of us who have paid $2500 plus for what we thought was the usual great product from Apple, and now is becoming a issue of incredible proportions. We went through this when the iPod came out... remember?? It seems that Steve Jobs has taken is eye off the ball again and Apple "computer" customers are going to suffer. So here is the deal,
complain all you want, take you computer back and exchange them, do all you can, because none of this will do the slightest bit of good… the stripes will come back, some time they will disappear for weeks at a time, but trusts me they will come back. And in the end the only thing you can count on, is that Apple will do NOTHING about fixing this problem! BUY A iPHONE IF YOU WANT APPLE’S ATTENTION!!!

I have had good experiences with customer support, mainly because i don't use apple when things go wrong. I called them because my original MacBook (Late 2006) case started to crack, and they told me to take it to this place called Carbon Computing which was only a few blocks from my house. And now i find that here is this computer store dedicated 100% to apple products. So i give it to them, 2 days later i get it back with a brand new case, keyboard, and track pad. it even smells new again. Then my hard drive failed, and they replaced that. Then after my warranty ended, my display data cable came loose and they plugged it back in no charge. I will never call apple when i have problems with a Mac or iPod, i'll always go to Carbon.

I bought a new MacBook in April from store.apple.com. I've had to call customer care a few times for various minor things. Their system won't recognize my serial number (and it matches the numbers from the AppleMenu>About This Mac and from underneath the battery.) I've tried both online and over the phone to do this, but to no avail. I still get updates OK.

And I was rather peeved to have bought DiskWarrior from their store, only to find out it was incompatible with Leopard.

I've always had excellent experiences with Apple Care. Recently I bought a used MacBook which wouldn't go to sleep when the lid was closed. Seller never disclosed this, but since it had two weeks left on the warranty I just sent it in. Two days later its back in my hands and works like a champ.

So while I've heard of people with CS issues, and I believe them, I've never experienced anything close to what they have.

I bought one of the first MBP 15"s to come off the line, fully spec'd. I've sent it back two times already, and need to send it back once more- when it came back from service the second time, the WiFi (which had always worked perfectly) was completely screwed, and still is- I can't fix it despite trying fixes posted by people all over the net..