The Reader's View: Best of your feedback, comments and opinions

TUAW did indeed do an article about this (it pertains to seven laptop manufacturers). I cannot find the article (too many pages ago), but basically it has a graph of seven laptop manufacturers with Asus as best, HP as worst, and Apple in or near the middle with Dell finishing just after Apple. I can say this is true, and that I am qualified to make the statement having owned several and used many other Apple and Dell products. Apple used to make a more reliable computer, but that ended with the PowerPC days. The prices have come down somewhat, but it is still very overpriced for all of their stuff being made in cheap Chinese factories. You could easily spend over $6k on an Apple computer (if maxing out your computer options), yet you can only get a 3 year warranty maximum on any product. Apple nickels and dimes customers more than even Dell would dare to do, however. It is pretty interesting that Apple is still selling $60 hard disks for $200 (and with only one of the three years of warranty you would normally get). You could pay just $5 extra for a better quality disk with five year warranty, but apparently Apple cannot make a product that is designed well enough to reasonably be expected to last for five years even if your life depended on it. I have heard of some exceptions to this rule for the older Macs, but maybe this was before Apple designed their products to be replaced.

BTW Undesired input != a troll comment. I can't help it if the truth offends readers. I'm mainly annoyed that there is no fully functional AND secure OS. It is a serious project to make a new OS, too. You would think, given all the effort required, they would aim to get it right.

My macbook has been more reliable for me than my Dell machine, but I'm afraid Microsoft is fighting back. Windows 7 is almost as good to work with. I'm not sure it is as secure. But I'm more concerned with the potential downfall of the iphone.
I'm afraid the iphone is about to lose its coolest thing in the world status. The Android and Windows 7 phones actually work cooler. Apple isn't the only phone with cool apps anymore. The Google phones seem to allow much of a smarter flow of experience with widgets and drop down menus.
I'm sure a new iphone is coming soon, but I hope that Apple takes into account the fact that new and slightly better phones are coming out every other month.
They need to match the operating system advantages of the Android system. Android's handling of updates is pretty handy. Blackberry and Google phones come with turn by turn directions. Why not the iphone? Why no flash? A camera button would be nice. Since, they sell millions of iphones, why not offer a version with a slide out qwerty. It would be nice to be able to open at three or four apps since there are other phones that allow many more.
There is actually lots more that they could do fairly easily if they wanted to offer higher end versions that do more than offer more storage. I would like to see something like infrared or RFID so it can be used as a credit card, remote, and key, but with all that power it may need a thumbprint scanner too though.

As the "other Apple" products, the Beatles' core work still works despite the fact that Apple Corps is now half corpses. Fave fab flav: the quiet one - George. Send skins.

I have to agree with Robert. I have been running a Mac Lab at my high school since 1992. I currently have 42 machines in my classroom and over the past 18 years I have purchased at least that many over again. Out of 80 plus machines I have had two machines that I have had to take in for repairs and both were under warranty. As I buy new machines I pass my older ones down to the history lab where many are still in use. The only reason we retire our Macs is because times and software pass them by. The history teacher still uses some G3 all-in-ones that I purchased in 1998 because they capture vhs tapes of which he has a large library.

Are Apple products really worth what they cost? Yes, just think of the article TUAW did confirming my suspicion that Apple is only marginally more reliable than Dell (which isn't worth shit).