When Apple let me down, down, down

Apple is a fine company as commercial companies go, but it is just a commercial company. During the x number of years I have used them, I have been let down numerous times.

• A Performa of some kind in 1995 with green hue on the screen. Some hardware fix had to be applied. The local Apple dealer promised me a System in English, but refused to give me any back-up system diskettes in English. It was an integrated screen-computer - some kind of iMac of the time. And it weighed roughly as much as a medium sized battleship. After that experience I promised myself never ever to buy a desktop computer again.
• A Duo 2300c in 1998 where the hinges broke so the screen became unusable. It was just slightly more than a year, and a reparation outside of guarantee was not worth it. Until then, it had been one of my favourite Macs ever - slim and light.
  
• A Wallstreet PowerBook in 2000. I upgraded the harddisk to 20G, just before Mac OS X came out. It turned out that Apple only supported installations on the first 4G of the harddisk, so my remaining 16G were of little use, unless I fiddled around moving home directories and stuff.
• A Powerbook 12" G4 with a failed harddisk. I lost data for a few days since the previous backup. It got replaced by the local Apple dealer and for years emitted a beep every now and then. I never figured out why, but that problem seems to be gone with the upgrade to Leopard.
  
• A Powerbook 15" G4, Aluminium in 2005. This is probably the worst computer I ever had. The first one I got failed loading the OS updates and just went dark. Besides a key was not working. I got it completely replaced and the OS updates would still not load on the new one, unless I trod very carefully. The touchpad does not select words properly. After a little more than one year, the battery stopped charging. It is not a problem of the battery, which I tried to replace, but it is something internal, outside of guarantee and most likely expensive. Last week the sound stopped working - all sound controls were greyed out. A restart fixed that one. A few days ago, the processor went all nuts during the night, the fan was running like a jet motor, and I had to get up and make a cold restart. The 2 December, all USB ports stopped working - both for EyeTV and for my iPod Nano. One restart with the cables still attached failed, but removing the cables and only plugging them in after the second restart worked. I just learnt that it would cost as much to fix the problem as to buy a new computer.

And yet I go on with Apple's products. I am pretty certain that the problems are even worse on the other side. I have used Linux, OS/2 and different flavours of Windows in parallel, and at least when it comes to daily use, they just do not match up.

I have had a few marvellous macs. My PowerBook 170 still worked after 10 years, and it was with a tear in my eye, that I got rid of it. My LC never had any problems. And my 12" PowerBook G4 and my 12" iBook have followed me for a long time, in spite of the one time harddisk failure of the PowerBook.