I’ve used Macs for 16 years now, and owned my own for 5. I’ve never had any issues, until these new powerbooks, never. All my macs have been rock solid, with any problems arising from my own extreme stupidity. Could it be that these powerbooks were rushed out, with little quality control? Or that Apple’s efforts are more concentrated on iPods? After all, thats where the money is for them. I’d like to think that I just got the few dud ones, and that these are just overly-paranoid conspiracy theories.
Alas, that does not appear to be the case. (Hat tip: Dane.)
My previous posts on the topic are here, here and here.
It’s interesting though because its only the 15″ version, both the 17 and 12 seem to be fine. The 12 didn’t have display changes, but the 17 did. Guess they should have done a better job picking up their display vendor.
You know, it’s kind of strange… in the past I never heard of such horrible problems with laptops (PC or Mac), whereas in recent years that’s all I hear about (both PCs and Macs). Older hard drives never malfunctioned - I have a number of Western Digital drives that have easily lasted for 10 years, and could last longer if their capacity wasn’t so useless - yet newer hard drives fail a lot more.
Seriously, I couldn’t tell you how many times people have had problems with PCs (Dell in particular, although people also have said their tech support is great). Macs have been relatively reliable from what I can tell, although now they too are suffering the same sort of problems. Is it because Macs are becoming more popular and now more people buying Macs = more visible problems? Bear in mind I’m not trying to bash Macs (or PCs), I just wanted to comment on the apparent decrease in reliability that I’m seeing.
Does anyone else notice this loss of reliability, or is this just an artifact created by more users having laptops overall (more computers = more problems)?
Well on hard drives you need to understand two things about hard drives.
First, there are two types of hard drives in this world: those that have failed and those that will, beyond that everything is a matter of time and use.
Second, higher capacity hard drives have lower tolerances. Consider, a 100 MB hard drive from 15 years ago versus a 500 GB hard drive today. The 500 GB drive might even be smaller than that 100 MB drive. so that is roughly an increase in information density of something like 5000% or more. This means a much much smaller defect (a defect 1/5000th) will cause the drive to fail. even a small drop while the drive is rotating can damage the palter or read write head. All told we are looking at smaller parts manufactured to extreme tolerances. Smaller pieces wear faster and fail sooner. Smaller tolerances means something fails sooner.
So, for the general rule of thumb, a drive over 3 years old is on borrowed time. a drive over 5 years has an impending failure.
I would also add that I don’t think quality has caught up to the incredible supply chain demands that are being unleashed by the high demand for cheap Dells and Macs. I am guessing that will take some time.
Yeah, I’d say that’s probably a big part of it, dcl. Gotta cram a lot of moving parts onto hard drives now…
That doesn’t effect the display issues (new PBs), and the battery/power issues (Dells), and a few other problems. That might just be an issue of scale though, like I was thinking above.
This is an archived post. Comments are closed.
To leave a comment on a newer post, please visit the homepage.
November 28th, 2005 at 10:56:22 pm
We have a saying:
There are three things that matter in the defense business: Quality, Schedule, and Cost. Pick any two of the three.
Sounds to me that Mac scrimped on quality in a rush to capitalize on its burgeouning popularity.
November 29th, 2005 at 2:13:31 am
It’s interesting though because its only the 15″ version, both the 17 and 12 seem to be fine. The 12 didn’t have display changes, but the 17 did. Guess they should have done a better job picking up their display vendor.
November 29th, 2005 at 9:14:28 am
Funny, have the same saying in my line of work too.
November 29th, 2005 at 11:02:27 am
You know, it’s kind of strange… in the past I never heard of such horrible problems with laptops (PC or Mac), whereas in recent years that’s all I hear about (both PCs and Macs). Older hard drives never malfunctioned - I have a number of Western Digital drives that have easily lasted for 10 years, and could last longer if their capacity wasn’t so useless - yet newer hard drives fail a lot more.
Seriously, I couldn’t tell you how many times people have had problems with PCs (Dell in particular, although people also have said their tech support is great). Macs have been relatively reliable from what I can tell, although now they too are suffering the same sort of problems. Is it because Macs are becoming more popular and now more people buying Macs = more visible problems? Bear in mind I’m not trying to bash Macs (or PCs), I just wanted to comment on the apparent decrease in reliability that I’m seeing.
Does anyone else notice this loss of reliability, or is this just an artifact created by more users having laptops overall (more computers = more problems)?
November 29th, 2005 at 1:57:50 pm
Well on hard drives you need to understand two things about hard drives.
First, there are two types of hard drives in this world: those that have failed and those that will, beyond that everything is a matter of time and use.
Second, higher capacity hard drives have lower tolerances. Consider, a 100 MB hard drive from 15 years ago versus a 500 GB hard drive today. The 500 GB drive might even be smaller than that 100 MB drive. so that is roughly an increase in information density of something like 5000% or more. This means a much much smaller defect (a defect 1/5000th) will cause the drive to fail. even a small drop while the drive is rotating can damage the palter or read write head. All told we are looking at smaller parts manufactured to extreme tolerances. Smaller pieces wear faster and fail sooner. Smaller tolerances means something fails sooner.
So, for the general rule of thumb, a drive over 3 years old is on borrowed time. a drive over 5 years has an impending failure.
November 29th, 2005 at 2:33:49 pm
I would also add that I don’t think quality has caught up to the incredible supply chain demands that are being unleashed by the high demand for cheap Dells and Macs. I am guessing that will take some time.
November 29th, 2005 at 3:05:03 pm
well, yes that too…
November 29th, 2005 at 3:20:09 pm
Yeah, I’d say that’s probably a big part of it, dcl. Gotta cram a lot of moving parts onto hard drives now…
That doesn’t effect the display issues (new PBs), and the battery/power issues (Dells), and a few other problems. That might just be an issue of scale though, like I was thinking above.