A few years ago I had issues with a G4 tower. Apple was unable to fix it with the onsite technicians and opted to replace it. At the same time the dual processor models hit the market and the extreme demand prevented them from replacing my system quickly. They replaced my system with a top of the line powerbook. This was circa 2000. The process was painless and they were very apologetic that I had issues.

Just recently I bought a G5 tower and have the known power supply issues with my system. I called Apple and attempted to get the system qualified for repairs. I was politely told to pound sand as my serial number was a “few” digits out of their range. Apple had the attitude that they were doing me a favor by even talking to me and did not see anything wrong with producing a faulty product and refusing to fix it.

Ubuntu and some of the other Linux Distro’s are beginning to get very mature and attractive with Beryl and Compvis. If Apple does not get out of this greedy nickle and dime your customer mode I am going to buy a commodity beige box PC and work with linux when it comes time to replace my G5 thats STILL broken! If I am going to be cheated and screwed by a company that produces bad products and refuses to stand behind them at least I can save a few thousand dollars in the process.

Had you called Apple or researched this story at all, you would have discovered the wee detail Colonna didn’t relay with the rest of his anecdote: he was asked to insert the Tiger install disc which came bundled with his Mac and use that to install the original OS, thus correcting the problem. (Since he was doing an _install_ rather than an upgrade, he wouldn’t have lost any data by doing this.) Colonna also could have brought his defective disc into any Apple store (or any store selling the software in some lands) and swapped it.

This isn’t a case of abuse by big bad Apple getting too big for its boots, or “bricking” of a MacBook, or of Apple refusing to support their product, it’s a minor inconvenience blown out of proportion (partly by shoddy under-researched reporting). Apple made hundreds of thousands of these discs within a week to be ship today–that defects like this are so rare is great.