I know this is way off topic, but I figure a bunch of nerds would appreciate this. And I feel like ranting.

[rant]
I have been using computers since 1992 (that I can recall). Over the years they have included:
1 Packard Bell
1 eMachines
3 Dell
8 HPs
1 Apple

It's that last one that I wish to discuss. I bought it for my wife four months ago. It was her birthday gift. She had been using the iPhone and iPad for so long she was too heavily entrenched into that ecosystem. So when her old PC got, well, old, I bought her a MBA in February of this year.

It died.

That's right, after four months, the thing stopped working. No drops. No spills. She was working on it one moment, and we get the folder with the "?" on it the next. I did all of the usual recovery steps and nothing worked. I took it to the Apple store and after ten minutes the "Genius" told me what I told him: the HDD was dead. On a four month old computer.

Never, have I lost a hard drive on any of my computers until yesterday. Never, in all of the drops, bumps, abuse, punching, and kicking had a single of my Windows machines lost a HDD. I was beyond ticked.

Look, I know this is the exception rather than the norm. But look at it from my POV. I have used PCs for two decades and have had over a dozen PCs in my home and it is the Mac that dies. Not only that, it dies in less time than it took for the battery in my XBOX controller to drain.

I have owned every consumer version of Windows since 3.0 (yes, including ME) and it is the Mac that gave us issues.

Sorry, Apple. Your track record is kind of poor at the moment.

*typed from an HP PC that has only been turned off twice in 18 months; and one of those was due to a week long power outage*
[/rant]

EDIT: WHEN I TYPE "HDD", I AM TALKING ABOUT THE HARD DRIVE. I KNOW THE MBA HAS AN *&$%ING SSD!

Why would you buy a Crapple computer in the first place?

You missed that "wife" part. There are certain things you do if you want....

Hm. I was using a computer lab one semester with Apples. The one I was working on was next to a window. The room was hot most of the time, so we'd open the windows even in the middle of winter. I figured the temperature change every day was bad for it. The HDD failed on that one while I was in the middle of a long project, which sucked since I lost several days of work.

That's right: a window killed the Apple right in front of me.

Maha our Professor gained a Lab grant from Apple to network all the projects to Apple MAcs and IF so no dos ibm work was accepted down to which printer dot matrix type for grading curve

Apple.. you are paying for the sticker...

Apple products are for people who are too lazy to learn how to use a computer. To my perpetual shame, I have owned 3 iPods.

I have a friend that has had a nice long career in Apple support. Any time I hear "They just work" I snicker.

Same hardware drop-out rate as any other mass-produced item, they just cost more -- admittedly the Unix-esque OS is relatively stable, and they are a step above buying a pre-built from Walmart/Costco.

I'll stick to my homebuilts, though if I didn't game I would run Linux instead of Windows.

Now now...

Obviously what you bought was not a mac, but some sort of copy.

A Mac is solid as a rock, stable as a calculator and beautiful as a rose. There is no possible way a mac could get broke, as there is no way a mac breaks.

A Mac dosen't freeze either

You must now go to the altar of Jobs and pray for forgiveness.

I must admit that I like they STOLE code from... was it FreeBSD? And I must say that it's really freindly coming from a KDE enviroment on the Linux to Mac...