Apple crappy discs !

Jalapeno

Older MacMini gone tits up - that's 5 yrs or older - not so much an issue.

But Disc fail on a MacBook Pro less than a year old is shite.

:x

ICBM

And covered by the warranty.

Then restore from your backup. A bit of a hassle, yes... but better than if it died just after the warranty ran out.

Not Apple's fault either really, they don't make the drives.

Deijavoo

aye i'm almost praying for my iMac to go wrong by June next year with the AppleCare to get some worth out of it.

Deijavoo

"Almost"

holnrew

Disc or disk?

littlegreenman

Once again, it just works

Jalapeno

ICBM said:

Not Apple's fault either really, they don't make the drives.

Of course it is - they spec what reliability they want. My generic Seagate/WD PC drives last for years.

Erased, reformatted disc & reinstalled OSX, apps reinstalling now - the evening wasted. This is NO different from the PC experience ....

Myranda

holnrew said:

Disc or disk?

yeah... one of those.

ESchap

Mac's ... tsk ... all style over substance

Myranda

While I dislike the fact that Apple charge potentially hundreds of £s extra because they're mildly prettier than the same components not shoved into an Apple-branded computer I can't assume that someone having one hard drive fail prematurely is a sign of poor quality control.

Given the number of drives manufactured every year, even a 0.0001% early failure rate would mean lots of drives failing early every year. 

Sure failing after less than a year sucks bums, but a hard disk is 1-5 spinning disks with a motor driving them, a stepper driving the arms, multiple arms baring multiple magnetic heads, a controller board many moving or electronic parts able to fail... capable of 75+ Input/output operations per second. Thats 70million IOps in a year of 5 hours use a year or over 80million revolutions in that time... that we see so few hard drives fail is a testimony not that non-apple products are amazing, but that all hard drives are amazing

octatonic

Jalapeno said:

ICBM said:

Not Apple's fault either really, they don't make the drives.

Of course it is - they spec what reliability they want. My generic Seagate/WD PC drives last for years.

Erased, reformatted disc & reinstalled OSX, apps reinstalling now - the evening wasted. This is NO different from the PC experience ....

You're doing it wrong then.

Axe_meister

Even enterprise spec drives can fail early it's not uncommon to have at least 3 drives fail in a large array in the first year

Myranda

Axe_meister said:

Even enterprise spec drives can fail early it's not uncommon to have at least 3 drives fail in a large array in the first year

Bah! Enterprise spec drives are just cheap shoddy things with no quality control right

ICBM

Jalapeno said:

ICBM said:

Not Apple's fault either really, they don't make the drives.

Of course it is - they spec what reliability they want. My generic Seagate/WD PC drives last for years.

Luck. (Or lack of it with the Apple.)

All hard drives are potentially unreliable, so it's very hard to 'spec' better ones, and impossible to spec perfectly reliable ones. That's why all really important data is kept on multiple drive arrays.

If you talk to enough people you'll find exactly the same percentage of failures with the Seagate and WD drives. In fact, my last Mac *contained* a WD drive... so if that had failed (it didn't) would you blame Apple for spec'ing it?

Jalapeno said:

This is NO different from the PC experience ....

Of course not. They're roughly the same technology at roughly the same price. What you pay extra for with Apple is the styling and the ease of use.

Myranda

ICBM said:

Of course not. They're roughly the same technology at roughly the same price. What you pay extra for with Apple is the styling and the ease of use.

Would be more accurate to say they're the exact same hardware for significantly higher price. Same intel chips that go into laptops, same nvidia, same DDR3 ram, same laptop motherboard, same hard drives, same laptop style cables... it's the same, not similar.

Component for component comparisons (of desktops) have been done a few times on hardware forums... last one managed a higher spec for £300 less than the 27" imac thingamy - it had to be higher spec as the iMac uses laptop GPUs which for the most part can't be bought separately. As an experiment I just added it up - using an expensive case and better motherboard (can't just buy a laptop board...) had to substitute an AMD HD 5770 for the 755M (closest higher performance desktop component) and the most expensive 27" 1440p screen so there can't be arguments on quality of any components... £579 less than the Apple.co.uk price. 57% price increase is not the same price.

And don't for gods sake upgrade RAM via the Apple website - 8gb of 1600mhz DDR3 doesn't cost £160 (try £50), the difference between a 1TB 7200rpm Sata drive and and a 3TB one is not £120 (£85 vs £50... )

I don't disagree that some find the iMac prettier... but I totally refute the idea that they're remotely similar pricing. It's either ill informed non-sense or an outright lie. 

With phones etc pricing is much closer to the competition than people claim... but the iMac... no.

wibble

Myranda said:

ICBM said:

Of course not. They're roughly the same technology at roughly the same price. What you pay extra for with Apple is the styling and the ease of use.

Would be more accurate to say they're the exact same hardware for significantly higher price. Same intel chips that go into laptops, same nvidia, same DDR3 ram, same laptop motherboard, same hard drives, same laptop style cables... it's the same, not similar.

Component for component comparisons (of desktops) have been done a few times on hardware forums... last one managed a higher spec for £300 less than the 27" imac thingamy - it had to be higher spec as the iMac uses laptop GPUs which for the most part can't be bought separately. As an experiment I just added it up - using an expensive case and better motherboard (can't just buy a laptop board...) had to substitute an AMD HD 5770 for the 755M (closest higher performance desktop component) and the most expensive 27" 1440p screen so there can't be arguments on quality of any components... £579 less than the Apple.co.uk price. 57% price increase is not the same price.

And don't for gods sake upgrade RAM via the Apple website - 8gb of 1600mhz DDR3 doesn't cost £160 (try £50), the difference between a 1TB 7200rpm Sata drive and and a 3TB one is not £120 (£85 vs £50... )

I don't disagree that some find the iMac prettier... but I totally refute the idea that they're remotely similar pricing. It's either ill informed non-sense or an outright lie. 

With phones etc pricing is much closer to the competition than people claim... but the iMac... no.

I didn't realise Apple used off the shelf motherboards and chassis as everyone else and it all magically integrates itself...

Everyone knows manufacturers do not charge cost price for option upgrades

wibble

Myranda said:

ICBM said:

Of course not. They're roughly the same technology at roughly the same price. What you pay extra for with Apple is the styling and the ease of use.

Would be more accurate to say they're the exact same hardware for significantly higher price. Same intel chips that go into laptops, same nvidia, same DDR3 ram, same laptop motherboard, same hard drives, same laptop style cables... it's the same, not similar.

Component for component comparisons (of desktops) have been done a few times on hardware forums... last one managed a higher spec for £300 less than the 27" imac thingamy - it had to be higher spec as the iMac uses laptop GPUs which for the most part can't be bought separately. As an experiment I just added it up - using an expensive case and better motherboard (can't just buy a laptop board...) had to substitute an AMD HD 5770 for the 755M (closest higher performance desktop component) and the most expensive 27" 1440p screen so there can't be arguments on quality of any components... £579 less than the Apple.co.uk price. 57% price increase is not the same price.

And don't for gods sake upgrade RAM via the Apple website - 8gb of 1600mhz DDR3 doesn't cost £160 (try £50), the difference between a 1TB 7200rpm Sata drive and and a 3TB one is not £120 (£85 vs £50... )

I don't disagree that some find the iMac prettier... but I totally refute the idea that they're remotely similar pricing. It's either ill informed non-sense or an outright lie. 

With phones etc pricing is much closer to the competition than people claim... but the iMac... no.

I didn't realise Apple used off the shelf motherboards and chassis as everyone else and it all magically integrates itself...

Everyone knows manufacturers do not charge cost price for option upgrades

Phil_aka_Pip

Back in the mid 90s my employer bought some Dell PCs, it turned out that Dell had been lumbered with a dodgy batch of Seagate drives. My colleague had one of those PCs, which crashed regularly, and the Dell support guy came out several times in one week. On one occasion I saw him coming and annnounced "AyUp! Dell Boy is here again!". Giggles all round, except from him: if looks could kill I wouldn't have survived. Struck me as most unfortunate for Dell that their computers were acquiring a reputation consistent with having been sold from the back of a yellow Reliant Robin in a street market in Peckham.

guitargeek62

There's very little (i.e. none at all) fault that can be blamed on Apple here, HDD's fail frequently, and as Myranda pointed out, it's a wonder that they don't more often!

*edit* And if you didn't have a time capsule backup to restore from then that's your own fault! There's no excuse for not keeping backups these days, given how cheap storage is.

ICBM

Myranda said:

I don't disagree that some find the iMac prettier... but I totally refute the idea that they're remotely similar pricing. It's either ill informed non-sense or an outright lie. 

With phones etc pricing is much closer to the competition than people claim... but the iMac... no.

Actually the phones are where the real rip-off is... that's why iPhone handset sales generate the outright majority (not just the largest minority) of Apple's income.

http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2013/07/apple.png

On the iMac... what you're spec'ing isn't the same unless it comes in the same sort of neat integrated free-standing enclosure the iMac does, with no separate tower and monitor.

I don't disagree Apple products are more expensive for what you get in spec terms at all, and I never have. But if you're not comparing the full package then you're not making a fair comparison - which is the point Apple-bashers always miss (no offence intended), and explains why Apple is still so successful.

And no, I'm not daft enough to pay the extra for factory upgrades either - I've always bought the base model for exactly that reason. But some people prefer the convenience and warranty availability of doing it that way. You know how to assemble a computer... the vast majority of users don't.

Myranda

ICBM said:

On the iMac... what you're spec'ing isn't the same unless it comes in the same sort of neat integrated free-standing enclosure the iMac does, with no separate tower and monitor.

Could spec it for less money by using an mITX case that bolts onto the back of the screen via the vesa mount... would end up taking roughly the same desk space and from the front it would be a 27" screen with a black bezel rather than an grey metalic one. Would all be one visible piece... could the price down another £50 would just take me half an hour longer to source the parts (rather than less than 5 minutes)

So it comes to £600 for the colour of the screen bezel