Apple sells some 2.6 million Macs last quarter:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/07/21results.html
Even if you look at the longest thread here:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1114
and look at the 24000 views of the vertical lines, only 340 replies were made,
frequently from the same people.
340 of even one quarter (we are dealing with four distinct Mac model series, iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro) of the 2.6 million (650,000) is far less than 1%, and with an average of at least 10 people per thread, you are dealing with at most 2,400 unique views, which is less than 1%. You would need at minimum 6,500 iMac owners to even reach one percent failure rate. And then you consider the number of iMacs reporting into that board cover the iMacs for the past 12 quarters, that makes the percentage even smaller!
Sure, for every one person that does report in, there is another who doesn't. Even assuming that, you still don't make 1%.
Statistics of the actual failure rates are not disclosed by any means.
And most people don't report in success, because this is a troubleshooting board. How many people do you know will actually want to troubleshoot a healthy machine? Think about this carefully.
And remember, Apple Discussions is free. So your chances of seeing people who have failures who don't wish to pay AppleCare a visit with their pocketbook is much higher here than elsewhere.
Finally, year after year, Consumer Reports gives Apple Customer Service the highest rating in the industry:
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/consumer-reports-takes-a-shine-to -apple/
http://www.macworld.com/article/133293/2008/05/consumer.html
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2006/10/5614.ars
And this in the last three years that Apple has had Intel Macs.
Apple sales have increased year after year, even in this bear market.
So what does that say?
Message was edited by: a brody
Message was edited by: a brody