If you're going to stir a pot .
I am of two minds on Macintosh Computers. As The86d pointed out, they are only to be had at what can only be described as super-premium prices. Anyone who wants to contest that fact is welcome to compare the guts of a PC and a Macintosh computer and get back to me: he/she will find that the same board/chipset is often to be found in both and the only differences are either purely cosmetic (the case) and, of course, the operating system. Given this, you're paying more, f**kloads more, for the Macintosh.
The confusion only deepens when you consider the operating system. MacOs is a very good operating system with a user-interface engineered and tested to be both as idiot proof (if not actually idiot-friendly) as it possibly can be and this is one of the things that Macs Apple-users pump their teeny fists in the air and shout out, 'go mac!'
The only problem with this is that the only thing 'Apple' about that Operating System is the GUI itself. Years, and years ago, Apple realized that its code-base was complete crap and replaced it with a proprietary snapshot of BSD-UNIX and solved the, "our codebase is crap" problem basically by taking a freely-distributed version of UNIX with parts written by thousands of programmers world-wide, and locking it up behind the license that BSD's way of looking at things allowed them to write. It makes you imagine a very thin CEO looking East every morning and saying, "thanks, suckers! We don't' even owe you a royalty check!"
Where it pertains to service, the service that anyone hears about (and actually *listens to*) is either of the "Someone I met sent a letter to Steve Jobs and he sent him back the biggest possible powerbook signed in platinum wire and tickets to the superbowl, and a tricycle for his sick kid!!" Or they are the other kind of story of which the piece in the news is just an egregious example.
The news piece that is powering this thread is not what many of the angry young men here seem to think it is: it is certainly not an attempt by apple to void warranties to save itself money. If you read the article closely, you see that there were only *two* confirmable reported cases of apple voiding warranties for smoking.
Even if you threw in a fudge-factor of ten, that would mean that the service centers had rejected a total of twenty units. Most repairs on computers are "pull-and-replace" repairs: you don't test boards, hunt for the one bad capacitor in twenty of them, you rip out the board, put in one exactly like it, close the case and send it on its way. A skilled technician with the right tools can do that in less than an hour.
Even if Apple billed itself the $75-hour rate it once billed customers for labor in out-of-warranty repairs, that would mean it was saving itself a whopping $1,500, for any company the size of Apple, they would have to do that for years before they even *began* to feel itand mind you, this example starts with the assumption that the number of comps rejected were *ten times* what the piece quoted.
So, the whole, "Apple-is-a-bunch-of-skinflint-meanies" theory makes little sense. Unfortunately, the theory that *does make sense is something nastier.
Basically, someone in one or more of Apple's repair centers said that cigarette residue on a case or in the components of a computer (in all probability, less nicotine than I've consumed while writing this) constitutes exposing the unit to hazardous waste which could harm the technician and therefore voided the warranty. It means that someone at Apple said this, and no one said, 'you're fired get someone sane to take over his station.'
It meant that some patchouli-smelling flunky with a powered-screwdriver at an Apple repair center decided that a smoker was undeserving of having a functioning computer if it meant exposure to dried out cigarette-residue and that everyone around and above him at the center said words that meant, "yes, I agree with youlet's screw that customer into the ground."
That seems a lot more likely than anything else and a lot more frightening.
[This note was written on a 24-inch imac]
crunchy smelly CD drive, brown rear panel, bio hazard keyboard and mouse, 1.5GHz of ponginess and 1 gigabyte of ashtray brown Rambus memory! These are just some of the features of my stinky old Dell!! Its yours if you come and pick it up, video card not included!!!
