Highest customer satisfaction, second highest reliability (after Asus).
Also, my laptop is carved out of a single block of a aluminum. I'm pretty sure that makes it awesome. My buddy bought an Asus laptop last spring and I saw it for the first time yesterday. The left hinge cover had been broken off and the thing looked like it was 2 years old. He also said was upset about the quality because he expected more from Asus. See, I can provide anecdotal evidence too.
Not that I get too much into these discussions because they seem to be the type that people never see eye to eye. But you did touch on a point that I think is overlooked here, customer satisfaction. One of the things with Apple is that they are pretty good at repairing product quality defects on their dime.
To me that is part of the package of reliability. If I can buy the most reliable but 30 days after walking out the door I am on the hook for the repairs or I can but the second most reliable and be covered for any defects for a year, I am going with #2. From my experience Apple makes up for any defect in craftsmanship with their focus on customer satisfaction.
Whiny and with no facts to substantiate his claims. Note that the only data he cited is provided by a company that sells exploitative 'extended warranties' for 3rd party products (SquareTrade), and that it's in their best interest to cast the most popular manufacturer of non-bargain laptops as less reliable.
I don't know about this article (imho, the components on macbooks are pretty good), but I once spilled a cup of coffee on a MacBook Pro ... the keyboard and the dvd drive became nonfunctional and I had to take it to be repaired.
On the other hand I did the same thing to a Dell, twice ... coffee, and coke (with sugar). All I had to do was to clean it up a bit because the keyboard got a little sticky (and I could do this by myself).
Unfortunately I can't help it, any laptop I use has to be baptized with coffee.
(-1) Unsubstantiated and anecdotal. There is really no product on the market with zero percent failure rate and whoever gets a faulty unit will often instantly hate the brand. I have had several iBooks, MacBooks, MacBooks Pros and never once has one of them failed. But at least I realize that it was pretty much luck and randomness - not any inherent quality of Apple products in general.
I wonder how would this comparison look like about 5 years ago, before Thinkpads production went to that chinese Lenovo.
Personally I recommend buying as an experiment an original IBM's Thinkpad, esp. T series, in some outlet. I did it and looks like I'm going to use this stuff for more than I usually used new laptops.
Unreliability is one of the consequences of Apple's constant redesign and application of new unproven manufacturing processes and materials.
For example, they used fragile metal for MacBook Air hinges -- I have screen replaced two times due to this (the second replacement had hinges made of a different material) http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2948
Now I have a new white MacBook and its newly designed beautiful rubber bottom began peeling off (and I know others with the same problem).
I'm sure someone here remembers the iBook G3s (the white ones), that would have their logic boards die.
I still have my g4 ibook and it works perfectly (except for the smallish HD, but still works). Had the best suspend-resume from a low battery of any laptop I have used.
Typing this on a unibody Macbook. It worked better on 10.5, not 10.6. Resume is much slower. (BTW, the G4 only had 512mb less of ram).
The most important advice I can give of Apple hardware...always wait for 2nd, or 3rd gen product (Hypocritically, I did buy an iPad).
FYI, Intel MacBooks (and the last G4 models) support hibernate (suspend to disk) and use it by default instead of sleep (suspend to RAM), and thus take longer to sleep/resume.
Couple of posts ago there's a boring bit about college students switching to Macs en masse. A few posts before that there's an equally boring piece on bad Linux desktop adoption... ".NET Jerkface" sounds like someone with real insight to offer
Everything breaks, especially mobile hardware. Anecdotally I think they are more reliable than other PCs. But most importantly I've never gotten such amazing no-questions-asked service in my life. Not to mention the turn-around for repairs or free upgrades if they can't fix it.
Here are some hard facts:
http://www.rescuecom.com/blog/index.php/computer-support/the...
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/21/pc_industry_cu...
Highest customer satisfaction, second highest reliability (after Asus).
Also, my laptop is carved out of a single block of a aluminum. I'm pretty sure that makes it awesome. My buddy bought an Asus laptop last spring and I saw it for the first time yesterday. The left hinge cover had been broken off and the thing looked like it was 2 years old. He also said was upset about the quality because he expected more from Asus. See, I can provide anecdotal evidence too.