I too have spent inordinate amounts of time at the Apple Store here in Los Angeles. I’ve wanted a Mac for years and have never had the money for one. When my PC got stolen this summer on a work-related trip, my boss bought me one as penance.

Took it home, opened it up like a kid on Christmas morning–and it didn’t work. Took it back to the store, and my hard drive was completely shot. They gave me a new one and I went on my way.

Now this second Mac has suddenly stopped accepting CDs altogether and roughly half the DVDs I put into it.

Which is a problem considering…I USE IT TO MAKE DVDs and CDs as part of my job!!

All of my friends have Macs and have been telling me I’m crazy, that Macs never have problems and blah blah blah. Glad to know I’m not insane! Not that I’m glad for your misfortune, but still, it’s a comfort to know I’m not cursed or something!

And while I love my Mac….I can’t help but remember that of all the PCs I had over the years, I never had a single problem with any of them…

On Thursday 31 August 2006 I got MacBook Pro no. 1.
(took over an hour to install extra RAM so total time of 2h30min)

Took it back on Monday 4 September 2006 and got MacBook Pro no. 2.
(took over 2 hours to install RAM – total time of about 3h30min)

Took that back on Saturday 9 September 2006 and got MacBook Pro no. 3.
(took about 45min as I was VERY unhappy and demanding)

Took that back Saturday 23 September 2006 and then had the swap out on Monday 25 September 2006 for MacBook Pro no. 4.
(took about 20min to negotiate the swap process)

That is about 7 hours in total at the Apple store. Bearing in mind it takes me about an hour to get there and an hour to get back so that is 8 hours of travel time.

In less than a month I got 3 dud Macs from the same store and wasted about 15 hours of my time. No matter how Mac obsessed you are you have to understand that that is not acceptable!

1) See if they will allow you to do the data transfer yourself, *in the store*. Assuming it is able to boot to firewire target disk mode, it is a very easy procedure. You will not be able to leave the store with them, but they should be able to agree to it, since it makes you a happy customer, and saves them some work in the process.

2) Another poster said “a few minutes per 10 gigs”. The general rule of thumb is that a Mac to Mac set-up data transfer takes about 30 minutes per 10 gigs, roughly. Factor that into your plans.

In 2001 I bought a 733Ghz G4 which had a fan die in the first month. I took it into the repair shop and had it fixed in less than 2 hours. No problems since then…. we still use this machine.

Later in 2003 my studio purchased one of the first dual processor G5 towers. I had it a whopping 4 days when I hit the power button and nothing…. a smell of burnt electronics and no happiness. I took this machine to the shop and it was diagnosed and repaired in 3 days. It ended up being a logic board problem which ultimately fried both CPU’s and my power supply. Not a single problem afterwards.

Earlier this year my partner bought a G4 Powerbook. He had it about three weeks when we started noticing green dots flashing on his screen. It became worse and I was convinced that his video RAM was shot. He took it into the Apple Store in the late afternoon…. they determined the video RAM was flawed. They shipped it to a repair center in Texas that evening… 48 hours it was on our company doorstep in perfect working order. No problems since.

Because of the nature of electronics you are bound to have bad machines show up regardless of the vendor. I’ve read estimates in the range of 5-12% of all computers hitting the marketplace have some kind of hardware flaw. It sucks to be the person having to deal with it, but it is more rare than you probably feel it is at this time. Not much of a consolation, I know…