A dead Mac

After speculating about the Macintosh's reliability, my fears are confirmed. My Mac Mini CDROM drive, after a mere week of service, has given up the ghost. To add insult to injury, it took a physical visit to an Apple store and a verification by an Apple Genius before Apple would agree to RMA the product. Even then, they want me to drop off the machine to Fedex before they'll ship me a new one.

By contrast, my brother tells me that Dell would ship me a new machine as soon as they agree to RMA an old machine, so that I'd never be without a computer.

Lisa's 5 year old Dell laptop just recently gave up the ghost (yes, I've been suffering a rash of hardware failures), and after seeing the reliability problems with the Intel Mac Mini, she's decided that her next laptop will also be a Dell.