Before you all rush out to buy Macs read the following tale of woe. I have a friend who is a free lance editor and having used Macs for years he bought the latest, greatest, state of the art Mac about five years ago. It had eight, yes count them, eight gigabytes of RAM, a 24" screen, the latest operating system (X I think) and a liquid cooled CPU. He bought it directly from Apple in Ireland and paid extra for five years of cover. From the very start it did not work. Upon switch on the cooling fans would come on and then slowly over a period of perhaps 10 minutes ratchet up their speed until the thing sounded like a helicopter taking off complete with vibration. It took 6 months to get this sorted out during which time it was not usable. About five months ago this sacred machine became an ex-machine and failed to function at all. At this stage it was about one month outside the 5 year extended warranty. Having paid for the local Mac expert to take it away and inspect the wreck it turns out that the liquid cooling has leaked all over the mother board. Checking on various blogs he discovered that this is a known fault and he has communicated continuously to no avail with Apple in Ireland for months until he started copying the emails to Steve Jobs! Having had five months of total hastle it was finally agreed that Apple in Ireland would arrange to collect the wreck and hopefully next week it will be replaced. As, fortunately, a spectator to all this I have seldom seen such rotten service and I would not touch Apple with somebody else's barge pole. By the way, did I mention that the machine cost £5k five years ago? Having had to take my seven year old PC to the local PC doctor twice in the last three weeks I am well aware of some of their frailties but for most of us it is a 'no brainer' to use PCs.
