Newbie here...er..has something gone wrong with Apples quality control..!?

Question

Hi, this is my first post here. I am on my second apple computer, first was a 12inch iBook in 2004 which my partner now has as I went and bought a shiny new macbook in June. When I bought my first apple computer I was a very happy switcher from pc's, I loved my iBook, and learnt mac osx on Panther Lots of fun with movies, photo's and iTunes. The ibook never crashed, never stopped doing what it was supposed to, and never got too hot or made barnyard impressions! So I was looking forward to the upgrade to Tiger, iLife 6 et al when I took delivery of the macbook. And I trusted Steve Jobs and the crew at Cupertino to carry on the the good work and provide the quality hardware and software that I had been trying to persuade all my pc friends to buy into....but...it has all gone horribly wrong. My macbook is at this very moment as I type getting hotter by the second and there is a herd of cows on my desk mooing away. Every now and then..bang.. ramdon shutdown. And every now and then it won't shut down when I want it to. Now I know from the discussion boards that I am not alone with this and that apple issued a fix for the overheating, but then on top of this, I see that iTunes 7 has lots of problems as does the new v10.4.8 update. I am still a mac fan, and I want to stay loyal as I can't bare the thought of going back to pc's, but hey, I just really hope that if there are some quality control issues rearing an ugly head that Mr Jobs remembers that we still have a choice. I'm holding off from downloading the updates until the bugs are fixed, and I will hold off from buying my new 24 inch iMac until I am sure that there are no gremlins with it...and I should not have to be doing this with Macs. Or so I was lead to believe!
Sorry if my first post sounds a little negative but I just want to enjoy being a mac owner again!

Answer 1

So I'm guessing that your reliable iBook (the one that never crashed or stop doing what it was supposed to do) wasn't one the first generation of iBooks that Apple made that had the logic board problem that caused Apple to extend the warranty out to 3 years, right?
http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/
My point is that your iBook was as good as it was based on the fact that Apple made mistakes on (and learned from) previous generation iBooks.
Now you buy a first generation product (where Apple's had no chance to learn from previous mistakes because there haven't been any previous mistakes as this is brand-spanking stuff for them) and you're expecting it to be as good as the fifth or sixth generation product that you're replacing.
Where is the logic in that?
To me, what matters is how well the manufacturer can address the issues. And although I'm not impressed with the speed at which Apple has dealt with some of the MacBook issues, as it stands (and as far as I know) they've corrected all of them so far. New ones are being manufactured that don't have the issues, and Apple will repair any older MacBook that was manufactured before production was changed. This is more that I can about my experience with my first-year Honda Element.
Perhaps this is why Windows laptops rarely have huge innovative design changes like Apple made going from the iBook to the MacBook. Most manufacturers don't want to have to deal with the subsequent risks.
I don't think it's wrong to expect a lot from Apple, but I also don't think that you can ignore the logic of the situation.