1) Hard drive had IO errors and was replaced (2 months)
2) One of my keys stopped working. (9 months)
3) The right fan died. (10 months)
The last company I worked at had a small fleet of MPB's and hardware problems were a regular occurrence. Far more frequent than when I was at an IBM/thinkpad shop, but drastically less than when I worked with Dells.
Jeremy
You have 2 verified MBP users with a total of 4 problematic MBPs. That's raw data right there.
Do not confuse data with statistics.
(Oh, I nearly forgot, the "F" key on my keyboard failed, too. It – i.e. the whole keyboard – was also replaced.)
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/0413212
Resetting the power management memory seems to fix it, but this amounts to rebooting. C'mon! It's just like I'm back on Windows 95!
It’s just that I could be an outlier, these kinds of stories are always so freaking anecdotal and not really a help when deciding what to buy.
My screen failed and was exchanged. Then my main board failed and was exchanged. Now everything seems to be working fine. Oh, yeah. I nearly forgot, my DVD drive was unable to burn anything so it was exchanged. The exchanged drive was also unable to burn anything and was exchanged again. After those two tries it finally worked. And I already destroyed two batteries. After mere 110 cycles both were unable to hold much charge (they lasted for 30 min or less). Both were exchanged.
All this, and the MBP is not even two years old. Since I have Apple Care I didn’t have to pay for labour or parts, but I had to pay for transport to and from the few places in Germany where Apple hardware is repaired and I didn’t have my laptop for several weeks in the span of those last few months.
I hope that’s all for now because I actually still like my MBP. I planned to buy a new one at the earliest in three years, but after all those failures I don’t have much hope that my MBP is going to make it.
But: it simply cannot be the case that every or even a big percentage of Macs fail like this. With Apple having to pay for two batteries, one whole screen, a main board and two DVD drives plus all the labour they certainly didn’t make any profit from my purchase.