Thanks for that Josh ....

 

The reason why I am so upset with Apple is that I have a Sony laptop and a Dell laptop and I take one of them away with me while I am travelling for work. Thousands of miles of air flight, used on dusty, dirty building sites, used for hours on a daily basis, and both have been no problem for over 2 years.

The iPod, which works a couple of hours a day packs up after 14 months

 

Electronics.

 

I'm constantly asked which I like better... iPod or Creative (I have both) and this goes in the data set.

 

any hard drive can die after 14 months of use, especially in a device like the ipod which is more likely to be dropped, kicked, stepped on, etc. I had a sony laptop that went through 4 hard drives in a year, for example. my powerbook OTOH has only crashed twice: once from a very tight infinite loop in some code I wrote that I could not kill manually (had to remove battery and hard power the box) and once from microsoft word. I've seen people that have had sonys without a problem for years. Sometimes you're in the 2% manufacturing error, but 98% of the time you're not.

 

Exaclty...just the way it goes with electronics. I've seen brand new computers of of the box fail and others that have been running for 20 years without a problem. It's the luck of the draw and really doesn't have much to do with the manufacturer....as long as they aren't using bottom of the barrel parts of course.

 

I guess you could say it was a bad apple

 

There's one in every barrel.

 

And Apple risks appearing "big brother"-ish in this lawsuit:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7160519/

 

give me a break dude, they're not reporters, they're freaking 19 year old bloggers! There are laws that the bloggers broke by taking information that they could reasonably believe to be confidential. Not just a civil contract violation on the part of the employee, but a violation of california trade laws.