Considering that mass production and consumption has grown exponentially during the past 11 years, plus the fact that Apple's prices have been forced to become competitive with PeeCs, the quality of Apple's products remains quite high, by any standard.
This ATI graphics card problem affected greater or less than 12% of new iMac owners, and was due to a component not manufactured or overseen production wise by Apple. Coming up with a fix required first identifying specifically which batch of ATI cards had interface/memory problems, and then rewriting code for that specific firmware/memory address glitch. In the interim, Apple gladly swapped iMacs for new ones - this is where quality assurance counts the most, well above quality control. When a problem surfaces, will the company address it, remediate it until a solution is found, and then produce a solution? Regarding this case, 3 months is not an unreasonable time to produce a fix for this problem.
As far as pixels are concerned, I own more than 2 dozen Apple LCDs in the form of iMacs and/or 23"-30" monitors - never had a bad pixel. Apple does stand by their hardware, as well as components manufactured by other vendors, and will replace whatever it is to your satisfaction. This has not been my experience with Dell.
I'm not talking about the past 11 years and by the way market share for Apple still has not grown past 6% market share, while I agree that is up from 2-3% worldwide they aren't even the top 5. So this whole we have grown so much mass production thing doesn't hold water.
I have also owned Apple products over the last 20 years, and while your experience with their products appears to still be favorable I have just returned my fifth iMac 24" in one week.
What is also annoying is when people start to try the if we can't look good then try to make others looks worse by pulling Dell or MS into the picture. We aren't talking about Dell or MS we are talking about Apples QC dropping.
Clearly based on iMacs freezing, SR Macbook keyboards not responding, Yellowish Tint on MBP screens, Apple not even being consistent with what vendors they are using for hardware, if this is what they need to do to even try and keep prices competitive then I don't expect stock to stay high for long.
Am I upset about the iMac issue, no not at all, they lost I didn't. I don't have blind loyalty, I will just move on to something else. There isn't anything that great about Apple that can't be replaced by something else. They lost 5,000 dollars this weekend and repeat business, not me. Not to mention the amount of people I will tell about this just in passing, the same for people that had/have freezing iMac, same with MB and MBP issues. That not the way to win over new customers, thats my point when it comes to your comment about people being happy about fixes.
When you own 95% of the market like MS you can screw up alot, when you own 5% you can't you have to prove you are better all the time, you can't rag on the competition then do the same thing when you release Leopard. Or rag on Dell then have hardware issue across the line.
Just simply my opinion on this which isn't worth any more then yours.
= NICE 
