What percentage of MBPs have problems?

[seanofford]

I'm waiting for my third replacement MBP. The last one had a terrible flickering screen. The one before that (non-SR) had a dodgy enter key.

Having read about all the problems with SR MBPs I've worked myself into a despondently negative attitude and am fully expecting my next one to have to go back as well.

So now I'm trying to make an effort to convince myself that I'm being daft and that there are plenty of satisfied owners, whose MBP have not had wireless networking dropouts, yellow, flickery screens, kernel panics and the rest.

In order to convince myself I just need an estimate about the number of SR MBPs sold, so that I can tell myself to stop worrying, and that it's only a minute proportion with problems.

So how may do you think have been sold? If it's thousands, or even better tens of thousands, then I am happy to convince myself it will be third time lucky for me. (If it's not I'm getting a full refund).

Cheers,
Sean

 

[Igantius]

I don't mean to be negative (bear with me, I will get more upbeat), but this question is rather like asking 'how long is a piece of string.'

As to how many units have been shipped, it's certainly tens of thousands - if you want to a definite answer, wait until Apple's next quarterly figures.

On a more positive note, I would a have a look at Macintouch - it has daily reader reports, which it's an excellent source of info and IMO often more accurate than forums.

Try not to be too disheartened - I know that easy for me to say while you're waiting for your third replacement, but it's very easy to get a false idea of how big a problem is. You've probably see the recent thread about unsafe Magsafes, you could get the impression that it's a serious probelm - at least one poster got very nervous about ordering a MB even though in reality Apple phased out that type of connector six months ago and in a Macintouch reader survey at the end of 2007, found that in 3,000 laptops this problem occurred 6 times - sucks for those six sure, but it's a lot smaller than you would expect from forum reports.

When a model undergoes a not insignificant upgrade (e.g. LED, new motherboard etc), it's not unusual for teething problems to be discovered and fixed...

In any case, hopefully it will be third time lucky for you!

 

[illustratorDavi]

The way I consider it is that people post of forums like this when they have problems. Rarely do people post to say start a thread saying - "got my mbp works great"

It in no way represents the major of mac users that have no problems.

For instance the last 3 macs i have had have no hardware problems - i've never sent any of my computers off to be repaired. All I have had is a CRT monitor pack in after 3 years and my current dvd drive in my G5 is skipping after 2 years.

 

[Zadillo]

Yeah, that's the big thing you have to remember - for the most part, with ANY laptop, people don't start tons of threads called "My [fill in the blank] is working great, I'm not having any problems at all!".

If you look at the forums for any laptop manufacturer, you'd think they were nothing but lemons being shipped out (check the complaints in the Asus, Dell, Sony, etc. threads at notebookreview.com, for example). But of course this isn't necessarily the case.

It does sound like you've had an especially bad run of luck, but if your question is whether your experience is common or not, the answer is probably no. It seems like every now and then, someone does end up with especially bad luck in getting multiple systems with problems, but usually even in those cases everything eventually gets sorted out.

-Zadillo

 

[Ticcioni]

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