[nycbug-talk] Apple Intel Servers?

[Jonathan Vanasco]

On Mar 3, 2006, at 10:20 AM, Mikel King wrote:

>> So my question is, if I am planning to purchase an xserve or two in
>> the near future, do I get a g5 model or wait for the intels, which
>> will probably mean waiting for the 2nd version of the intels...
>
> Brad you raise a concern we've had in my office over the last year
> regarding DELL and HP. Seems that the major manufacturers are rushing
> product out the door skipping the Q/A process. Or at the very least
> running the equipment through a shorter Q/A procedure. Maybe they've
> all subcontracted the same Q/A firm to do this work for them. It just
> seems to me that equipment failures are more common during the first
> 3-6 months than they were several years ago.
>
> Has anyone else experienced this trend?

If you can wait 6months, I'd get an r2.  aside from design flaws /  
q&a issues, they tend to come out with enhancements that make the  
system work better overall -- a little more cache here, some better  
airflow there, etc.

People are definitely rushing through the QA procedure.

Off the top of my head, in the last few mac models
	Powerbooks keep having major issues with optical drives.  they  
weren't anchored in there right, so would often break.   80% of  
people i knew had a failure.  everyone else sent it in to get  
replaced on their time, instead of waiting for a failure.
	 ibooks get faulty logic boards
	1st few months of g5 had fans that would die out ( bad bearings on  
the model ).  The machines would sound like a jet, then turn off from  
overheating.

all of these issues seem to come out after 1 month in the field.

i think apple gets an unfair blame in this, because they get 1M  
people complaining on 10 products, while Dell/HP get 1M people  
complaining on 100 products/configurations.  But across the board,  
people are skimping on QA, and the rev1 versions of the products have  
issues, and tend to be outperformed by rev2 verisons which offer  
slight improvements over performance bottlenecks.

i love using macs.  i've got 3.  but i've learned not to be an 'early  
adopter' of their new hardware, cos it always results in shipping  
something off for a day after it dies in some critical moment.