The Kobe beef was the giveaway. Everything else - totally plausible.

Hey, maybe I could bring them my 4 yr old macbook pro whose video chip is going bad. Looks like they might fix it for free...

Not free but if you opt for the fixed price repair you'll go out of pocket ~$300 and they will fix anything and everything that's wrong with it.

If the display sometimes stays black after powering up or waking from sleep or comes on then just goes away that's symptomatic of a bad inverter board.

If you plug in an external monitor does it display the same symptoms? If no I say inverter board is bad.

There were a couple of revs on the G4.

The earlier boxes had the inverter as part of the logic board so the only fix is a new logic board. The later boxes they separated the inverter board. They can be found on fleabay or from one of the used Mac resellers for ~$75. It's an easy DIY.

Have done it before and actually have a 17 in G4 MacBook as part of my entertainment center that the board is flaky on. Don't really care as it's plugged into my TV so the laptop screen is kinda not necessary anyway.

I'm sorry it is such a short visit.

I assume you're drinking and dining, and she's blowing and massaging, all at once? That would be plausible.

Maybe with all these defective units going back to the store, you should try a different brand?

OS's are software, they don't wear out...

When my PC starts acting funny, I throw it in the garbage can & drive down to Staples and buy another one. No biggie.

The moral of the story is to purchase the extended apple care package. I inherited a G5 iMac a while back that suffered a common catastrophic motherboard failure due to the heat generated by the G5 processor. It was 2 years new and after an appointment with the genius bar folks who ran the diag on the machine...No extended care program - so unless I was willing to fleece my wallet of $1K I was told to pound sand.

Again the moral of the story is - buy the apple extended care package. Sounds like Richard got his moneys worth and then some. He's a smart guy :)

Bought 10 computers for my company online at Apple. They then called ME to offer me a discount. (Never heard that from Dell years ago when they were flush with cash!)

Wife's hard on phones, and her iPhone has been dropped and replaced, and one had a flaw and was replaced (my 2007 is still going strong).

Article not too long ago in the WSJ about true cost of cars - including resale, repair, etc., and showed that foreign cars really were a better deal over time - though they cost more upfront.

Apple, overall, is the same better, cheaper deal.

You should just run a Virtual Machine. Parallels was and is still good but it's been surpassed by VMWare. Tons of prebuilt VM's available to evaluate all kinds of software and environments. Let's say you want to evaluate a collaboration suite that runs on a .nix. Pull down the prebuilt VM, load it up and everything is there already configured. Saves hours if not days of set up just to test something.

Sunbox is less feature rich than Parallels or VMWare's Fusion but it's free so the trade off works for me.

I would like to have a macbook pro... Sadly it is out of the budget at the moment... I would try a 13" but I know that the tiny keyboard would just piss me off...

Actually the keyboard on the 13 is very good. Nearly full size. Doubt you'd notice any difference.

The most comfortable rig is the 15. Ergonomics are damn near perfect on that thing. I have a couple of them and prefer them to working on my 17" machines but need the larger screen so I suffer the larger wrist wrest area.

This lasted me up until 2 yrs. ago. I bought in 1995. And it wasn't even one of the better Mac laptops. A "bad Apple" if you will...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...book5300cs.jpg

I travel with my 13" all the time. In fact I'm typing this from my 13" machine at the Oregon coast. The keyboard is just fine.

Had one of those as well. Did some ridiculous performance mod to it, can't remember what it was.

What I liked about them was the dual expansion bays. They could take a second battery, CD drive, Zip drive.

Yeah. It was the sheeet when it came to laptops back in the day. Heavy, sure, but the keyboard took typewriter strength to use which made it worth it to me as I'm a heavier typist.

I think you could "clock..." something inside them to make them real fast. But that also risked them overheating.

Something in the power cord outlet broke on mine, and from there, it was game over. :(

I immediately afterward bought a MacBook, which stock is leagues better and faster than my Dell Inspiron 6000.

I modified the MacBook by maxing the ram and installing a 7,200 RPM hard drive. Now it screams! :D

I still have the old 5300 Power PC. I'd love to get that thing running again...

I may still have a brick or two for one of those floating around. If so I'll send it to you.

Would be good in the garage for accessing reference online while wrenching.

I have a "frankenstein" G4 15' in my garage for that purpose, also to stream tunes from my media center G4 17".

mac books are twice the price of a intel/MS laptop
for the same spec guts

towers are insanely priced at about 3 times the mass markets MS system prices
and again they use the same guts

parts are way worse for apple only bits like a M/B


the CPU HD DVD memory ect are all the same

best solution is a hackintosh
hacked load of apples OSX on a nonapple laptop or tower

Hackintosh Instructions, Hackintosh How To Guides @ Hackintosh.com

apple fanboys have tooo much invested in mac's
yes apple care is nice BUT IT COSTS $$$$
and runs out in 3 years after purchase