As some of you may have read in a recent post, I pondered the quality of Apple products of late.

As fate would have it, my MacBook Pro shot fire this morning. Two small flashes of yellow above the F4 key, accompanied by a “zit” noise and the machine powering off.

I called AppleCare and they immediately bumped me up two tiers – they don’t like the sound of fire.

They immediately asked if I was ok. yes. They asked if I had been injured. No. They asked if the fire department or insurance came. No.

After checking the battery, which was fine, we determined something on the motherboard, maybe a capacitor blew out.

I took it to the Apple Store and the awesome assistant manager Matt not only popped the machine right away to confirm that there had indeed been an incident, they replaced the machine right out without me even asking for such.

So I brought the machine home and restored via migration assistant from my Time Machine backup as of yesterday, which appears to have gone well. I had to reinstall XCode, but that’s because I did not want to use the full system restore. Start fresh.

They also offered to replace both of my power adaptors, just to be safe.

Excellent service indeed, no argument there.

However, sadly, more evidence that there may be something amiss in this round of quality control.

This machine is a newer revision of the same laptop, with a 40gb larger hard disk, so we’ll see if it behaves better in the year to come!

Thanks again to everyone at the Apple Store and at AppleCare – Excellent service!

Apple is at a peak. The Macintosh is wildly successful. The iPhone even more so. The Apple brand is not just well known, but well known for quality. The “PC/Mac” ad campaign has been very successful, touting how the “Mac just works” while Vista is a dud.

Reports I’ve read in the past (I am too lazy to find an example) suggest that Apple’s approval rating is very high.

However, with all of this success, I am noticing more and more issues with Apple products. Some are annoyances, some are downright not acceptable. Over the past 18 months, here is what I’ve seen first or second hand:

1. I bought an Apple Airport Extreme N router in early 2007. It took Apple a year to get the router working with the Sonicwall VPN. Apple replaced the hardware, to their credit, but it was a software issue. I had to purchase a D-Link N router to replace it (another $179) and yes, it had issues also, but that does not excuse Apple’s quality control.
2. Now on firmware 7.3.2, the same Apple Airport Extreme N router randomly starts to drop wireless connections, eventually ending up in a self-reboot. This happens once every one to two weeks.
3. In January of 2008 I purchased an Apple TV. When connected via HDMI, the Apple TV would lock up with the infamous “silver apple” screen, requiring a two-step reboot. This happened nearly every time we’d use the Apple TV. It took Apple seven months to correct this flaw.
4. The same Apple TV will sometimes lose it’s wireless network settings. I don’t know if this is connected to the above Airport Router issues, but you’d think that by using all Apple hardware, things would “just work.” They don’t. I either need to reboot the Apple TV or re-enter the wireless network settings.
5. A friend had iPhone OS 2.0 fully brick her original 2G iPhone. The Apple store had no idea how to repair it, so they replaced it. Good coverage but this should never have happened, and according to the discussion boards, she was not the only one.
6. A friend had the iTunes 7.7 update break her ability to listen to her music. iTunes constantly asked her to authorize. Apple support had a page about this very issue, and other reports dating from almost a year ago. After trying everything listed, iTunes still didn’t work. She called Apple and after hours on the phone, they finally got it working, but said “We have no idea why it suddenly started working, but we’re glad it is.”
7. I had the video card on my Santa Rosa MacBook Pro die.
8. I had a fan die on my Santa Rosa MacBook Pro.
9. I had the metal finish etch on my Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, where the wrist rests.
10. I had a keyboard die on my original MacBook Pro.
11. A friend’s original MacBook Pro’s keyboard is dying in the exact same manner.
12. I had a superdrive die on my original MacBook Pro.
13. A friend went through 3 ATI X1900 video cards in his MacPro over the period of a year, all failing over time. To Apple’s credit, they replaced it with a nicer nVidia 8800.
14. Now the same Mac Pro randomly won’t turn on and is in the shop for it’s second of two weeks being in repair.
15. The iPhone OS 2.0 is fairly buggy, including random reboots, applications quitting on launch, the mute feature getting stuck on, slowness in response to taps and swipes
16. Time Machine randomly reports that a backup failed, but supplies no information as to why nor how to fix it.
17. iChat Video conferencing only works some of the time, whereas Skype video conferencing works all of the time.
18. Back to my Mac won’t work through Apple’s own Snow Airport base station, and Apple has no plans to support it.

Is it just me? Are there more quality control issues or is it more likely the fact that I have 5 more Apple devices I rely on daily than I had 5 years ago?