Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ames!oliveb!pyramid!prls!philabs!sbcs!root
From: root@sbcs.sunysb.edu (root)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: 1084 monitors: Another one bites the dust ...
Summary: Manufacturing woes
Message-ID: <1347@sbcs.sunysb.edu>
Date: 19 Jun 88 22:53:50 GMT
References: <3040@louie.udel.EDU> <6637@cup.portal.com>
Distribution: na
Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook
Lines: 70

Came across some interesting stats in "Macworld" for July, 1988,
pg 67:

	Percent of users reporting power/video board problems:

	Mac-128K:	17
	Mac-512K:	32
	Mac-512KE:	19
	Mac-plus:	22
	Mac-SE:		20
	Mac-II:		26
	Avg:		22%

	Percent of users reporting logic board failures:
	
	Mac-128K:	17
	Mac-512K:	9
	Mac-512KE:	13
	Mac-plus:	12
	Mac-SE:		9
	Mac-II:		13
	Avg:		11% (their number, actually it's 12)

	The sample set of users was 504 respondents.  

My experience with both Apple & Commodore equipment has been *very* good;
out of the all the various Amiga's we own at Ameristar + my personal
Amiga, I've had absolutely no trouble at all.  This contrasts with
my experience with Sun (at Stony Brook) and IBM equipment.  

Anyways, the real purpose of this posting is to put me on record as
against the "I had one bad experience with ***, so I hate them and
I don't want anyone to buy their equipment" genre of network postings.  
C'mon folks.  Any manufacturing company in the world will have a certain 
product failure rate.  Think about it for a minute.  If you were making
Amigas how would you do a better job?  Remember, you buy the chips
from a set of companies, cases from another, power supplies from yet
another, etc.  How would you impress your quality control goals onto
all of your suppliers?  And your suppliers suppliers, and so on.  You
can't just say "Well, they shipped me a bad power supply so that
manufacturer must be bad; I'll get another."  First of all, not all
fallout problems are readily apparent.  So you ship a few thousand
units and then discover that C101 was manufactured out of spec by
the cap company that supplied your PS manufacturer.  What do you
do, switch vendors and then field update all old power supplies even
if the bad cap causes perhaps a 3% failure rate?  Maybe you should
burn in test your equipment for a few months :-).  Of course not.  No
one would ever be able to remain in business under either of those 
conditions.  What about second order failures, eg monitor failed
because it was operated in a room too hot/humid, etc.  Or perhaps the
monitor was operated on rotten AC.  Would you design your equipment
for absolute worst case functionality?  Probably not, because it can't
be done and you can only approximate worst case. Not to mention that
reliability/safety have never been really strong selling points.  

What I am getting at is quite simple: don't waste net time and bandwidth
telling me that you've got an Amiga that went sour.  I already know real 
hardware widgets fail.  If a person is really interested in gathering some
useful insights into Amiga reliability, I would suggest that they conduct
a survey of a real cross section of the user community.  Just because 
even a few monitors went sour in the hands of Usenetters doesn't mean 
that Commodore has a problem.

					Rick Spanbauer
					SUNY/Stony Brook
					(& Ameristar)

Standard nondisclosure: my opinions are my own; they do not in any way
represent the official policy of either State University of New York or
Ameristar Technology.