Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!shelby!portia!mouser
From: mouser@portia.Stanford.EDU (Michael Wang)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Apple's Horrible Product Quality
Message-ID: <2694@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 3 Jun 89 19:52:57 GMT
References: <13743@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Sender: Michael Wang <mouser@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: mouser@portia.Stanford.EDU (Michael Wang)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 64

In article <13743@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
           changwoo@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Chang P. Woo) writes:
> I bought my SE with internal 20 meg drive on September 87. Now it is in
> the shop to receive its FIFTH floppy drive. That is mean-failure-time of
> 5 months. That is not all. My mouse is the third one, the analog board
> is the second one, video board is the third one, and the fan is the
> second one. Overall, except for my logic board, display, hard drisk, and
> the chassis, they are ALL new ones.
> [ LOTS OF STUFF DELETED ]

Your problems with your Macintosh SE sound extremely unusual (as other
people have pointed out). There could be other explanations for your
problems other than overall poor Apple quality.

For example:

1) Since you rarely use your floppy drive, mabye other environmental
   factors such as smoke, dust, and humidity are causing your drives
   to constantly fail even when you are not using them. Could you
   be more specific in explaining what sorts of problems you have
   been having with your floppy drives?

2) Mabye the power you are feeding your Macintosh is very erratic and
   prone to spikes and drops. This could put some unusually large
   amount of strain of components in your Mac, causing them to fail
   prematurely.

3) When you say analog board, do you mean JUST the analog board, or
   the power supply too. On a Mac SE, they are actually two different
   repair parts. It is possible that you just have a bad power supply
   and all your other problems are related to that.

4) On a related note, mabye your logic board is bad. Since your video
   board, floppy drive, analog board, and mouse are all connected to
   the logic board, mabye something on the logic board is causing the
   other items to fail (of course this doesn't explain why your hard
   drive hasn't failed yet).

In summary, your reoccuring problems may be caused by something in the
environment like bad power lines. Or they may be caused by just one
slightly bad component in your Mac, that hasn't been replaced, that is
causing everything else to fail. If you could be more specific about
the types of failures you have been having, mabye some people on the
net familiar with repairing Macs could help you figure out your
problem. Another suggestion is to talk to your dealer, and see if you
can't get him to replace some of the parts that haven't been replaced
yet, and see if that doesn't fix your problems.

Remember, just because you are having major problems, doesn't mean
everybody else is. Though Apple does blow it occasional (like with the
Mac Plus power supply/analog board), I haven't of any reoccuring
problems with the SE and SE repair parts; and I've been working
in our campus computer resale center, which repairs many Macs every
day, since before the SE was ever introduced.


-Michael Wang

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