dcharlie, from what I've seen, some people just have stupid bad luck with Macs. Some people just never seem to get one that works, even though the rest of the world is using them without complaint. Gman was also one of those guys. One of my cousins, as well. Everything arrives fine then turns to shit.
Macfags upgrade more often than PC fegs? 
Ok you guys are seriously deluded
Yeah, the only guy I know who upgrades this way is an Apple employee, who uses his employee discount to see his current one at the same price as the new-and-discounted item he's about to buy. Everyone else I know with a Mac hangs on to it for a long time.
tl;dr version: I have owned a number of Macs, and only one of them was a problem.
tl version:
After college, I bought a Mac IIfx which lasted 3 years in the USA, survived USPS mail to Japan and 2 years there, carried in airplane cargo back to the USA, and then I sold it as a server to the company I worked for. You probably could have dropped it on a tank, and killed the tank.
To replace it, I had a Power Mac 6100/66 which lasted me 4 or 5 years. Then I bought the original white iBook before coming to Japan (again); it served 6 years. It was perfect the whole time. Its replacement was a refurbed PowerBook G4 17" -- the only complaint I have about Macs are based on this PowerBook. Christ, what a lemon. The whole time I owned it, it had incessant problems. When I took it in to Apple Store Shinsaibashi, they claimed it had been dropped. I told them that I'd never dropped it, but the REFURB packaging in which it arrived had no cushioning, so it was the refurb factory's fault. Never, ever buying refurb anything again, though my friend at Apple says it was the only time he'd ever of problems with a refurb unit. The MacBook Air and 24" iMac I have at home now were bought in the last 18 months, will probably last another 3 years.
