[webwright]

I'm not a Mac guy... Never had a PC fail me (over about a decade), except one ultraportable toshiba (screen failure). That's... 4 desktops and 2 laptops.

Of course, it DOES fail on the software side... Windows gets pretty painful as it ages.

I've always aid that Mac vs. PC is a decision of whether you want crappy-but-pretty hardware and good OS or ugly-but-solid hardware (assuming you do your research) and a mediocre OS that ages poorly.

I'm seriously considering a hackintosh for my next machine.

[anthonyrubin]

Most of the parts in Apple computers are the same parts used in PCs. A majority of the PC laptops are built by one of a few companies in China. As a former sys admin I've dealt with my share of PC hardware failure and in the last several years I've seen my share of Mac failures.

Hard drives are probably the component most likely to die in either and they all use the same group of vendors. Display failures are also more common in laptops and again, they all use the same group of vendors.

[icefox]

"Three of my older laptops have had their hard drives fail (with painful data loss in one instance)."

More like they deserved what they got. A four or five year old hard drive should b expected to die yesterday and full backups should be an absolute requirement. I have had plenty of drives die long before that and would never dare push a hard drive to such a long limit with no backup, especially a laptop one that is moved around a lot.

And just to top it off "hard drives" are not Apple special hardware. I have noticed that some comments have negative points, how do I vote down something (in this case the article)?