"Hey, AtAT, what the heck's happened to Apple's quality control over the past few years?" Yeah, we get that question more often than we'd like, usually from people who aren't really expecting an answer. They're just frustrated because they're the unlucky saps who keep buying Apple's Insanely-Great new products, and every time they do, they wind up with merchandise that has some sort of soul-killing defect. As you might imagine, this experience hits them in much the same way as Lucy pulling away the football. Cube "cracks," faulty iBook motherboards, PowerBook Leprosy, eMacs missing 1/3 of their screen space, crackling iPods, hair-dryer-quiet iMac G5s-- these poor luckless bums have been bitten by it all.

Well, collectively, we mean. They haven't all been cursed with every one of those issues. There's one guy who has, but he's also been struck by lightning 37 times (once while inside an underground fallout shelter and wearing a beard of bees), so we just consider him to be a bit of an anomaly all around.

Anyway, the point is, while no product release can be flawless, any problems that creep into Apple's gear is magnified a zillionfold because the products themselves are just so freakin' cool. If you buy a $600 Dell system and a plastic front panel spontaneously falls off, you slap it back on with an "I'M A TOOL" bumper sticker and get right on with your merry virus-deleting, because that's precisely what you'd expect to happen. But when you buy a sleek and divine "quiet as a whisper" iMac G5 only to find that it sounds like Apple managed to wedge a small but powerful pair of electric hedge clippers into that two-inch-thick case, that feels like the final incontrovertible proof that God is dead and mankind is but an infinitesimal meaningless smear on the inky black infinity of space.

So how do we deal? Anecdotal therapy, of course! And faithful viewer Ian Hornby forwarded us a doozy: according to MacBidouille (at least, as far as we can make out with three years of high school French and the ever-dubious, always-entertaining help of a Google autotranslation), some hapless owner of a dual 1.42 GHz Power Mac G4 has had a world of trouble with what should have been a hassle-free machine. (After all, those came out after Apple had fixed the "Wind Tunnel" problem.) All MacBidouille says is that this G4 "always presented problems," so we don't know what the nature of the ickiness was, but whatever it was, it was tenacious, because it clung to the system despite two-- yes, two-- complete motherboard replacements.

But here's the kicker: "Applecare has just solved definitively its problem with plume" (plume?) by swapping out the "chronically broken-down machine" with a brand spankin' new dual 2.5 GHz Power Mac G5!

Actually, it's probably not brand new; more likely it's a refurbed service replacement. Regardless, though, getting Apple's current (and tough-to-find) top-of-the-line system in exchange for a two-year-old dual G4 with "issues" is the sort of trade-up whose nits you just don't pick. Assuming this is all true, kudos to Apple for taking an ugly situation and turning it into the service equivalent of a group hug and a plate of fresh-baked brownies. It's not as nice as all Apple equipment being bug-free in the first place, but given those pesky laws of thermodynamics, it's probably the best we could hope for.