Bitten by Apple quality
Just before I quit my last horrible computer job and took up babyherding, I went out and spent a stack of money replacing my broken macbook with a nice new macbook air. Which was fine (the macbook air is, by and large, a lovely machine) except that two months into its life the hard disk started going “tick tick” “tick tick” “tick tick” in a manner that sounded very much like a disk going bad. So I backed up the system, plunged through the wall of flame that is Apple online support, and eventually got them to give the ok for me to take it into the local Apple store and deal with their so-called genius bar, which ran a bad-blocks scan, mapped the offending blocks in the bad blocks table, and gave me back the machine.
I was happy to have my workstation back, so I didn’t pester them for how they mapped the bad blocks. More fool me, because just this afternoon I fired up the machine and listened with dismay as the (now out of warranty) hard disk started going “tick tick” “tick tick” “tick tick” again.
Now that’s a quality hard disk. Excellent quality control, Apple – I’ve always wanted to spend US$1800 on something that only lasts about a year before parts start flying off.