This Apple Worries Me

I’ve owned and worked on Macintosh computers since the very first model came out in 1984. I bought the original Mac and immediately upgraded to a “Fat Mac.” Over the years, I’ve owned (and loved) the “wicked fast” MacIIfx, two workhorse G3 beige desktops, a purple “Candy Mac,” the original dual-system titanium “Ti-Book,” the beautiful blue and white G3 Tower (also dual system), two 17-inch G4s, two Intel mini-Macs, and now a 15-inch G4 "glossy." There was a time in the 90s when people made fun of my devotion to Macs, but I never had a breakdown or a hard drive crash (until January 2009) and (knock on wood) I’ve never had a virus. Lately, I’m worried. In late 2007, a gal I work with bought an ibook laptop. She had a fatal hard drive crash eleven months later. A friend in California converted to a Mac laptop 18 months ago. He’s had two hard drive crashes. The first shock came when another devoted Mac user I know bought the little white ibook when it first came out. The keys fell off. When I asked what was going on, she said, “Oh, they all do that.” To an “I-was-there-when” Mac user, this decline in quality startles. Still better than a PC, but scary. Maybe that’s why I now have four huge external hard drives for back-up (they crash, too, but that's another story). My computer is no ipod to me, so why did everything start changing when Apple went into the music business? Surely, there is still a market for quality computers whose real strength is dependability. Apple?