1. I have a white plastic netbook too that cost almost half. I don't see any cracks in it. You are arguing that a $1000+ machine can have cracks in it after a month because it's not a "premium" product. That just sounds like the bleating of an Apple apologist. Furthermore, you don't address the dead HDD, the fraying power cable, the dead earphones and the non-functional 3G on the phone.

2. http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliab... Quote and write properly please, learn to capitalise. Apple are mediocre with good product aesthetics (I'll give them that, although see below) and excellent PR and an ok-ish window and application manager (which has nothing on apt-get) they whacked on top of existing open source. They may be big now but it took an emergency investment from Microsoft to save them, and even then it took masses of open source software (and a few iterations of OS X) before they had anything passable to run on their doddering hardware. Also, as you sound like an Apple fanatic who notoriously get these things wrong, I'd point out that the mouse was taken from Englebart window manager concept was taken from Xerox (in addition to the OS from BSD and Webkit from KDE). There are also posts showing Johnathan Ive plundered product designs from the past. So the innovation is paper thin, the engineering is massively taken from elsewhere, some of the product design is taken too and the reliability is mediocre as proven by the stats.