How many bad experiences is that with Mac hardware Norm? Are you still 'trusting' of it?

Perhaps the smarter question. Is it any more or less relibable than the Dell or whatever you used to use with Linux?

I had the exact same problem. (I purchased my 15" MBP in July 2007.) And it looks like Apple has now admitted there's a problem.

The only difference in my story is that I still hadn't set up Time Machine (oops), I purchased a hard drive at the store and had them back everything up, and then I waited a week for it to get shipped back to me.

I read about this problem reoccurring for some people (even after the motherboard was replaced). So now I'm a little nervous about it failing during a presentation or something.

I think this is the first real problem I've had, Dave. I did blame an earlier problem on bad hardware, but I was wrong. It was a software problem. Reinstalling fixed it.

I also had hideous problems with the drivers for a 3G card, but drivers are often troublesome and bad software abounds.

In fairness, I've shipped every laptop I've ever owned out for warranty repair once or twice. I treat them gently, but they still get bumped and bounced across land and sea.

I'm not less confident in my Mac than I have been in other laptops. Which isn't to say I wouldn't be more confident if OS X was open source and there was a community of developers working on it in public.