Sprocket - what software are you running on them? its incredibly rare that I have anything crash on any of my Macs (of course its pretty rare on my PCs too). Opera is the last thing I've had crash but its been months, and it always comes back on a relaunch. I run Office 2008 on my powerbook, firefox, safari, webkit, itunes, adium, colloquy, last.fm, vlc, VirtualHub, and probably a few others. Crashes are incredibly rare, and I've never had the OS itself mess up outside of maybe a networking glitch with a Windows PC.

Hardware failures like the HD or RAM could sort of be blamed on Apple, because of their choices in brands or something, but there is absolutely no difference in a 2.5" hd in an Apple notebook vs one in a PC notebook.

What is your complaint about the battery? Nearly every single notebook that has been made in the last 4 years has used a Lithium Ion battery. Dell's have caught fire too. If you crack a shell on a MacBook you are treating it pretty badly, but I guess that type of treatment would help to explain all the other incredibly rare problems that you are seeing in such abundance.

Failure of batteries, as in losing charge capacity, is true to some extent. I believe its documented several places that some of the first gen macbooks and mbp had batteries that died sooner than they should. But Didou (mod here) ran some software that checks his battery, and his is still doing well, I don't have the link, but I'm sure we could get him to post if needed. I ran that app on mine too and my battery is doing well for its age:

I would be suprised if the typical lithium ion battery in a PC Notebook is any different in life span. Probably part of the problem is that if there is a bad batch of batteries, they show up in a portion of the MacBook or MBP notebooks, if a bad batch of batteries enters Dell or HP's line, they have a ton of other models in their own inventory to drown down the percentages, and then the entire PC Notebook volume across the other manufacturers. Maybe you guys just got a bunch of notebooks from a line of bad batteries, but Apple doesn't make the batteries they just use them. If you pull out 2 PC notebook models at random and stick to them I bet you'd see statistically the same "failure" rates.

I can't comment on the imaging software with OS X Server because I have no expierence with it.

Your heat comment might be right, but I think for the wrong reasons. The iBooks ran cooler because of their processor, G3 and G4s just ran cooler than the Intel Cores. They also had a plastic case rather than Aluminum or even Titanium in some of the Powerbooks (plastic being a better insulator). So the iBooks had 2 things going for them, plastic and a cooler processor, they may have had more air space too, but I don't know for sure. The flipside is that the early MacBooks were also plastic, and ran hot and also felt hot on the user's lap, so you are correct on that. Their whole model line going to metal cases now probably won't help the heat the user feels either. I don't know that that has much of anything to do with reliability though, heat does shorten life of electronics, but it may cut the life from something like 10 years down to 7, it doesn't cut it below the typical use-span of a notebook computer.

We are pretty off track of the original topic of this thread, so if people want to continue this discussion I may have to cut these last several posts out of the original thread and place them in a new one.