My view on this is simple. I've owned four macs in the past twelve years, an iMac, a G4, and two Mac Minis. Every last one of them has worked perfectly, and done what I need them to do for years...
I've also used seven PCs over the same period - five through work, and two laptops, by Toshiba, Dell, IBM, and HP. And every single one of them developed a major issue within tWo years...
To further "pluralize" the anecdotes...
...in the past 6 or 8 years I've owned 4 Windows laptops. I needed to in order to keep aviation databases up to date and to run a handful of aviation simulator software programs.
The first three were a Toshiba, an HP and a Fujitsu. None lasted three years. In each case, they failed to boot up some time in the second year, and the shops indicated "mother board" and $300+ repairs. Those repairs did not make sense, when for a couple hundred more I could get a newer, more powerful laptop, and sell the broken one on eBay for a significant amount.
The fourth is a $499 Sony Vaio and that one's working fine after a couple years - here's hoping.
Point is, overlapping that time period I also owned a white iBook which is still soldiering on. And my MacBook Pro which is my main computer.
Anyway, as to the optical drive in my Macbook Pro, if my position had been that Apple's never break, my position would have been weakened with my hard drive failure*. And you could call it ironic. But that was never my position, so its only ironic against some straw man.
*get ready for some special pleading...
We live on a dirt road. A neighbor has a plaque in her kitchen that reads, "Dust Is A Country Accent". I suspect the dust that gets on
everything finds its way into my computers. For a while I could get the drive to work after a few passes with a CD cleaner disk. Eventually not so much, and my LG optical drive serves my very rare CD ripping and archive needs just fine.
