This is my last warning shot across the bows of Apple France. The first and only serious one in public.
Why, in the name of all the gods they worship in California, should buying a very expensive new product from Apple be like playing a non-fatal game of Russian roulette?
"Don't expect a rapid repair," one technician told me yesterday. "I'm not allowed to mend it. There are no 'special dispensations' except for VIPs. Apple's very fond of VIPs, but for the likes of ordinary people like you and me..."
Marianne's PowerBook G4 is the second Mac in four I have bought partly dead straight out of the box, the tape and all the foam.
If you're mean enough to count the Indigo iMac that a dealer took back for another one in May 2001 because it wouldn't even start up, that makes three rotten Apples out of five in the past six or seven years. Had the first one not been completely dead, I wouldn't have had an instant replacement.
Are we expected to tolerate a 60 percent failure rate?

What's wrong with the PowerBook?
A sleek and gorgeous machine refuses to spit out Apple's very own disk, which went in when I installed the Mac X 10.2.3 operating system and other bits and pieces.
This model comes with no emergency CD release mechanism of the kind you trigger with a unbent paper clip, once an almost unfailing last resort.
The defect's definitely mechanical.
There are unorthodox ways of making a Mac release a DVD or CD (including what is technically known as booting into open firmware and typing in a command, or using the "terminal") as well as the conventional ones.
Apple assistance got me nowhere, apart from a list of authorized fixers in Paris. That was after trying what the technician talked me through, just to be obliging, since I'd done all but one of those five things already.
The DVD will unmount -- that's to say, its icon disappears from the "desktop" after a couple of noisy efforts from the Mac's innards to eject it -- but it returns on deciding "I'm stuck".

So my daughter will be disappointed. It's far from the end of the world; the PowerBook otherwise works fine and she's got the internet.
But I can run neither the Apple Hardware Test nor Alsoft's admirable Disk Warrior 3, which finally arrived in a packet from the United States last week after a wait of more than a month.
And she can't play games.
I'm leaving her the choice between parting company with the machine for the days a repair will take or using what it can do for the weeks left before she goes back to school.

The really bad news is that I'd half-expected a problem!
Experience has made me wary.
If I'd trusted Apple, I wouldn't have set up Marianne's machine yesterday but let her do it She would have learned to run the maintenance routines and see whether the hard disk needed "optimizing", which a newly installed system often does.
But I had to be sure that the bloody thing works.
If I hadn't, she could have been more upset than she will be.

While this isn't a disastrous defect, Apple is getting another 1,800 euros (a bit more than 2,000 dollars). Their policy is to repair, rather than replace, even new faulty machines.
I've wasn't going to say how much it cost me, but the wildcat told me today that Apple's approach was "scandalous at that price! It's not a bad cabbage from the supermarket."
What if I'd bought the Mac for an assignment abroad as a journalist? What if I were a designer with a project to complete? If I weren't in a big town?
Last year, it was Apple software. I foolishly ordered Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) by 'phone. Instead, they sent me Mac OS X 10.2 Server. A shipper in Rotterdam said they wanted it back before they'd give me what I paid for.
When I told him that this was out of the question and was between me and Apple, he understood.
The Server ended up given to an African university's computer sciences department, where I hope it's proving useful.

It's not special treatment I want, unless Apple starts treating all its clients like VIPs again, but answers. Anyone else badly burned is welcome to help me obtain them.
How do defective Macs like this get on to the market? Why is Apple support increasingly often unworthy of the name? And what do you, Apple, plan to do about it?

"The surprise turns into downright disgust when you compare the American iMac 500 MHz with the model sold in the Hexagon (France). On the model sold in the States, the level 2 memory cache changes. This buffer memory, partially but directly responsible for the performance of the machine, totals 256 Ko running at 500 MHz on the New Continent, as against 512 Ko but at a cadence of 200 MHz in France.
"What's one to make of such a choice, when you know that it's better to have a cache which is smaller but runs at the processor's speed, rather than a slower memory? Could it be that we're being dumped with the end of the production line that was used in previous models? No, impossible!
"Let's add that the same models, the other side of the Atlantic, have a video card with 16 Mo of memory, while everywhere else, they've got 8 Mo. This is a difference gamers will notice, because it will force them to compromise with regard to resolution and will be a drawback when it comes to finer details. These kinds of 'novelties' do rather leave a bitter taste."*

As it was, the iMac took a holiday in Holland, I ended up still with an 8 Mo card, but it worked -- not well enough for Jag.
In September 2001, I'd planned to ask Apple's overlords directly about shabby practice. (Quietly, by the way, that iMac model improved, too late for some of us.) But Steve Jobs & Co suddenly cancelled Apple Expo in Paris after "9/11", much to the annoyance of Europeans who had been gearing up for it for months.

Enough crap from Apple.
I've read too many woeful stories in the letters' pages of Mac magazines from clients who have been shat upon by the company, particularly when it comes to so-called service, without doing anything about it.
I don't know whether a certain Patrice Gauthier still runs customer relations in France, or whatever his job description was. I'll find out next week. I also have another name from a helpful somebody.
Plus the all-important 'phone numbers, rather than one that gives you robo-woman.

It can sometimes be fun, as a Mac user, to take the piss out of Micro$oft, but it's high time a few of us with the clout began to turn our torches on Apple.
If Mr Gauthier, or some other appropriate senior member of staff, cares to reply, I'll happily publish the response. I'll also listen to their viewpoint should this need to go further.
This isn't a crusade, but castigation, like charity, begins mainly at home. Not with the neighbours.

_________

*A close translation of part of 'Strengths and Weaknesses of the New Macs', a feature review not now in their archives. It was signed by the editorial staff as a whole, supervised by Jean-Luc Arnaud.