I know there are many who don't like Apple. But I wanted to post my story.
I purchased a Quad Core Xenon Mac just over three years ago. During the past couple of months it became clear that the FireWire port was having some troubles. I suddenly realized that I was almost out of warranty. I took the computer in and it turned out that it was 6 days past my extended warranty period of 3 years. They extended the warranty and fixed it anyway. Almost. The repair didn't fix the problem. So I brought it back in. After 9 days waiting for a new Logic board and a firewire cable harness, they called to apologize for the inconvenience and to tell me what they would like to do. They wanted to GIVE ME A NEW COMPUTER.
So last night I picked up my new Mac Pro Quadcore with the Nehalem processor. It was a very cool way to be treated. I have a 1 year warranty on the computer and I bought the Apple Care 2 year extended warranty for $199. How cool is that?
I'm not sure any other company would have handled this way.
As a side note, the past 3 or 4 weeks have been some of my busiest ever. During this time I have mixed 20 songs on my little white MacBook!!! Thanks to Pro Tools unlocking PT 9, I was able to do the work and no one noticed any sonic difference. Luckily the track counts were small, and I didn't need to use many virtual instruments, since it was all just mixing. It reminded me that I don't need all those expensive plugs to do the work.
Steve