My Macbook developed a fault where the DVD drive would not play properly. It turned out that this was caused by two things. 1) was Apple not liking disk caddys and insisting on the sort of "suck it in" drive you get on a car stereo added to 2) most users are right handed. When you pick up the laptop, you tend to do it with your right hand, grasping it top and bottom of the DVD slot, which is the balance point. This, over time distorts the slot (because it doesn't have a caddy closing it) and prevents DVDs from loading properly. The solution was to wrench it with a wooden stick to open up the slot again. The guy at the Apple Store said it was a well known problem and they would have charged me £50 to solve it in the same way I did it myself. -1 for design then. Generally, though, the build quality of MacBooks is streets ahead of a Dell or an HP.

Apple desktops have a different problem in that you are limited to hardware sold by Apple (at a premium). Want the latest Nvidia graphics card? Forget it. OSX checks the cards for an internal signature and will not load if the card didn't come from Apple. However, a way round this is to use Windows 7 on Mac hardware, then you get Apple build quality with the flexibilty of Windows for hardware. If you are brave, you can re-flash the graphics card so OSX thinks it came from Apple.