DVD-Rs suck

[vinylrake]

are they shipping something other than the Pioneer drives these days? or are you saying the Pioneer drives suck?

[devSin]

I think they changed to a Korean or Japanese OEM brand (similar to Matsushita in the old days), after a long run of Sony and Pioneer?

Quality shouldn't be that bad, but you get what you pay for, and optical drives run like $1 these days.

[haravikk]

Whatever they are, when they work they're fine, but it seems there's a pretty high dud-rate, and still no blu-ray drives in sight =(

[GodzFire]

The DVD drives Apple ships with its computers are actually shockingly bad. I spent £4,500 on a Mac Pro only to get a DVD drive that barely worked (it couldn't exceed 0.5x read) =/

Sorry Hara, but you're in the minority. I have a Mac Pro as well, and I haven't had any issues.

I hope that as soon as you found that problem, you requested a replacement, since I would assume it was still under warranty.

[TarousZars]

My iMac's DVD drive died after just over a year. My sister had one die in her iMac but it was within warranty at least.

[William Wallet]

Well I have to admit this hardly fills me with confidence in my new machine. Haha!

[haravikk]

The DVD drives Apple ships with its computers are actually shockingly bad. I spent £4,500 on a Mac Pro only to get a DVD drive that barely worked (it couldn't exceed 0.5x read) =/

I hope that as soon as you found that problem, you requested a replacement, since I would assume it was still under warranty.

Of course, but the damn thing was like that on arrival. It's a bit of a downer to get a brand-new machine, get it all set up, then go to play a DVD you got recently too and it can barely load; had to copy the whole thing to disk and run it as an image, but it took ages to copy. Apple did send a replacement drive after two calls, first person didn't seem to have a damn clue, claimed the DVD drive isn't user-serviceable. Fortunately the one that spoke actual English had a clue what he was talking about.

But the point was that the DVD drives they're putting in are really cheap, and have a high failure-rate. When you pay so much to get server-grade processors, server-grade RAM, a corresponding motherboard, one of the best workstation cases available, and so-on, it's a bit of insult when they go and throw in a DVD drive you can buy as a consumer for $20. Double that and you can get something of a much higher quality, and it's hardly going to kill any mark-up on the machine!

I really love the Mac Pro, it's a great performer and well worth the investment, if you exclude the DVD drive from that statement.

[Cobalt 7]

I too had a serious problem with my Macbook Pro's DVD drive. Shit stopped working after less than a year, and would only read files. It was incapable of burning.


Apple's really starting to piss me off with this kind of shit.

[Renwood]

PC's are cheap and fast.

macs are not.

get a cheap pc for a backup system.

allthough i cant even afford a cheap USED one these days heh

[William Wallet]

I haven't any problems with the speed of this thing (considering I'm working on movies and music at the same time) but there's no arguing about which is cheaper.

I am looking at getting a cheapie PC to have around the place purely for backing stuff up. Won't even use it for games because Crossover works pretty well on here.