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

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.

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 =(

haravikk wrote: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.

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.

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

GodzFire wrote:

haravikk wrote: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.

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.

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

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.