MacInTouch has written up the results of their MacBook reliability survey. Unfortunately, my own vote wasn’t counted as I missed the self-selection boat. Here’s my belated report: “June MBP whines sometimes, sudden shutoff once.”

The survey results were not far off from what what I expected, having obsessively followed their reader reports the past few months. Thirteen percent of the owners surveyed had taken their MacBooks in for repairs. Thirteen freaking percent!

Of course you can’t read too much into a number derived from an unscientific survey of 2,800 people. The actual repair rate is known only to Apple, but it’s plain to anyone not wearing rainbow glasses that the 15-inch MacBook Pro was a botched rollout in the extreme. One unhappy switcher reports:

I switched from PC (XP) to a MacBook Pro at the end of February 2006. I had the original MBP for 4 weeks in total with a total of 11 weeks in service centers. The whole experience was thoroughly disappointing. OSX has been a wonderful experience for me but sadly the hardware has been terribly unreliable; I never had faulty PC equipment with 13 years of use.

Yes, I remember the days I assumed reliability problems in computer hardware had been overcome. Who would have thought we’d regress? Our unhappy switcher continues:

Basically i feel the early adopters of the new notebooks have been nothing more than laboratory rats so Apple can find and fix all its careless mistakes. Give me an Acer running OSX any day of the week! My new macbook pro doesn’t exhibit any of the previous problems; this was the machine i should have had in February when I handed over all that hard earnt money.

Yes, exactly. The danger of Apple snooty touché ad campaign, is firstly that you piss off most of your audience, and secondly that the people you do convert are actually expecting superior hardware. So what do you do? Rush a new laptop to market in time for a surprise MacWorld release, and then sell these 20-second hotcakes to your enthusiastic new customers!

Hey, all I’m asking here (again) is that Apple slow down and stop screwing over early adopters (known internally, I suppose, as “suckers”). Then again, with certain of the faithful it’s just not necessary:

Some users are happy even with a host of problems—this owner rated his experience “Pleased”:

Overall happy with it, but case is not sealed, speaker volume is weak, trackpad button is squishy, hard to tell when clicked, too easy to brush trackpad while typing, sending cursor and typing elsewhere, plus [noise, moo, fans, display color cast]. I plan to seek service at an Apple Store later this week.

Girl, this is not healthy. If he’s beating you, you got to leave.