If there are fanboys buying faulty retail overpriced hardware you bet there is a fanexec at some company ready to hire a faulty overpaid engineer as well.

Firmware problems do not occur in ones and twos. They afflict all machines of the same design with the same firmware.

Apple's firmware 'fix' is dealing with a crappy hardware problem. It's an unspoken admission that their design is no good. They should sake their design engineers for getting things like this wrong so often. Do they not test? Do they not check component specs? Do they not give a damn? Do they not value their jobs? Who'd employ an ex-apple engineer now with such a poor track record on public display?

The thing is, here we have a similar issue to the NVidia laptop GPU problem of the recent past. Here we go again. A firmware update that cranks up the fan speed to cool the beast off. When the wide spread failures come (and they will), Apple will of course not claim them as such until they are hard pressed not to, as they with the the GeForce 8600M debacle. The MacBook with it's 9400 chipset is a better buy, I think....

I always like to read your apple coverage, its so neutral and focuses quite often on the good things as well as the bad.

Yeah right !

I don't care if your Apple, HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.... every hardware manufacturer makes a turd product at some point in time. This was Apples. At least they are trying to fix it. Just think... you could have had a product that your manufacturer was unwilling to even troubleshoot. (Cough... looking at you Sony... cough)

lines and distortion mean 3 things, overheating, or not enough juice, or maybe drivers.
either way another untested, poorly built computer.
when will you ppl learn that apple is ripping you off.
apple really need to ditch hardware and just focus on software, that way they would reach all platforms, and would make a killing and keep MS honest. I would use OSX if I just didnt have to buy the shitty apple hardware.
hada G4 logic board failed twice, and that was because they installed a wireless card. 3 ipods failed, kept replaced under warranty, but I was replacing them until the warranty ran out.