When Apple starts churning out disposable $200 pieces of crap that have to be repaired constantly and replaced every couple of years, we'll see that change.

The main difference here is that Apple churns out $2000 pieces of crap that have to be repaired only slightly less often and replaced every couple of years. And as an added bonus if something goes wrong with your Mac you have to send it back to get it fixed. When a PC breaks you can often fix it yourself easily and cheaply. I've very rarely had to do any repairs on my PCs at all over the last 20 years. Mac is overpriced for what it is and reiles on snobbery to get people to pay the difference.

Failure rates in the field for PCs are quite a bit higher than for Macs

And what are you basing that on?

http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/

shows Macs failing at a 3% to 31% rate.

http://www.macworld.com/2007/05/features/reliabilitysurvey/index1.php

shows a 15% to 23% failure rate, likely over a longer period of time with a larger survey population.

For comparison

http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_154164_11.html

shows a 5% to 22% failure rate for PCs. And that includes all manufacturers. The Dells I've purchased were quite reliable while the IBMs, especially notebooks like the ones you reference, tend to be horrible. In fact the only major failures I've had with Dells were when they used IBM hard drives.

What's so disturbing about 30% coming from potatoes?

I've been to Whole Foods and they're Wholly unimpressive. The quality is really no better than the local supermarket and the prices are much higher. They seem like a market that gains sales from snobbery and little else. They don't sell organic, they sell pretention.

Why are so many of you assuming this was some random person knocking at the door? When I read this I thought she had scheduled an appointment with a contractor from Home Depot or Lowes. Of course you'll let the person in and spend 2 hours with them, tolerating the mild weirdness at first because you asked for this appointment. Yes, as the weirdness became threatening or crude, she should have asked him to leave, but this weird obsession you all have with Travelers and traveling salesmen is just strange speculation.

Like I said, this guy was weird. So I called this national chain and spoke to very concerned people there. I received many calls and apologies. Within 24 hours, the president of said company offered to do my entire job for free.

She said there were many calls, not that the president immediately got on the phone with her. She spoke to multiple people and it doesn't say she just called the number on a piece of paper the salesman gave her. If she scheduled this appointment, she likely had a number to call.

To those of you who are sure this is a scam because "National companies don't give away $14,000 for free" or "They'd never make that offer without an attourney present to sign a 'don't sue us' form", this was an offer over the phone. If she takes them up on it, they'll have her sign all kinds of things, especially forms stating that she can't sue after accepting it. They'd likely be happy to get out of this with only $14,000 in contract work as opposed to attourney fees, potential settlements against them, bad publicity, etc. $14,000 is dirt cheap to a national company like these. And there are likely other conditions too, like a gag clause.

I also don't see why some people see the switch from "scary person threatening me" to "what can I get from them" as being so odd. If the guy was an employee of the company, she's just looking for compensation. The kind of compensation they're offering is something she was looking for anyway. Yes, she needs to hire an appropriate lawyer, but her reaction is not that strange. Hell, if she were to contact a lawyer and just recount what happened, he'd likely immediately start talking about compensation, she's just a step ahead of the curve because the company has already made noises about buying her off.

Between the "It's a fake" letters and the "OMG, Traveling Salesmen!" letters this letter column reads like a UFO community.

Brightstar65 shows why you should come out as an athiest. He doesn't think you should and he's a complete moron. He's wrong about everything and a pompous ass while he does it!

The issues of accuracy, context, and proper characterization is something that perhaps you could do a little research and would assume you are aware of as a trained lawyer.

That's just a mess. How did this guy get a position that requires the ability to communicate? And how does he not have someone checking his letters for this kind of error? One of my first jobs included doing just that for a VP of AT&T. The higher up you get, the more people you normally have doing that. Usually just to prevent exactly this kind of embarassing letter.

we went with the real talent, Alan Colmes

By "real talent" they meant someone who will say whatever they want him to say and then plead that he's a "liberal".