I think that they are just making everything really cheap now. I have a Powerbook that still works from 1997. It is heavy as hell, slow as hell running moden software, no USB or FireWire porst, only runs for about 45 minutes on its battery and maxes out at 348 megs of RAM, but it has never given me one bit of trouble.
It is pretty useless as a laptop, but hooked permanently to my home stereo system and running Mac OS X and iTunes it makes a kick ass jukebox. I turned all my CDs into MP3s and have almost 20 gigs of music on it. BTW it is backed up.
