The company I work for had a similar experience. I can't remember the exact model name but over a period of a year we had nearly every machine die due to faulty capacitors. The bad capacitors were even marked differently to the "good" capacitors on the replacement boards. We had a Dell tech visit our building every week for over a year to do the replacements. As far as I know, Dell did a good job of replacing the broken boards within a week. Because the boards going to fail could be identified I'm not sure why they didn't proactively replace all the dodgy boards before they blew up.

Having just downloaded the Adobe AIR version of Zinio Reader (admittedly a beta) on my mac I would have to agree that people should be protected from bad experiences based on crap software, or software that isn't appropriate for certain devices. For reading digital magazines this product is discouraging, painful and would ruin the business of online magazines. Thankfully the old reader still works.