I can attest this is true (Score 1)

I am the technical lead at a school district with about 400 iBook G4 1.2ghz laptops deployed as a one to one program in our middle school. We have a self-servicing agreement and do our own repairs to ensure good uptime. This is the second year of the program. Last school year (2005-20060, we had 90 or so motherboard (applespeak == logic boards) fail. This year (2006-2007) so far 195 logic board failures. This is a huge problem in terms of support and uptime. Glad to know it is not merely student abuse that is responsible. Many, at least half of our failures are "dark screen with startup tone" or "no tone, no screen, fans blasting". But plainly this is a major issue for Apple as a company, especially in their education sector where hundreds of thousands of iBooks are issued to students. I'm a true blue Apple fan, but this is some heartily deserved egg in the face.