Apple Service Reliability Quantified (ouch!)

Apple's online service business doesn't deliver five-nines reliability.

Apple's reliability isn't even two nines. The service has been scandalously unreliable -- to the point of public apologies -- and is still going down. At least the latest outage was only a few hours long ...

The inconsistent performance and downtime Apple delivers to its paid customers does two things: (a) it offers ongoing evidence that Apple doesn't take pride of craftsmanship in its services business, just customers' money; and (b) it demonstrates in the most high-profile way possible that Apple is unsuitable as a choice for business solutions that must work. In short, Apple's efforts serve to drive the discriminating consumer to alternate providers. This means competitors.

The 96% uptime estimate, however, may be generous: it's based on Apple's status history, which given Apple's online service reliability may itself be unreliable.