I think they are having an unusual number of problems, but it's hard to tell for sure. We Mac users tend to make noise (both good and bad) all out of proportion to our numbers, and to have much higher expectations than Windows users. That's great for Apple when things are going well, but not good when they're having difficulties.

The good news is that their support (at least in the US) tends to be excellent. The bad news is you really do need to buy the extended warranty with their notebooks.

I don't think it's fair to blame Intel though. Apple has occassionally had these rashes of hardware problems. The difficulties with the iBook G3 logic board are well documented.