My 14" M1 MacBook Pro screen repair cost was $809. Supervisor refused the waive the fee. The screen cracked for no apparent reason and then completely stopped working.
And that’s why most people buy $500 laptops. Even if the screen broke you can probably buy a 3rd party one from Aliexpress for $100.
But $800 for a replacement one? I’d rather sell the MBP for parts on eBay and buy a new one if must then pay that much. Like you would get more for that with a broken screen for sure, some people would fix it on their own or use it as a desktop computer.
But I don’t have a SV engineer salary so what do I know
Most people is a sketchy expression, but I would venture a guess that "most people" buy cheap laptops because they don't really care, they don't know how to adequately judge which ones are worth more, and they also just don't want to spend much on a computer.
It's hard to imagine, but "most people" actually care little about computers.
> For many people outside of HN demographic $500 is a lot of money for "a computer"
It would be but it's also kind of overkill based on the specs you can get nowadays for general computer usage.
I recently picked up a $399 15.6" Lenovo laptop new on Amazon for a family member. It has all of the important stats for a regular user. A 1080p display, fairly light, 11th gen Intel CPU (i3), 8gb of memory and most importantly an SSD. It's lightning fast for browsing the web, working with Excel and playing browser games.
If you did care more about development they have a 20gb of memory version with a 512 GB SSD for $540 and a 36gb of memory version with a 1 TB SSD for $630.
With these cheap computers, the manufacturers typically cut corners on things that are not listed on the spec sheet, though, especially the quality of the trackpad.
We have a bunch of $400 Lenovos at work and their trackpads are absolutely atrocious. When someone is using one of those, they almost always use an external mouse with them, because otherwise, mouse cursor handling is just too frustrating.
The webcam and sound are decent enough for casual usage. The keyboard was surprisingly good.
I can't speak for the trackpad. When setting up the laptop I found it to be ok but I only have 2 occasions of using it for 20 minutes (2 different laptops) which isn't enough time to really evaluate it since so many things can be hit or miss with trackpads. The people who use it do use an external mouse, mainly because using a trackpad is too foreign to them.
Both Lenovos are IdeaPads that were purchased a few years apart. The latest one wasn't to replace the first one, it was for someone else. The first one is still going strong. I had forgotten I even picked a Lenovo the first time around and ended up picking the same brand / model when researching "what is a really good budget'ish laptop for general computer use".
Almost yearly she'd buy some $150-$200 Dell clunker, all plastic, atrociously low resolution, loaded with bloatware.
For years I told her if she'd just buy one "overpriced" Macbook she'd save money in the long run, since despite some hiccups over the years, Macbooks are not particularly unreliable.
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Eventually I took it upon myself to give her my old Surface since she didn't want to learn OSX.
A machine I optioned out to nearly 1k, for someone who only checks emails and writes word docs... yet 4 years later and she hasn't needed a new one.
She's easily saved her money's worth if she had bought it new herself simply from not dealing with the hassle of needing a new machine every 12-24 months.
Agreed. I'm very proud of a $1200 Sony Vaio laptop I got back in 2007. My mother still uses and it's going strong, albeit the battery which needs to be replaced.
I don't think that's true. Yes I agree it might be a Mercedes but given that most of Apple's customer base isn't HN and most people seem to be happy spending $1k+ on an iPhone. $500 isn't a lot of money for a computer.
This doesn't really transfer. The same people willing to spend $1k+ on a phone might still say that $500 for a computer is a lot. Just like they would consider $200 for a kitchen knife a lot. Different categories, different scales.
Phone through carriers are heavily discounted with 2 year contracts. Apple also offers zero APR financing to pay for a new phone. Humans have a harder time reasoning about buy now/pay later.
Apple also offer financing on their laptops as well?
Phone's are not heavily discounted with 2 year contracts, definitely not here in Australia anyway. Carriers are going down the route of customers paying the standard device repayment per month (equalling the RRP). The days of device subsidies by taking a plan are fading.
Plans from mobile carriers are becoming suped up pre-paid plans with a device payment tacked on.
A vehicle needing a repair that costs 50% of its new MSRP is extremely rare, outside of a few electric vehicle battery packs.
In addition, when a vehicle reaches the point where any common repair costs more than it's current market value, it's basically considered worthless and only desperate people buy them. How long does it take an apple product to reach that point? A year?
Exactly. Apple has engineered their products and supply chain to make it not economically viable to do any kind of repair.
For traditional cars, as long as it's not a completely blown motor or transmission or a extensive front end collision, it's always economically viable to repair them.
You can take it to an independent repair shop. There's a supply chain of repair parts. Mercedes doesn't try to use trademark laws and DRM to stop you from using a third-party water pump.
Additionally, you can't capriciously tell people that an unrelated repair done by a third party voided their warranty. That's a violation of the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act.
That used to be true, but somehow Apple gets them. Probably still more true of non-mac computers - where high-end sales I imagine are almost exclusively to businesses and gamers.
I needed a new laptop last year. I decided to care less about my computer and so I chose not to get another Mac. Got a small Lenovo instead. Runs great with Linux. Does exactly everything I need it to do.
I've been instructing (extended) family members asking about laptops to just get an ex-biz lenovo (x220, x230, etc) and let me configure Linux/do upgrades on it for the last 8-9 years.
It serves all their use cases, and most of them are still working fine with no real repair need.
The apple branch of the family though (my in-laws) have been having hardware failures almost consistently during that time.
I'm too old and not of the right disposition to provide much tech support for people anymore. I did that for years, and I learned that it truly sucks to have to fk around frequently with stupid stuff (usually Windows stuff). But even Linux, using it as my own development environment, I would periodically have stupid stuff just mysteriously break and than require a lot of fiddling to get fixed.
As for Apple reliability, I set my grandfather up with an iMac 11 years ago. It was still functional when I replaced it with a Chrome desktop machine last year. (Of course it was no longer supported for OS upgrades, so that was the final reason to replace it). Likewise, my girlfriend daily drives my 2014 MBP which I used and abused around the world for years. I did an Apple service center battery replacement, and otherwise it performs as new. 8 years with a laptop is pretty great, especially considering it still does everything it's supposed to.
Oh, the wifi at my grandfather's house is still the original Airport I setup 11 years ago. It still does its job, without fail. I think I had to provide tech support (unplug, wait, replug) once.
For low-tech family, I now recommend Chrome devices. They are about the easiest things to support, and they are fairly low priced.
The X2 or T4 series from Lenevo are definitely state of the art in Design. Being so thin that no standard plugs fit anymore wouldn't be 'hot' among humans either.
I've been pondering doing something similar myself. If you don't mind my asking, which Lenovo did you get and which Linux variant does it seem to play nice with? :-)
T480s 3.5yrs old, out of warranty, ex-corporate cost me USD$430 running ubu 22.04 on a 4 core 8th gen core i5 & intel gfx is getting me 10 hours of battery life without having replaced the battery. (power settings set to Power Saver in the very obvious gui menu above shutdown). I did shove in more ram and a bigger ssd. Meh, 8G & 250G would have been enough fwiw. Gnome desktop is a thing I now find really polished and lovely to use.
In all it's just a beautiful thing I'm very, very happy with.
& Ebay. But it's also a very reasonable & justifiable decision to buy a new thinkpad imho. When it's a couple of years old the hardware support is usually perfect on first install - but I guess I don't use garbage like fingerprint readers so ymmv on that kind of silliness.
Thinkpads, T-Series, X1 carbon are the best laptops on the market by a good margin and have been there in that spot consistently for a long time. Buy apple if you really want/need to run apple software. I'd say just about /any/ distro will place nicely with the kernel-hackers laptop of choice. I'd bet fedora, rhel/centos, debian, arch would all be just terrific if you prefer one of those (and why not?)
I mean, x1 carbon (new) isn't much cheaper (in fact, more expensive, at the time of my googling) than a MacBook Air. The linux ecosystem (which I love) has it's own fair share of problems - gnome vs. KDE, deb vs. rpm, X vs. Wayland, pulseaudio vs. pipewire, systemd vs. (the world). Sure, installing ubuntu and not worrying about any of it is a great option, but I think you've painted a slightly too pretty picture :-)
(And, on your "kernel-hackers laptop of choice comment," it's curious that Linus released the last kernel from a MacBook device)
Gnome vs KDE isn't really a thing, deb vs rpm isn't a thing, X vs Wayland is only a temporary thing, Pulse vs PipeWire isn't a thing, PipeWire implements pulse apis.
systemd vs $INITSYSTEM is also temporary, though on a longer timescale. We need the old generation to die before systemd is accepted by everyone.
I don't mean to shit on your argument, but most things are either just preferences or progress that isn't done yet.
I'm about as bleeding-edge as can be (always latest stable kernel with xanmod patches) from NixOS, using Wayland and PipeWire.
The move to PipeWire made literally everything better for me (just works TM). While Wayland isn't perfect yet.
Gnome or KDE is a preference, it doesn't matter much and they're cooperating on many Wayland extensions.
systemd hate is either because you love the drama or you like bash scripts.
I don't particularly like either, so I like systemd.
A good thing people often forget with Wayland, PipeWire and systemd is that they are making our ecosystem a bit less fragmented, which I see as a great win, especially since I'm a NixOS user, my system relies heavily on systemd being declarative. My distro of choice wouldn't work as well (at all) without all "standards" (both real and implementation) that systemd and freedesktop puts forward.
Back on topic, the Linux desktop is honestly quite great if you constrain yourself a bit (Run a stable distro with boring tech, no Nvidia) or live on the bleeding edge where things also work well but might require more maintenance.
Lets be honest though, if I wasn't running NixOS I would probably run Ubuntu with whatever display and audio server they decided for me. And the package manager would be apt, brew, nix or flatpak depending on application. (Now it's Nix and Flatpak only).
Fair points, though I don't share your enthusiasm about wayland/pipewire transitions being "temporary." The fragmentation that Wayland has caused will be difficult to recover from - I think many older WM's will just die off. I generally agree that less fragmentation is good, though, so hopeful that desktop linux emerges stronger. But, having used it full time for the last ~15 years, it feels less focused than ever. Perhaps I too should transition to something like ubuntu, and just not worry about any of it :D
>Perhaps I too should transition to something like ubuntu, and just not worry about any of it :D
Something like this (fedora, debian are fine, I've heard arch is fine, no doubt others also) is the /only/ fair approach in comparison it to an apple or windows laptop. It's the only approach _possible_ with microsoft & apple.
Doing fun stuff like re-writing the default kernel scheduler and putting a bug in there on linux is really just not a point against linux in any way when you can (a) choose not to do that and (b) can't choose that at all with windows. Apple? Does anyone compile their own laptop kernel on apple? Common enough on linux because you can make your use as complicated as suits you in all the ways you can't on windows and apple...
It is true that apple sysadmin gets super complicated and hard with the answer usually boiling down to something not far away from: "you can't do what you want even if it used to work fine and you paid apple for the privilege. But you can pay apple an ever bigger subscription to do something related the way they want and stop complaining, apple is so user-friendly! Apple knows best. Freedom is tyranny."
I mourn the death of the Nokia N900. I hope for the oncoming pine phone & pine time revolution because Apple really are every bit as foul as Google. These things aren't yet easy the way laptops really are now.
I'm on NixOS atm, but I've been considering going Ansible+btrfs on some rolling release distro instead, the declarative approach is cool but hard when you're off the beaten path!
For PipeWire I'd say we're already there, it just works better than pulse when doing pulse things, and they also implement JACK and ALSA if you need them.
Regarding Wayland, yes a lot of old DE's and WM's will die, but that's just the way of nature, there are still many great options for people to use, we must deprecate things eventually.
Wayland impressions so far: Annoying that windows can't take focus, annoying that electron doesn't default to it yet, TouchPad input works better, scaling works better.
Some apps (vscode) shows a generic icon in Wayland rather than vscode.
Remember that you can run XWayland on Wayland. XWayland will keep most X11 apps working just the same, and X11 really needs depreciation. I'm almost most excited about "Waypipe". When it's mature enough it'll run circles around X11 forwarding while being performant and secure!
I mean I realize how I've turned into one of those "you just have to do these easy things to make it work" kind of people, but for "dumb usersč on "good hardware" (Linux compatible) it's really quite nice, my father had less issues on Linux Mint than Windows.
The year of the Linux desktop is here, it's just wrapped into a VM (crosvm) or a gaming console (SteamDeck/SteamOS).
Honestly with a bit more customization options, and no tracking I would probably get a Chromebook as the next machine (They run Android and "Linux" apps now)
With Waydroid or Anbox you can run Android apps on Linux too, but last I tried wasn't great.
Progress is being made on the shittiest of fronts too! NVIDIA moving code from the driver into firmware is "great" from a usability perspective, I don't really care enough about FLOSS to demand my GPU implementation details being open, as long as compatibility is good.
Huh? We've been asked for our experience and that was mine. I feel strongly that if I were using fedora or debian that experience would be strikingly similar.
Gnome vs kde (and there's /plenty/ of other options) is a choice, make it. Done. No further issues. And as a happy gnome guy I'm very sure KDE is excellent and will serve well.
deb vs rpm. That choice is made when you choose your distro, never to be revisited or cared about again. Likewise pulseaudio, systemd are chosen when you chose your desktop and distro respectively and you don't have to think about them on your laptop again. X vs Wayland - whatever comes with your distro you use if you're even aware of it.
But yes you can complicate it all as much as suits you if you have the need or want to do so which you basically can't with apple, so... And your knowledge then translates to the pi or other SBC so that's pretty cool too. And to your servers or ones you work with for money. This is not a negative imho.
Go to any kernel conference and you'll see all kinds of laptops for sure, some hilariously eccentric. Linus used a mac 15 years ago too (powerpc iirc). Yet you'll see Thinkpads are always, clearly and obviously the most commonly used by a large margin unless things have changed dramatically during pandemic times, which I kind of doubt.
Anyway I bought a T480s second hand for peanuts, dumped ubu on it and have been contemplating its beauty and utility since. Apple gear is a _much_ bigger sysadmin headache for me (and it isn't close) but might be less so for you if that's what you know and understand. This is /my/ experience of it.
Linux on the laptop in 2022 is flipping great. Shhhhh, don't tell.
I think ThinkPads are so commonly used because they're durable, but most of all, because their keyboards are probably one of the best among any laptops.
I can vouch for Linux in laptops, I've been running Debian+xfce (recently switched to Debian+lxde, for maybe slightly less ram usage) on my Acer Aspire One for probably more then 10 years now! It's my go-to machine whenever any hardware needs testing, be it networking or just a printer.
Sorry for the very late reply, but thank you so much! I'm very glad to hear you have a machine (and OS) that you are happy with. I'll definitely check it out for myself!
Ideapad 5 pro with an AMD proc. it's the 14" variant. I am not near it right now, so I can't give you specifically what model. Got it on sale at Costco. Running Pop_os. The newer Linux kernels have support of amd_pastate so battery life is good.
Previous Mac was a 13" Macbook Pro if anyone is keeping score. Loved it, but just didn't want or need something that expensive.
Apple service is usually very good as well -- I've had several products replaced by overnight fedex with no additional cost. Also time machine backup/restore is a godsend for mission critical workstations when you do need a replacement. But ya, most people aren't doing work where time is worth the slight premium.
I agree with GP, and I think here on HN the opposite of your comment is true.
People buy expensive laptops because they don't know how to adequately judge which ones ain’t worth more. Not just on HN, I’m observing same behavior among friends and co-workers.
People buy ultra-thin laptops because marketing sells them as high-end. It’s often impossible to upgrade them to good specs like 32-64 GB RAM and fast 2TB+ SSD. And even CPU performance ain’t great because thermal throttling, hard to dissipate heat from an ultra-thin computer.
Similarly, people who never play videogames buy laptops with discrete GPUs like nVidia 3070, paying money, weight, and even battery life for something they don’t need.
I've never spent more than 400 or 500$ on a laptop. Plenty of good enough stuff on the second hand market if you go after business laptops. But it's never my main machine (I can't understand doing anything productive with 14").
The screen size is the only real limitation for me when using my M1 Air. The keyboard is pretty decent, the trackpad is just right, and the form factor is wonderful.
There is a noticeable loss in human productivity by not having a separate large monitor (and sometimes also a nice external keyboard+mouse). However, I find that the small screen constraint can be beneficial sometimes as it forces me to approach my work a bit differently. I would say it's a bit like how changing my scenery or routine temporarily can recharge me.
> I would say it's a bit like how changing my scenery or routine temporarily can recharge me.
Work-wise, the only thing I like about laptops is the ability to quite literally change my scenery (going in a café or in nature for an afternoon). But it's always with the intent of doing the few things I can do on that sort of device : reading or writing some doc and doing some surface level diagnostics through SSH (my job is a mix of Kubernetes administration and miscellaneous production tasks).
It's nice to have, but it also can't be the tool of my trade. Putting any significant money into a machine that'll end up 70% of the time as a self-standing Netflix screen in bed isn't worth it.
I know a few people who can work exclusively on their laptop, but they also use no UI scaling and have much better eyesight :)
Framework is my dream machine, still waiting for an Australia launch.
Also hoping we'll see them execute on some additional keyboard layouts (or someone will) - avoiding Mac-like keyboards is one of my primary desires laptop wise.
I'd love a split, ortholinear, semi-ergonomic keyboard for a laptop but know it'll never happen on a mass-market device. The framework has the best change of making it possible because they couldd just sell that keyboard to those who want it without needing them to sell the rest of the laptop as part of the package. Still not likely to happen, but I can dream...
Even $500 is rich, now, for a laptop. iPads and Chromebooks can be had for half that, and could run circles around the laptops of yesteryear. Hell, MT8183-powered Chromebooks cost $170 and still come with FHD touchscreens, 12-18 hours of battery life and have acceptable build quality.
....kind of. It's got a deductible for accidental damage, and the deductible can be fairly significant.
You're going to be out an additional $99 if you only damaged the display or only damaged the top case. But if you had a liquid spill or significant drop, you're likely going to be out the $299 (for damaging both, or for damaging the logic board/anything else internal at all).
It's a decent deal if you've got a high end machine, but it doesn't as much sense IMO if you bought something like an Air or a Base 13".
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In contrast, ~$160 on a $1.5k Dell Latitude will get 3 years of warranty + accidental damage coverage with no deductible.
That feels like saying "And that's why you pay the Mafia their protection money." These screens are breaking because they're defective, which is what the warranty is supposed to cover. Why should you have to pay Apple more money for them to do what they're already supposed to do?
I break things infrequently enough that it's cheaper to keep the money I would have spent on protection plans in my bank account, and then just pay out of pocket when I do.
Paying protection to the mob is a good idea in general. Even if you're generally careful, you never know when a leg will break because of something that was your fault.
You should insure things you can't afford to self insure for. Life, Home, maybe car.
You should not pay insurance for all the tech crap we buy. You're just losing money on average. Only way to win with this type of insurance is to be unlucky.
But this is exactly it. Insurance is about relative luck and hedging against being unlucky. It’s all a matter of risk/reward. It’s an ex ante cost.
Much history of costs/return in various domains show the power of ex ante investments vs ex post restitution.
If I spend $1200 on a high end phone, and it costs $300 to replace a screen, or $30 with insurance, after a $200 one time premium for 2 years… it depends how often you break your screen on average. If it’s at least once every 2 years, then yes, it’s worth it. And then that’s not even counting other things that may go wrong.
Same logic for extended car warranties. Sometimes they pay for themselves quickly, sometimes not.
Which is nonsense, the whole point of insurance (and why most people should purchase insurance) is to pool risk so to cover high costs that most can’t afford for themselves.
GP is saying that insurance makes sense for things too expensive to replace on your own, like houses and cars, but not cheaper things like consumer electronics.
“Insurance is never a good idea in general” is a bit too extreme. Not all hedges have to be about protecting you from a wipeout. It’s about opportunity cost for the premium vs the risk (magnitude x probability).
In many cases, these programs aren’t profitable, especially if the extended warrantee covers products with unknown problems. Neither the supplier nor the purchaser knows the true risks of warranting a new product, they only have historical data to go by. Often they are profitable, on products that actually were far more reliable than consumers expected (eg. Phones whose screens get harder to break).
But even then it doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to buy it, as you can’t predict the future, you can only make bets and cover your risk exposure to some degree. That risk coverage and piece of mind is valuable even if the unlucky event never happens.
At a bigger scale than product warrantees, Health and Life insurance are both profitable but also often worth purchasing to protect you or your family as it’s the ultimate case of hedging against bad luck. You’re trading reasonable, predictable costs against actuarial events with huge (potentially bankrupting) costs. Some folks that didn’t need it, they spent a reasonable an amount of money and still got value out if it: risk coverage and piece of mind.
12 months in the US. It depends on the country. In Europe a device has to last a reasonable time with a minimum of 2 years. But the warranty is with the seller, not the manufacturer. This is why I generally buy from Apple directly, so they can't weasel out of it this way.
Though after the first year the onus is on the consumer to prove a manufacturing defect. During that first year the manufacturer has to prove it wasn't broken by the customer. That makes the discussion a bit harder after the first year. Also, these protections only apply to consumers. Businesses have to fend for themselves and that includes -employed when buying as such (and thus avoiding VAT)
You are still free to sue them if it is actually a faulty product. But maybe you want to get a quick repair done in the mean time without shelling out $800?
Waiting for Apple to admit wrongdoing is like trying to get blood from a stone. Remember the Nvidia chip failures that Apple caused by using cheap solder on their Logic Boards? They never fully owned-up to that one, despite being 100% culpable. We eventually got admissions of guilt for things like Lightning ports and Butterfly keyboards, but that doesn't fix the thousands of devices that are now using ass-backwards technology that can only be replaced once broken.
The other comment is entirely right. The fact that Apple can sell a first-party service entirely dedicated to replacing broken iDevices is evidence enough that it's a racket.
I rarely had a problem with an iDevice. Once my MacBook Pro 17 inch broke down after 4 years or more, it was out of warranty and out of Apple Care, and they replaced the whole motherboard for free anyway. My mother is using it to this day.
Doesn't feel like a racket to me. Rather, if you buy an expensive device, and you cannot easily afford a replacement if it breaks, get an insurance. That's Apple Care (plus). It is an easy enough to understand concept.
I think it's closer to Ford being both your manufacturer, insurer, and sole authority on vehicle repair. This is something our nation already faced, and rectified with legislation.
What exactly is your point? What legislation are you referring to? What exactly is Apple doing wrong here? Not paying off some Smurf who dropped his MacBook one time too often?
Like Ford, Apple wants to be free to innovate. If you don't like the quality of their products, don't buy them. There are plenty of other great choices out there. Oops, maybe not so much for the M1 MacBook Air.
> If you don't like the quality of their products, don't buy them.
"If you don't like the country you live in, just move!"
Seems pretty asinine now that the shoe is on the other foot. Here's the problem: I bought the iPhone X. I have the Macbook Pro. None of them do anything for me. Sometimes I boot up the Macbook to test a Darwin build once in a blue moon, but MacOS isn't even on my radar of daily-driver OSes right now. The BSD compatibility layer is festering, and Apple's refusal to implement modern APIs like Vulkan is childish. MacOS has been heading downhill for the better half of a decade, and Linux support on M1 is barely existent.
So, I think I'm perfectly contented to call Apple out for poor innovation. I paid their price-of-admission, now I get to leave a bad review. If you don't like the content of my feedback, don't take it personally. There are plenty of other great comments out there. Oops, maybe not so much from the technocrat-apologist crowd on Hacker News.
> "If you don't like the country you live in, just move!"
Done that.
> Apple's refusal to implement modern APIs like Vulkan is childish
No, it makes perfect sense. Metal is a nice, compact, and easy API. This is one of the reasons that allowed them to get out the M1 in the first place, because they could reuse all the work on Metal for iOS. Why would they try to accommodate the shit show that is Vulkan? And why would they try to appease people who really want Linux, not macOS?
Personally though, I am turning away from Apple when it comes to programming. It is just becoming too insular. It is great if you want to only reach people in Apple land, the tools (like Swift and Metal) are pretty nice. But in the end, web tools are also very nice these days, and your reach is just so much bigger. It is great to see your software running on a £150 Chromebook!
I used to always pay for apple care, but not once have they paid out a claim or fixed a problem without charging me. It's always "we don't cover normal wear and tear" or "we don't cover moving parts" or "the user must be at fault".
It's also worth pointing out that the $500 laptop will probably last a lot longer than the most expensive Macbook. All plastic, they use a lot of older/reliable technology, they don't get used as rough - the most common failure mode is they get too old/slow for the user.
In the last 12 years, I’ve owned 3 MacBooks. Maybe my experience isn’t common, but the units that I’ve bought, have always outlived my windows machines.
When averaged out to cost per year, in my experience, Apple is way cheaper.
Part of the issue here is that "Windows machines" could mean anything from an el cheapo Asus to a mil-spec Thinkpad.
I also think that people don't necessarily appreciate how much quality improvements have been made in the last 5-7 years in consumer laptops. Optical drives are gone, everything has an SSD, performance has plateaued and AMD is good again.
Someone walking into Best Buy today and dropping $500 on a laptop will be getting a much more robust machine than when I did the same back in college.
You are 100% right, besides the mil spec, which explicitly means the “least expensive option that does the job”.
I can attest that recently, the average laptop is way better. My machines were a toshiba, surface (2nd gen), and think pads (during their dark ages), dell XPS.
My two MacBook Air, both from 2013, are still working. They both have battery issues but I plan to replace the battery.
My MacBook Air M1 had that very screen defect thing happen for no reason after... 10 months.
So, basically: ten years vs ten months.
Many people are reporting this issue: Apple fucked up big times and it's time to stop apologizing.
I don't care how genius the Apple geniuses are and I don't care that my 10 years old MacBook are still working: what I do care about is that my 10 months old M1 Air died on me out of nowhere.
Yes, that is really, really messed up. I’m not abdicating Apple from making a crap machine that they will be fixing for the next X years because of whatever issue.
Currently, I still have faith in Apple, despite their lemons only because other companies laptops sucked more.
But that does not mean your point in invalid, at all. I just hope that this is an isolated incident to a particular generation vs a broad company trend.
My 2008 white macbook had cracking wrist rest, exactly like any other macbook fromp this generation, and it seems every macbook since then had its very own issue impossible to avoid. I Love Apple laptops but it's like you're always buying them and using them with a sword of Damocles over your head.
I bought an Air in 2014 that lasted me until last year when I bought a new one. The old one still works. It's just too slow for my needs. I still open it up occasionally for some things. Longest running computer I've ever owned by a long shot.
I have a 2011 13" Air that has been mine, then my wife's, then my kid's. It has been thrown in backpacks, dropped, stood on, you name it. It's still going strong, and my kid still pulls it out to play some Mac-only games every few weeks.
I've got a 2014 15" MBP. It's had the screen replacement (free), and a bulging battery got me a new lower case & battery for $200. Still my daily driver.
OTOH, my wife has a 2017 MacBook which is on its third keyboard/lower case. Both the replacements were free, but it's a PITA to have to take it to the store and be without it for a few days while they swap in the new one.
Either way, my experiences have been uniformly positive with Apple's service, and whatever issues exist with the underlying hardware, if they're Apple's fault, I've had no trouble getting replacements for free.
I hate the fact I need to research 'vintages' for every product nowadays. Almost every product has a good production year followed by several worse ones. Like wine.
I'm not trying to make a case that Macs are inferior. A Nissan is a much crappier car than a BMW, but I would bet on the crappier Nissan to run much longer without need of serious maintenance.
One thing I learned is japanese cars function very well if you change their oil very frequently. It's usually 10k miles by the book, but also the book says if you sit in traffic a lot or go short trips this should be more frequent, even as often as 3-5k miles. Most people don't read this fine print and get surprised their car burns 2 quarts of oil per thousand miles by 40k miles.
You know what would help? Data! Your car analogy is backed by decades of that being available from a slew of organizations.
Computers are harder to get that for, especially when you have to correct for things like whether different classes of buyer have notably different habits.
I probably use my laptops harder than most people, but this has not been my experience with plastic laptops. I lost two laptops in a row to the plastic case cracking. In the first case the case broke around the hinge and destroyed a fan. In the second, about half the keys on the keyboard stopped working. I'll never buy another plastic-chassis laptop after that second one.
I can beat you! I had both issues, cracked hinge AND keyboard not working anymore on the same PC! It wasn't even a "cheap" model, but a rather mid-range HP ProBook. Judging by current prices, it should have been around €800 at the time.
> I probably use my laptops harder than most people
Yeah, I didn't. This was basically a sedentary laptop, 95% of the time sitting on a desk connected to external screens / kb / mouse in an AC office, never in the sun. The other 5% I'd carry it around to meetings in the same building.
Since I was using it so little as a portable, it actually outlasted my colleagues' ones by two generations! So, it wasn't just my particular one that was a piece of junk.
> It blows all the “premium” work laptops out of the water.
I disagree. I loved my Thinkpad T450s so much I bought an identical used machine when I quit the job. Since then it's been stepped on, dropped onto concrete multiple times, had beer and wine spilled on the keyboard.
It cost me $250 + $100 for a battery replacement + $34 for a new keyboard (when the wine spilled on it, it still worked but the keys were sticky) + $150 to upgrade the RAM.
It's currently running Visual Studio Code, Photoshop, and prepping to run a pub trivia event later.
But this is all a digression - my larger point is that a $500 laptop bought today is going to have a lot more longevity than people will give it credit for.
One caveat wrt the more recent mil-spec Thinkpads is that they broke the ergonomics by making the front edge razor-sharp, so that it really cuts into your wrists. I tried to work on my T14-2 on a long train ride, and the pain in my wrists the following days kept we awake at night.
My daily Linux driver is a ThinkPad X220. $75 on eBay + another $120 for IPS LCD screen and an SSD. I use it when it really need Linux or when I’m on the go and don’t want to carry a 15” laptop. I wish they still had 1080p conversion kits for that one…
But my current Dell Precision from work is a spectacular nightmare POS.
I'm also a big fan of the 2012 macbook pros. I only upgraded to an M1 mac end of last year.
I love that the older macbooks can be opened up and fixed if needed. I had to replace the HD connector a couple times (and learnt to add some electrical tape to stop the issue), and I recently cleaned the old CPU adhesive off and added some new (old macbooks can start to smell like Body odour!).
With 16GB of RAM the macbook performance is still decent, able to run docker and run modern IDEs.
It's a great machine. The only downside is that you can no longer update to the most recent OS versions.
Kits and YT videos pretty much always means "beyond the average consumer", meaning either paying a repair shop hundreds of euros in labour/profits, or just replacing the device.
> Apple must treat it as a cost of business at this point.
As should every company, because it is. Not saying Apple SHOULDN'T make decent equipment, but nothing is perfect so these things just have to be part of the accounting/business plan. They clearly are relying on their customers' brand loyalty as part of that calculation, and that + cheaping out or whatever else is causing these bi-annual issues is clearly more profit than fixing them.
> My 14" M1 MacBook Pro screen repair cost was $809.
I was quoted, for the MacBook Air screen repair (it died overnight), 490 EUR VAT included in Belgium. Paid the M1 MacBook Air 1020 EUR or so 10 months ago.
In addition to the price being ludicrous, I've got an interest close to zero in owning a laptop which can suddenly stop working for no reason.
Serious build quality issues: I think it's simply a piece of shit and has to be called for what it is, regardless of whether replacement parts are highway robbery (which they are) or not.
Do you have a photo of the crack before it was repaired?
Apple Technicians have access to a document that provides instruction on how to classify (in warranty / out of warranty) display cracks. There are actually plenty of display issues that look like the result of physical damage, but are instead categorized as 'in-warranty' by Apple's documentation.
Reach out to me at my username at gmail.com, I can maybe help you if you have a photo of the screen before it was replaced.
My partner used to work as an apple support person. People break their shit all the time and try to pretend it wasn’t their fault because they don’t want to pay for a repair. How you ask and call has a huge impact on your success.
Another big impact: your purchase history. If you’ve owned every iPhone for the last decade and purchase it as soon as it comes out they will be much more lenient when you tell them it was cracked in box than if you have a single second hand iPhone SE that is cracked and the crack “totally happened on its own”. They want to protect their valuable customers.
But also as other commenters have said, it’s possible that apple knows this is a real issue and is addressing it differently now.
I've seen it happen outside of Apple, heck I've seen it outside the tech world. Company deems the damage to be out of warranty however after looking at the purchasing history/power of the customer and deeming them as "someone they don't really want to piss off" they will then offer a no cost repair/replacement as a "goodwill gesture".
Think of it like this:- You have 2 clients you sold widgets too that have come in for repair. Both widgets are beat the hell up like they were using them to hammer in nails and are both clearly out of warranty repairs.
One customer as other than this widget has 0 purchase history with 5 followers on twitter and the other has been buying goods since you were a start up and has a million followers.
Who would you be more inclined to make sure they are happy and who would you say "yeah I'll fix it, but its gonna cost you" to?
(For examples of something like this, see examples of people going virial on social media because something broke / got banned, timed it right, and suddenly it was magically fixed, within 24 hours, but your avg joe is stuck speaking to a chat bot for months on end).
It just seems like you are wide open to legal broadsides working with a policy like this. Basically you are turning your repair program into a class based program. Poor people are disadvantaged relative to your whales but that isn't clear to anyone using the service. IANAL but it seems like it could be easy money for a law firm on discrimination grounds if they had this sort of stuff on record from an apple employee.
If you make your warranty terms perfectly clear you will be fine, there is nothing stopping you from going above and beyond the terms at your own discretion.
You would have issues if your warranty said "we will cover you for (random thing plucked out of the air) battery replacements for the first 2 years" but would only replace batteries for your whales as you are in breach of contract with your non-whales.
You have to stick to what you agreed to with your customer in your warranty terms, but you are free to go beyond those terms at your own cost as you wish as customers were aware of your terms at time of purchase.
The warranty has always covered a single hairline crack.
If there are multiple cracks, chips, or a POI on the outside of the glass. It's clear as day what happened to the screen.
I can't count on my hands or toes how many people will say they don't know what happened to the physically damaged machine. Maybe someone else broke it and they didn't know. But I can tell you that we fix more physically damaged machines than we do single hairline cracks. So I would say this isn't a huge issue that people make it out to be.
I think it's more plausible that people are surprise that their really expensive super thin and sleek computer breaks when it's physically damaged.
To me the super thinness out right screams to being part of the cause.
Without taking one apart to confirm it for myself, going off past patterns I would guess Apple have thinned the lid and the display past its limits under every day use (not lab conditions). Pair that with People having got used to using a single hand to open/close their screen, heck even Apples marketing pushed one finger lid openning/closing. So people are not closing their screens "carefully" from both sides with two hands any more (and haven't been doing so for many years, as its easier to close a laptop lid than open it).
But with thinness comes lack of rigidity, so closing the screen with a single hand unless you do it smack bang in the middle I would guess is putting more strain on one side of the lid leading to a premeture screen failure.
Basically "Bendgate" all over again.
But its not the first time we seen screen issues on macbooks come to light once the devices where in the hands of real world people. Look at the stage light defect which for the longest time Apple denied as a fault https://support.apple.com/en-gb/13-inch-macbook-pro-display-... which turned out to be that the flex cable was just a smidge too short and repeated normal use damaged the flex cable.
I'm not saying the customers are not at fault. <edit>Heck I've seen plently of dropped devices and the customer swears on their first born they didn't do nothing. Until you point out the impact damage and suddenly it all comes flooding back to them.</edit> I just see a repeating pattern and would like to dig into it more before I dismiss the customer saying they don't know what happened.
The tight closure with just about zero clearance and no bezel is a significant part of the difficulty.
Anything in there, even being closed gently and you notice at the first sign of resistance and correct it - has probably cracked the screen.
Charger/cable/pen tip is common, but even a paper clip could be enough. There's no audible crack and you think nothing of it until the next time you take it out of your bag and the display is broken. That said, this sort of thing will typically have a point of impact/multiple cracks, not just one straight line.
Plastic webcam covers will also do this, just less consistently - they hold the display open a bit and concentrate all the force of the closed lid there.
If there is one continuous crack with no point of impact or other obvious damage, it will generally be covered under warranty (assuming you are under warranty) and not considered accidental damage. That was policy in the past and I doubt it's changed.
If there is more than one, in any way - not covered unless someone's being nice to you.
So after all the hype that I have heard about the Apple Silicon computers, it seems like it takes a screen crack to make it useless and issue a repair cost of almost the price of a new one.
Especially when as soon as the computer fails to boot or stops working, you have lost all data on the computer as the data cannot be recovered.
Sounds like a total scam. Glad I never bought one on launch day.
Obviously there is a defect problem affecting some of the new Macbooks, and Apple needs to step up and take responsibility. But that said, I personally think the Apple Silicon computers (the Air in particular) are worthy of the hype.
This 1 year old M1 Air with 16GB RAM is twice as fast as my colleagues' Intel MBPs (comparing same year devices), and it's _silent_. It rarely even gets warm, even with Docker, several containers, JetBrains IDEs, Spotify, Firefox with a million tabs, etc. all going.
> the data cannot be recovered
For most HN readers, not having an adequate active backup/cloud sync system is difficult to imagine. When you can transfer about 1GB/s to a modern fast solid state external drive, plus we mostly have fast internet, it's easy to have live and periodic physical and remote backups.
If there's a scam to be found, it's that Apple has a real problem affecting more than a few users, but they are denying it. The scam is not in the computer but in the warranty/repair practices.
Wasn't worth the hype for me at all. My m1 MBP might have better performance than my x1 carbon but my x1 walks all over the m1 in terms of software I can install thoughtlessly. I tried for months to get parallels + Ubuntu to do everything I needed it do to but I had to switch back to the x1 (which I could reformat today and have my productivity be the same within an hour); what a waste of time and money.
To be fair, if you really want to run Linux, why are you getting a MacBook? Plenty of better machines for that (with different trade offs) that are better suited to Linux.
I'm 30% tempted to give Linux a full time try again, this time on a Framework laptop. I previously used a Dell XPS 15 (high spec), but it was loud and hot and not a pleasant experience.
I returned my X1 due to poor thermal performance, bad Windows drivers, and incomplete Linux compatibility. I switched it out for an M1 Air which has been my favorite machine of all time.
> Obviously there is a defect problem affecting some of the new Macbooks, and Apple needs to step up and take responsibility. But that said, I personally think the Apple Silicon computers (the Air in particular) are worthy of the hype.
> This 1 year old M1 Air with 16GB RAM is twice as fast as my colleagues' Intel MBPs (comparing same year devices), and it's _silent_.
According to the comments in the apple forum thread, this bug affects people with older Intel-based MBPs as well.
Taking the thread at face value, if this is a super common issue, then your coworkers should also have observed significant numbers of "random failures" on their legacy Intel MBPs because those laptops too are cited in that "50 page thread" as being subject to this supposed failure mode. Do you find that to match your experience?
It is, of course, unclear whether this is an actual issue, or just a catch-all for people who damaged their screens (micro-fracture) from various drops/impacts, and then over time the micro-fracture eventually worked and became a macro-fracture. They do that - glass can be damaged without actually being visibly damaged until you put it under a microscope, and then some later much smaller stress (even just thermal stress) causes it to fracture along the weak spot.
50 pages of people sounds like a lot, but Macs are the most popular single-series laptop in production (other laptops have more in total, but it's fractured over many manufacturers and series) and if that translates to 500 posts / 200 unique users who broke their screen, across 10 years of usage... that's not actually all that much, or that surprising.
Once it hits the internet it gets blown all out of proportion... remember when RX 480s were "killing motherboards", or NVIDIA GPUs killing themselves due to "bad drivers", or EVGA 1080s were "dying en-masse" due to bad VRMs? Remember POSCAP vs MLCC on Ampere GPUs? Once a social-media pitchfork mob gets started, it becomes basically impossible to measure because all kinds of random failures get attributed to The Current Thing and people trumpet every random failure as being evidence of it.
I'd believe there are some amount of "childhood mortality" in a screen - the person in this thread whose screen delaminated right in the middle after a couple weeks isn't the only person to have a bad screen. But it's very difficult to distinguish which users have that, and which users just dropped it and then later had a crack start working at that fracture point. And once it becomes public that there's "an issue" (regardless of if a significant issue actually exists) there is a huge amount of piling-in where everyone whose screen ever micro-fractured from a previous bump will pop up and tell you about their screen that "randomly shattered".
Genuine question but how is a manufacturer supposed to handle that? Let's say Framework puts out a glass screen model. Do you just give everyone who says their screen shattered a replacement screen? So you're providing unlimited warranty screens for customers who aren't being careful but know to say "it did that by itself"? Do you limit it to one freebie per customer? What if that one also shatters? Do you just do it for the first 3 months, and what happens when someone says theirs shattered after 4 months? And any customers you let fall through the cracks will post a thread like this one about how you've wronged them...
Worst of all Apple is involved here, and that just sets people off like crazy. I know I'm going to get various un-civil responses for all this. There’s no question that the design of the screen is certainly worryingly fragile, but, I really don’t think that all of these are truly manufacturing faults, they’re people bumping an overly fragile design and then later having a micro-fractured screen start working on them.
While I believe $800 is way too much I do actually believe the screen is an extremely expensive component. It's a 120hz microled screen with a very good webcam. I wouldn't be surprised it's the most expensive part on a mbp.
Then why does the notch exist? And compared to what is it crap, webcams have always been utter shit if you compare it to smartphones or dedicated video cameras.
I made some side by side photos and videos (that I don't want to share because of privacy) of Macbook Pro 2015, M1 Macbook Air 2020, 16" M1 Macbook Pro 2021, and the front facing camera of a cheap android phone.
My conclusion:
- the only good camera is the front facing camera of the cheap android phone
- the 2015 MBP camera has low resolution and lots of noise, but the image at least looks natural
- the images from the M1 Macs look very similar. They added extreme smoothing to hide the noise. The result is that there is no details at all in the images. Skin looks unnaturally smooth and facial hair is a blurry mess. When you move your head, there are weird artefacts near the eyes.
- comparing M1 Macbook Air 2020 and M1 Macbook Pro 2021 looks similar, except the smoothing seems even stronger on the 2021 Macbook Pro
- even in perfect lighting the resolution of the camera is very low. There is no way this is actually a 1080p camera. The 720p image of the 2015 Macbook Pro has more detail than the cameras in the new Macs.
- the only good thing about the cameras in the M1 Macs is the low light performance. The algorithm is pretty good at producing a usable image even in very low light.
It's really not a good camera. It really sucks. Everything else about this laptop is perfect: The display, the speakers, the keyboard -- everything is wonderful, apart from the fact that whenever I facetime with someone I look like a blurry mess.
My custom Ryzen 7/RX 570 Linux PC built from parts cost less than this, so a repair of this magnitude just boggles my mind. At that point just buy yourself a new computer.
People just don't understand how good desktops are, right?
On my flight yesterday, when I pulled out my full tower Ryzen with 2x 3090 GPUs, I got told that the power outlet on the plane seat shouldn't be used for my 1200W power supply.
And yet, the same flight attendant said nothing to the macbook user a few rows over who was clearly plugged in. Frankly, it's appalling how few people understand that a cheaper desktop is comparable to a laptop.
I mean, unless you are an extreme outlier, you spend more time on the ground than on an airplane. Why would you optimize for working on an airplane over your typical workday?
For me personally, 99.9% of my work is done at my desk (1), so why not have a more powerful, upgradeable, repairable computer to work with?
I agree with you. When I travel I just take a tablet for some reading on the flight and maybe some light HN reading before bed. To do actual work, I kind of like my split keyboard, mouse, and 32 CPUs. I don't bother trying to get a ton of work done on the road; if I need to talk to someone in another state or country for work, we have video conferences now.
It's amazing how much shit you get on HN of all places for sitting at your desk programming.
Contrary to popular myth, not all of us live and work in a basement. Myself and many people I know, my non-technical girlfriend included, use our laptops all around the country and in multiple other countries.
I do agree about upgradeable and repairable, which is why the Framework laptop is getting pretty attractive. But there's still nothing that compares in performance and portability to my M1 Air.
Right, that's why they said "outlier". Most people aren't going all around the country and multiple other countries. Most people sit at home on a computer, and sit at work on another computer.
Like you, I am also an outlier, using my MacbBok all over Hades.
That also suggests that modern tech workers who have a hybrid work arrangement are outliers. That's getting to be a pretty large group.
Heck, even before COVID, my previous company only gave out laptops. Those things would get moved all around the office - from desk to desk, to multiple conference and meeting rooms, home, etc. This has been the norm for at least 5 years in my experience.
From my experience it's better to use both laptop and workstation. When I'm normally working I use the comfort/performance of the workstation, when I'm on the move I can use the portability of the laptop.
Basically all developers I know have "hybrid work arrangement", working some days from home/travels and some from office. They all remotely connect to their workstation at work either from their home computer of from laptop when traveling.
Maybe it depends on type of development or age of developers, but I'm not 20 anymore and laptop is an ergonomic nightmare. If you want to use it for a longer period of time and avoid health issues you should get an external keyboard/mouse/screens anyway. Which means you just recreated workstation, but it costs more money, has worse performance and all kinds of issues while connecting so much stuff to it.
We all had external keyboards, mice, and multiple monitors on our desks. The only time we were ergonomically constrained was when we were mobile. But we could be mobile at a moment's notice, and with all our stuff still running.
Now what I really would like is a high quality, low latency complete remote system. I got pretty close to this with a recent experiment, but it took a good bit of effort (and I still had some weird issues). It was great in that I could go to any computer with enough power to drive a browser, remote into my server "desktop", and continue right where I left off.
If that could get perfected, I would probably switch to an iPad Pro with optional keyboard.
> Most people sit at home on a computer, and sit at work on another computer
a) You don't know what most people do.
b) I would add that those of us that are in a hybrid mode e.g. working equally from home and work are given laptops specifically because we are expected to use the same computer in both environments.
a. Sure I do. It's pretty easy to reckon. I don't see "most" people traveling across the country and countries on a regular basis.
b. Sure, but again, that's a minority of even the professional demographic. Now, if you're thinking the developer demographic, sure I might agree with you, but that's not what OP said.
They don't need to travel across the country to need a laptop.
I have two data points for you:
The company I work for does little dev work. 99% of the people have laptops. They don't travel cross-country, mostly work in the office. But they also need to move to conference rooms, work from home, etc. We only have to handle one PC per person this way, instead of figuring how to handle their own personal PC when at home, etc. These are mostly "non IT people". Sure, you can argue they don't need the power of a desktop anyway. Which is absolutely correct.
I have a friend who does "actual dev work" working for an "actual software company". Java and C++, so they actually require powerful machines to compile (at least more than my company), etc. They used to have big-ass Xeon workstations. Those were replaced with some kind of Dell laptop [*] with a bunch of cores and RAM. He also basically never travels for work, but can now easily work from home without installing the company crap on his own PC. My friend is much happier with this arrangement.
Both companies provide multi-monitor setups with external keyboards and mice, so the comfort part of a desktop is still present when they're sitting at their desks.
---
[0] They look like the XPS line, but seem somewhat thicker and don't have the XPS logo.
I wonder how energy prices are going to change that. If someone needs to pay $1000 a month to heat their homes all day in the winter because of WFH, I can see that tipping over lots of folks to go back to the office.
If that becomes an issue, I think it's reasonable that companies will start providing extra money to remote workers to cover operating costs. After all, those same companies will need to lease less office space (meaning lower costs for space and electricity).
My work is done almost 100% at a desk, in different rooms of my home depending on the season (some get too cold or too hot) or on a whim. A desktop won't do. And sometimes I really take my laptop to somewhere else.
Different strokes for different folks and all, but it's hard for me to imagine this. I have 3 large monitors, so even if I had a laptop I would want to move those around as well.
After working with large monitors, I don't know how anyone gets serious work done on a laptop screen.
I do have a laptop, but it is relatively inexpensive and used mostly as a thin client to my desktop (as others have mentioned).
Edit: I will also add, I like having a dedicated space for work. This prevents work from creeping into my life everywhere in my house. I can't be on the couch, watching a movie, and have the urge to work - I'm not in my work space!
I mostly agree with you, in that I usually find working on only a laptop screen frustrating and love having a dedicated work area.
But it depends on the task I do. For example, I quite enjoy working from my parents' garden when it's nice outside and if I do some focused work. Like reading some "long-form documentation" (where I don't need to follow it along as I apply it) or when I do some routine sysadmin work.
I have a big monitor (don't like having multiple monitors) at my parents' house, with a dedicated desk in a "work area". I also have this at home. And I also have this at the office. It's much more comfortable to move around these locations with a laptop than it would be to haul around a desktop, or have multiple desktops and having to keep them in sync. When I need actual horsepower, I have a Xeon workstation at my house, and my work allows me to leverage it remotely if needed. Guess what? I basically only turn it on for games.
This is all getting rather stupid. Laptop aren't for serious work? What planet are you on? You like stationary devices because you like to compartmentalise your life. Well thats great for you, but it's hardly normal.
Yeah. Only thing I'll add is that I use my laptop as a thin-client, so I don't ever find myself pining for more power. Works great for watching YouTube, editing text and SSHing into my desktop via Tailscale when I want some more power. Using my Macbook in the same way is just more of a hassle, but that's probably because I don't use iCloud/the App Store...
You don't have to travel much at all before a laptop is essential.
And at that point I'd imagine it's way easier to optimize for mobility, for a vast majority of people - unless they're working entirely in virtual workspaces/the cloud - in which case a laptop is perfectly fine anyway.
I too don't get this transition to working on laptops. What a crappy form factor. I do have two of them - and they get used about 2 hours per month on average.
If you add external monitors, keyboard and mouse you just recreated non-mobile work environment that costs more money and has worse performance than workstation.
A non-mobile work environment, but unplug one cord and you can take the laptop part to meetings, including offsite, you can travel with it, work from the coffee shop or roof or park, keep working if there's work being done on your office (painting or whatever) so you can't be in there at the moment, if you usually work in a corporate office but WFH some days you still have the same machine, can take it to co-workers' desks to show them stuff without having to screen-share and having both workstations together at once, which can be nice in some situations. Built in UPS is sometimes handy, too—no power-offs because you kicked a cord.
I'm not arguing against desktops for people who like them but this "I don't understand laptops" stuff (several posts, not just this one) is bizarre.
This site is just becoming ridiculous. You understand what a portable device is right? That you can UNPLUG the laptop from the external monitor and still use it.
But you do understand that owning a desktop does not preclude also owning a laptop, right?
I have a desktop, and a laptop used as a thin client. The laptop can be inexpensive or have nice features (like a touchscreen), while the real power, storage, etc, is on the desktop.
Not often you see someone use their own argument against themselves. Why buy a desktop with a thin client laptop (that are not in anyway cheap) when you could just buy a standalone laptop.
This isn't even an argument, the decades of the laptops continued popularity say enough.
My machine is way too valuable to risk traveling with is the primary reason. Another is that laptops are noisy due to fans.
My desktop is just a host for several VMs. If I actually need to travel with one of those "computers", I just shut down the VM and copy it's image from my NAS to my laptop.
If you are still buying a laptop for your stated reason, then you haven't embraced virtualization as a developer.
Your personal sensitivities about travelling with a laptop are not shared by the majority. Laptop fans are in no way noisy enough to cause a distraction for yourself or others.
Making a VM copy from a NAS every time I decided to step outside and work say on the back deck in a different environment with trees and some sun is anything but convenient.
There seems to be a perpetuation falsehood in these discussions that the only time you would need to use a laptop is when travelling a substantial distance from home, which can not be anymore further from the truth than is possible.
Lastly, laptops are not the sole domain of developers and you don’t need to ‘embrace virtualization’ simply because it exists.
It is pretty appalling. Much better to go through the hassle to bring my portable, solar rechargeable 1200 watt power generator onto the plane than it is to fork over the extra cash for those silly little lap warmers.
The beauty of the desktop is that you can buy a display that fits your budget and needs. A desktop monitor that's equal to a typical 1080 laptop display can be had for $150. If you need something better, you can spend more but very few people will need to spend more than $500.
If it breaks, you plug in a new one at 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of the laptop repair with the only downtime being how long it takes to drive to the store.
This is like saying that you don’t think formalwear is a good deal because your Costco jeans are more durable. Desktops are great, I heartily recommend using them instead of laptops for most people, but it’s not especially revelatory to point out that laptops make design trade offs to hit their size & battery trade offs.
The more expensive something is the higher the ongoing costs to maintain it. It's the same case with cars where more expensive ones are also more costly to maintain and fix.
When people buy a more luxury item, it's because there is something about the item that they value where no cheaper equivalent exists. MacBooks certainly have several such features: quality of display, ecosystem integration, form factor, battery life, speakers, aesthetics... These things might not be the same things you value, but for those who care it's just as important. This is also why some people buy luxury cars and others just get the cheapest whatever that gets them from A to B.
FWIW, I run an HP Ryzen laptop that cost me just $350. But I do so because the 2h battery, non-HDR (and probably not even 100% sRGB) 1080p screen, lackluster speaker, and "borderline serviceable" trackpad don't bother me at all. I would not buy a MacBook as it offers no features I care about at a significantly higher price, but I respect people who do buy MacBooks because they fit their needs.
There’s lots of things that are more expensive and last longer with no maintenance. There was an entire thread yesterday about how stuff doesn’t last as long and sometimes if you can afford it, you should pay 7x for a Vitamix or KitchenAid.
I’m not sure this compares to luxury cars, since MacBooks more than ever are more like appliances. So it’s arguable that paying more should get you a more durable product.
I mean there’s loads of people who have pre-shitty keyboard MacBooks that have lasted years. I have a great 2012 MBA that still works great and I paid a premium for it then. I’d be happy to pay a premium again for a similarly long lasting computer. You’re also paying the apple premium so that if something goes wrong, they fix it with little fuss. Something I have also used over the years.
Not saying more expensive things don't last longer, just that usually it is not proportional to the price difference (and that's fine).
If you really want to compare, if I got a similar spec-ed MacBook to what I need, I'd have to spend easily $4k+. That means I can outright write off my current cheapish laptop 10+ times over the entire lifetime of an equivalent Macbook and I'd still be in the green.
Premium products are premium because you need them to do something that no other device can. Durability _could_ be a premium selling point for some stuff (tools for example), but for electronics and cars it almost never is. OTOH, I'd happily concede if someone wants to spend $3k+ just to get the better monitor or better battery life on the Macbook.
That's how I feel about bikes. I like that enthusiasts get the really nice fancypants stuff. But if I'm gonna be doing my own maintenance, and riding for durability along with functionality, then the lower end stuff ends up being more for me than the latest & greatest.
Yeah, I have a friend who has a nice fancy carbon fibre bike meanwhile I just have a random no-name brand because it does everything I need it to do for commuting and I don't care that it weighs several kilograms more...
Honestly, if I had broken the screen, this seems like a fair cost for a new display like this. Apart from the the cost, I'd also like to mention the repair process (via mail at their Houston repair facility) was very speedy. I got a quote within hours of them receiving the product, and it was shipped the next day after I approved. The supervisor mentioned that if they ever set up a repair program for this issue, they will refund the fee.
Wow you praise Apple even after they screwed you! The cult of Apple is still going strong!
Edit: parent was made to pay 800 dollars for a screen breaking which wasn't his or her fault, but still goes on to say "they said they might refund it later" and "the repair was quick". The rationalisation is painful to read.
To be clear, it's completely unacceptable they are charging for this repair. My intent was to give some perspective on how the repair process went overall, I needed the device back for work.
While apart from the cracked screen issue the hardware is amazing in my opinion, the overall software issues make using macOS painful sometimes (processes running at high CPU -- now mostly offloaded to the efficiency cores, WebKit views having issues loading, anything syncing to iCloud sometimes not working, sometimes working on the 2nd try, Messages/Apple Mail search only finding some of the messages, audio crackling issues with wired headphones/AirPods/built-in speaker, etc.)
I had a warranty on my Lenovo laptop included for which a guy came to my house and replaced the defective part at no extra cost - within 3 days of reporting it and almost 3 years after buying the laptop.
You can last a "full day" on AAA batteries. A manageable configuration is likely double-suitcase with copper link, each contains 10000 Alkaline AAA batteries.
Really interesting to hear so many people having had experiences with Apple support.
I recently bought a 10 year-old iMac second hand from Cash Converters, which I promptly softbricked the day after purchase (bad Bootcamp install + firmware password).
I took it in to the Apple Store, and despite the fact that it was 10 years old and used, they contacted the engineers in Cupertino to get the firmware unlock key, reformatted it and updated it to the latest supported macOS, and didn't charge a cent for the service.
I was blown away and told people I knew about the experience. Apparently they did something similar for a friend's iPhone 6 a couple of years ago. Didn't charge a cent to service a 5 year-old smartphone.
Both of your examples are software related. In my experience, anything hardware related Apple tends to shift the blame to the consumer. I wonder how much of their profits are based on repairs.
I think it's perhaps more random than that. Friend of mine had a problem with an older MBP. He took it in to get repaired, it was going to be a system board replacement, but since they didn't have that part handy they just sent him out with a brand new MBP with comparable (but slightly better) specs than his original.
For all the people complaining about Apple, they haven't screwed me over yet either, I've only had good experiences. All hardware, I haven't had a software issue I couldn't find the fix for on my own.
I assume your friend had Apple Care, in which case it would be expected to receive a replacement device if they cannot repair it or cannot repair it in a timely manner.
He did, but it was out of AppleCare too. The kicker was that the problem had begun to manifest while still within the three year window, so there was documented history. It was most of a year out of AppleCare when it failed the last time and they decided to cover it as goodwill.
The fact is, Apple is generally one of the best support experiences you’re going to have today. But there are also 1,000,000,000+ iOS devices out there, millions of laptops, and a lot of customers. You’re going to have plenty of bad experiences at that scale
The best support i got was when the guy at the authorized service provider told me to take the business across the street since it was both faster and cheaper and the device was out of warranty anyway.
I got a new MacBook Pro 2 years ago whose screen got black lines after a few days of use, went to Apple support, they changed the screen and didn’t charge me a cent. The guy told me since there’s no physical damage, nothing would be charged
In my experience when there are design flaws Apple won't move a finger until there are class action lawsuits.
And good luck if you're outside the US. Not sure how it is in other countries, but in Mexico Apple doesn't do repairs. It's all left to authorized third parties that really will only try to get as much money from you as possible or get you to buy a new device.
I know a couple of people that were denied repairs/replacements on the infamous butterfly keyboards because these repair centers said they couldn't reproduce the issue themselves. Most likely they didn't want to do the repairs because their margin was too low.
Anyone who's read my comments knows I don't usually have the patience to be charming or whatever. I had a battery start bulging with a polycarbonate MacBook and they just gave me a battery off the shelf no questions asked. There was some other underlying problem, and I eventually scrapped it. Its replacement eventually heated up the charging cable enough that the insulation browned and flaked away (computer side so it's not replaceable). I got a free replacement with zero hassle. Both were out of warranty.
Phone side, I had an OG iPhone SE and decided to get the battery replaced right towards the end of the free replacement period. The first/only appointment I could find was at the Emeryville store so I dropped the phone off. Unfortunately they had a runaway thermal event so the store got evacuated. I was told to come back later and pick up my phone. Eff that, I'm not sitting in traffic and paying for bridge toll for their mistake. It took a bit of persuasion, escalation, and a minor tantrum but they did FedEx my phone back to me. Eventually I dropped that and broke the screen. They couldn't fix it and they no longer sold the 64 GB version so I got a new 128 GB one off the shelf for the price of the repair ($130) without even asking. Or 32/64. Whatever.
So, yeah, Apple's been good to me with hardware stuff (with and without AppleCare). Clearly they're not making everyone whole. The problem as I see it is that Apple is relying almost entirely on the discretion of their retail staff instead of having a formal policy in place.
>The problem as I see it is that Apple is relying almost entirely on the discretion of their retail staff instead of having a formal policy in place.
So, I worked behind the genius Bar about a decade ago, and can tell you that at least as of then (say iPhone 3g through 6 era) this was definitely not the case. There’s a policy for everything.
The issue is that you’re an individual, dealing with another individual who is acting as the intermediary between you and an extraordinarily large and complex logistics and record-keeping system.
If you left feeling taken care of and treated fairly, from apple’s POV that’s a successful interaction. But the procedure for getting there may deliberately not be customer-facing; that doesn’t mean the procedure doesn’t exist.
I can answer questions if people are interested, with the caveat that my info is (thankfully) not fresh.
The other thing to mention is that regardless of policy, humans are humans.
If you're acting like a Karen to the guy behind the counter, they are going to give you the absolute bare minimum service. They know the policy, and they know exactly how it can be applied to make sure you have a shit day.
If you help them help you, they'll often go above and beyond to make sure you're looked after.
The simplest and most effective strategy I've found, both as a customer and a support rep, is to simply explain the problem you're experiencing at a physical level, keeping emotion and opinion out of it. Then cooperate with them and trust them to do their job.
Support people are almost biologically engineered to want to solve your problems, but do not appreciate being treated as a punching bag or emotional dumpster.
"My trackpad stopped working randomly, do you reckon we can fix this?" is far more likely to get a good response than "My trackpad is broken, I spent $1000 on this computer just 6 months ago! I can't believe you'd sell me such shit!"
It definitely didn't seem like there was any policy in place to deal with shipping a customer's items from a store to their home. If there/are policies in place they certainly don't feel consistent – and that's a problem IMO. There was also a pretty big shift when Ahrendts "revamped" the stores in 2016. Apple stores morphed from a convenient place to buy stuff and get support to a place where you go so Apple can further monetize you.
To the sibling comment: I've seen much worse approaches to safety stuff at other companies. Go buy a used steering wheel with a potentially defective Takata airbag for a car. Now try to get that air bag replaced or verified safe.
Or go buy a Coway air purifier. Notice how the fan is off balance and there are a bunch of complaints about these things periodically exploding? Try to get Coway to fix or replace it… lol.
> It definitely didn't seem like there was any policy in place to deal with shipping a customer's items from a store to their home.
Sure there is, it’s “we don’t do that” (at least in my day, and I’d be shocked if that’s changed). It’s a good explanation for why things seemed ad hoc and improvised—because they were. Sounds like the tech & manager were way off the reservation.
At least at my store and in my day, that’s the kind of exception we tried really hard to avoid. You never want to set an expectation you’re not going to be able to meet consistently.
Batteries swelling and cables getting so hot they're discolouring is what we call "safety critical" issues in the electronics industry.
Basically it means they're early indications of problems that can cause injury (in both these cases fire). Most companies I know are extremely lenient with warranty for these types of issues. I worked in support for a manufacturer (not Apple) for a long time.
I had a Macbook pro gpu go bad a couple years outside the warranty of the laptop. They replaced the entire thing for me and also noticed a little dent in the case and swapped that out too, I essentially got a new (old) machine handed to me with my hard drive swapped to it.
Eh. About 10 years ago I had one of the older white iMacs, I think like a 2008 model or thereabouts. After owning it around 5 years and no longer being under warranty, it had some motherboard problem I brought it in for anyway. The Apple Store Geniuses (?) tried fixing it a couple different ways but couldn't, so they replaced it with a similarly-specced current (at the time) model for free.
'We lose money on replacing the entire motherboard for 3 cents under cost whenever any minor thing goes wrong but make bank on refurbished computers with a single resistor that had gone bad which we get for free for some reason'
IMO getting good customer service requires social engineering, whether it’s the Apple store or the cable company. Personally I’ve always been able to talk a Genius into replacing the device, even with a new one versus a returb; at no cost. Sucks that it’s a gamble who ends up assisting you, but my odds have been good.
> For users who want no one but themselves to remove their firmware password by software means, the -disable-reset-capability option has been added to the firmwarepasswd command-line tool in macOS 10.15. Before setting this option, users must acknowledge that if the password is forgotten and needs removal, the user must bear the cost of the logic board replacement necessary to achieve this.
I've owned macs for decades and every single time there's been a problem or defect, they have been gaslighting assholes the whole time. Things were particularly bad when the only way to get a laptop repaired was to ship it to their repair facility in Texas. Weeks of waiting, only to get the machine shipped back to you with a letter saying they found nothing wrong.
Apple is infamous for "secret" recalls that staff will never mention unless you specifically know about them in advance.
One example: I had a Retina MBP with the infamous antiglare-flaking problem, which Apple was sued over and initiated a secret warranty extension program for people who complained...but the settlement did not require notifying owners of said extension. I assumed they weren't doing repairs until I heard about the program second-hand...a year after they stopped doing it.
Razer's support is underrated. They've easily been the best for any company I've had to deal with multi-thousand-dollar replacements/repairs for, and coincidentally they also serve a very similar niche to Apple (high-priced, high-performance, well-built laptops).
> it is frustrating that apple doesn’t believe its costumers.
What's notable here is there is 49 pages of seemingly mostly "me too". It should give Apple at the very least pause for reevaluation of their stance. One guy saying "I didn't do it man" is not evidence, but a clearly non coordinated global trend of people claiming the same thing? Pretty compelling.
There is almost certainly a team at Apple with a very keen eye on this - many teams in fact - everyone from PR ready to do damage control to manufacturing trying to not make it happen anymore to engineering trying to come up with a fix or workaround to stop more screens in already sold products breaking.
But none of those teams are allowed to make any noise externally till legal has fully understood the issue and decided what damage 'admitting' to the fault might cause in any potential future lawsuit. That's why it appears Apple isn't paying attention.
You only hear about it because it’s Apple and they have like 6 SKUs of products that they sell millions of.
When the batteries bulge or screens fail on some random Dell made by a subcontractor in Vietnam, nobody cares as they have like 80 models of laptop for every market segment.
The bullshit thing in my mind is that Apple took away the ability for store staff to make discretionary calls to bypass stuff like this and do what’s right for the customer.
We get to see every failure mode of apple devices because they are so homogeneous and sold in very high numbers. By comparison the asus xifudjeh-9938293-ax-2021-ab-? has maybe a few hundred units sold world wide.
It’s a double edged sword. Their economies of scale are insane. But when shit goes wrong, it’s really bad.
A significant part of my business is sourcing lots and lots of computers. We’re assholes to our suppliers, and I can say that generally the parts that are the most reliable are devices that straddle the business and consumer space. Volume drives success, at a threshold price.
iPhones and Samsung Galaxies are almost problem free. Desktops are generally problem free until ~30 months. Laptops have higher failure rates, and cheaper device categories fail more than pricey devices. Last time I looked, MacBooks were among the most reliable, consistent with my experience.
Places like Gartner and IDC have this data. Usually you can find references to it online.
The point is, when Dell has serial defects, they just repair it. Had some of them on my devices. All got fixed from Dell within normal warranty without discussion or payment.
> The bullshit thing in my mind is that Apple took away the ability for store staff to make discretionary calls to bypass stuff like this and do what’s right for the customer.
It could be that, or retail workers are sick of us and aren't making calls in our direction anymore.
Who is "us" here? Abusive customers? I can't fathom someone coming into a store being nice as expected and a retail over fucking them over just because.
I worked as a tech guy in a store for about three years, more than 15 years ago. I had a lot of autonomy in deciding what I could and couldn't do, what I would charge, whether I would waive charged, etc.
At some point you just get jaded. You have this nice guy and it's all fine and you even go beyond what you need to do for them (sometimes even taking things home because they really needed it at 9am in the morning) and they're so thankful. And then they show up three days later even though you TOLD THEM you would take in home in the evening so they could have it by 9am the next day and they will shout at you over the €40 we agreed on like you just punched them in the face.
Then there are the people who will physically threaten and even assault you... Had a few cases of that too.
For those (profoundly) negative interaction you may have had a whole bunch of positive interactions, but negative interactions just register so much stronger. When you drive or cycle to work you may encounter hundreds or even thousands of other cars, but you only remember that one asshole.
It's been a long time since I worked there, and I've had some time to reflect on things and my attitude when I worked there, and I'm also a bit older now. But if you're in the thick of it in your 20s ... yeah, it's complicated. If you're not careful you get jaded, start treating everyone like a potential asshole, and after a few years it becomes harder and harder to really care like you probably should and did when you first started.
And for what it's worth, I do miss that job sometimes; I could really help regular folks in a very direct and satisfying way that I rarely do as a software developer.
I don’t know, but if it were me being subjected to that, all customers would likely start looking the same and I’d probably not be sympathetic to giving them the benefit of the doubt. I definitely could be wrong but I suspect there are a lot of tired retail workers out there.
Yeah these kinds of en masse reports have resulted in an Apple response in the past so here’s hoping for everyone subject to this. They use to be awfully reluctant though. An article in mainstream news and sustained pressure should help.
What's more surprising to me is that they haven't yet deleted the thread. This has happened many times in the past (customers complaining about widespread defects on Apple's support forum) and Apple usually deletes the threads or moderates them down enough to make it look plausibly deniable.
My guess is that the current class action will probably look unfavourably upon such an action given there are more eyeballs on the matter and people have probably already scraped it by this point.
Folks like you and I can interpret it this way, but the accountants and engineers at Apple would have to provide much more rigorous evidence to the high level executives that would need to sign off on some remediation program, recall, or redesign. Granted, at a lower level it could be used as justification to look into more rigorous/empirical investigation.
They likely know and don't care. My old macbook pro updated to the latest OS and it completely bricked the machine. Every time I'd try to watch a video the thing would overheat. Reverted the OS and the issue was completely fixed.
Bought a new iphone recently and the camera simply can't focus at short range.
Why would it? Seriously a large proportion even of the users bitten by this will still run to buy the next shiny apple device they release and then there is the other part of the users who are not affected and will blame the affected users for doing something wrong, because apple can't be in the wrong. I never understood the personal attachment and identification that some brands elicit it people (but credit to Apple to achieving this, and I don't mean this ironically. They must be doing something right to gather such a following).
> credit to Apple to achieving this, and I don't mean this ironically. They must be doing something right to gather such a following
Credit in a disgusting kind of way yes. A skill you can only admire abstractly.
This kind of thing has been going on for well over a decade now, the reality distortion field that Jobs left behind is very real... It's China level of denialism, pretty sure Apple's internal media control slogan is "never admit fault, deny everything, at all cost" - even big fat class action cost, because that's cheaper than breaking the delusion of the pretty, perfect device with a massive markup.
Once you've been burned once and they disrespect your intelligence you abandon them if you have any sense... but to be fair to others, some people become entrenched in the ecosystem and effectively have lockin, many of those poor souls do what any human does to protect their sanity in an impossible scenario, they lie to themselves to justify the economic and emotional cost to them - which ironically helps sustain the delusion for everyone else. Although maybe the single benefit of the big apps turning everything into a cloud subscription is that it reduces this somewhat.
But everyone has limits, I'm convinced there is a critical mass Apple will disenchant where the illusion will finally be broken for everyone and they burn their image. Since the company is well and truly into the milking stage I'm sure this will happen sooner than later - Investors have limited life spans even if companies do not.
I don’t know that its what Apple does right but that the broader PC market continues to shoot itself in the foot. Little things like pre-installed bloatware and the inability to figure out smooth trackpad scrolling (still!) keep me firmly on Apple devices. And more recently, the M1 platform is remarkable, so I tip my hat to them for that and doing the basic stuff right (mostly—there have been blemishes obviously).
Simple: because a single entity has responsibility for the entire product. PC's are built out of software from Microsoft, hardware from a random supplier (and probably a contractor who agreed to write a driver in a week), and a assembler/supplier like Dell or Lenovo who go for the lowest margin so can't and won't fix any of the mistakes of the other two parties.
I think having a strong personal attachment to a brand is actually pretty normal. If you spend a large chunk of your time using a companies products and those products make your easier/better it's understandable.
You say this like other brands products are flawless and don't randomly break ever. So far Apple is the only tech brand I have had no issues with and has vastly exceeded the experience I have had with alternatives.
It’s also because a good chunk of people also lie to get something fixed under warranty. Didn’t the other weak the article that rose to the front page talk in detail about the various frauds?
I wish Apple wasn’t like this and spent time investigating each defect accurately to identify and issue “recalls”. They sure have the money to do it. But like every other capitalistic company - including the ones that put a 1 ton missile on the road - they fix something when they have a financial incentive to do it. Class action lawsuits are a good incentive. Loss of goodwill is a hard to quantify but important one as well. And I’m sure there’s a suit somewhere in Apple spaceship doing these calculations.
My 10 day old Macbook with M1 Pro died suddenly last week. In India we don't have Genius bars like in the States, what we have is a franchise model where in small repair shops are given the right to repair (only part to part replacement) and they probably get some commission. The guys in these shops are very afraid of Apple and its policies. Even things which normally would get fixed in Genius bars without any second thought, these shops will outright refuse to repair with the fear that Apple would revoke their license. Now this has directly affected the customers like me. Moreover, the staff in these shops are highly incompetent and do not have good knowledge about Apple in general.
In my case, the shop lady put a big scratch on the top of my Macbook while she was rotating it after putting it upside down on the table to take pictures from all angle. Apparently it is required. Not sure if they have this procedure in the US when you go to submit the laptop. Now, the staff at the shop told me they do not want to involve the management and they would do something about it. Had this been completely managed by Apple, this wouldn't have made a single dent in Apple's profit if they just decided to give me a new laptop but since its a franchise model, they behave differently, and do not want to lose a single rupee and hence refuse to replace or even change the top case having the scratch caused by them.
Moreover, they will take around 2-3 weeks to replace your logic board / battery / screen / keyboard. Just about anything. I don't know if Apple will survive if they did this in the US.
Apple support informed me that they are waiting for a reply from the shop, about the scratch and status in general before they could take any action - its been 5 days (including the weekend) already.
My iPhone's screen stopped working suddenly right before I was due to travel.
Apple authorized service center in India said it will take 2-3 weeks to send and get it back from repair center.
I decided to take it with me on my travel and just strolled into an apple store in Dubai mall the next day. It was fixed in literally 40 minutes there.
It's surprising how Dubai with such a low population and low apple users as compared to India gets this preferential treatment.
> It's surprising how Dubai with such a low population and low apple users as compared to India gets this preferential treatment.
In addition to the demographic differences, I wonder how much of this is also a difference of where there are official Apple Stores and where there are not.
Dubai has 3 official stores I think (I’ve only been to the flagship at the Dubai Mall and it’s one of the most spectacular retail stores I’ve ever seen — very close to the Apple Store in Singapore), whereas the Apple Store in Mumbai has been pushed back to 2023 or 2024.
Apple is one of those companies that in my experience, the customer support is much, much better when it can be direct from the official retail or repair channels than if you are in a region that only has authorized repair centers.
As an anecdote, I was once doing business in Europe and had my laptop break in a country that didn’t have an official Apple Store. The authorized repair center I found seemed to be of good quality, but they wouldn’t be able to do the repair I needed in the timeframe I needed it. I ended up just flying from Finland to Sweden to get my laptop repaired/replaced.
It was about five hours total out of my way and like $150, but it was just easier than the alternatives.
I hope that once Apple has an official retail presence in India that service will improve, at least in major cities.
Lots of countries (including India) make it difficult for Apple to open their own stores.
Dubai allows Apple to open stores freely without needing local partners, and has the added benefit of being a travel hub, so the size of the market is far bigger than the local population. It makes perfect sense.
Spot on. Apple direct customer support really suck in India. In my city, the authorised store and service centre always act entitled like they are doing me a big favour (probably because we don't buy it from them directly). Last I went there to find out if a discoloured iPad screen could be repaired, and they said they can't examine my device unless I pay Rs. 500 (around US $5-$6) first. So I shell out the money, and they look at the screen and ask me if I have factory reset the iPad. I said yes, I had done that. The service "engineer" then returns the iPad to me and says, "Apple does not repair any iPad hardware in India. If it is under warranty, they will replace the device with another iPad." I asked him why he didn't tell me all this before charging me Rs. 500. He looked at me like he was staring at a jackass (which I guess he was :).
HP also does that. I used it once to replace a screen that had a vertical band because a problem in a hinge. I called the assistance, sent a video, they sent me the technician
It was about 90 Euro for 3 years. Then about the same amount for the 4th year, then nothing, but I can buy parts and replace them. It's an easy laptop to service.
Apple does next day business support. The problem is, they don’t do it internationally in every market (though it is in a lot of them). But if you buy enough product from them or pay for the Apple Care Enterprise, they’ll do on-site or next-day repairs.
The trick here is to buy Thinkpads which come with international warranty and accidental damage protection. In fact, the warranty/ADP is mostly useful in international scenarios because within the US, you can buy parts pretty easily on ebay.
If it's only been 10 days, can you return it? That seems extreme, yet maybe expected if something didn't quite pass QA, it might show up that early.
I can confirm that at a real Apple Store I've had genius bar folks take photos of everything also. Seems to be Apple policy these days, if they feel like it, to more easily blame the customer.
Doesn't always happen though, and sometimes it helps - e.g. I received a "repaired" watch that had new dents in it and used the photos to show that. Of course, they then said my watch was missing a tiny microphone mesh I'd never seen before and still demanded an AppleCare repair fee from me. I paid, because it wasn't much in the long run, but I'm a bit annoyed at how much Apple has changed lately.
A battery replacement took 8 days to ship back to the store (almost 14 days total) when they could have done it in-store while I waited, but the system said "no, it must be shipped in to be replaced" with no reason given.
In Canada I took a MBP in to the Apple store for a keyboard replacement under warranty, and during the repair they put a significant dent in the inner surface next to the trackpad. I had to point it out and they offered to take it back for another week but I had a flight out that day and had to decline.
Having access to an official Apple store does not guarantee perfect service either. More reasons we need legislated right to repair.
It is possible many or most of the reported screen cracks are due entirely to thermal changes. The M1 MacBook displays are made of glass. Glass is a poor thermal conductor and rapid changes in temperature will create stress fractures in the glass that will eventually crack. When heated, thin glass begins to crack.
Let's say, for argument's sake, the OP has their desk in front of a window. At night, temperatures go down, and in the morning, sunlight provided enough thermal change fast enough to cause a small crack, which expanded with stress. I'm not saying that is what happened, just that thermal stress can explain a lot.
Voices can already be heard that Apple's product can't even handle sunlight. But it isn't sunlight, it is the delta-T over delta-t the change in temperature over time. Taking a device in thermal equilibrium of an air conditioned environment outside into a hot car will crack the glass with no impact event. Happened to me. I was holding an iPad in my hands in front of me, and I saw the glass crack, and I knew immediately what I did wrong. The change in temperature was too extreme and too fast.
I'm sitting in a car with 150k miles on it, with the original windshield. It has one chip from when I followed a gravel truck too closely once.
Sometimes I even take it to a carwash in the summer with a baking hot windshield. Sometime I turn on the heater in the winter while it's snowing.
Amazingly, engineers have designed a glass product that is as heavy, thick, coated, whatever... To survive common usage for a decade.
> My car windshield defies the laws of physics, so Apple's devices should too!
You do not understand thermal shock. Remove your windshield and bring it inside. Lower your thermostat to 63° and let your windshield equalize at that temperature overnight. When the outside temperature reaches 90° the next day, rush your windshield outside.
Conversely, wait until winter and your windshield is left overnight in 35° temperatures. Boil a large pot of water, and dump the boiling water on your windshield.
It is not at all surprising that for 150K miles, your car's windshield has never experienced thermal shock.
? I explained in my post I take it to car washes on hot days. Cold water conducts way better than your idea of "shock" via air and sun rays.
Your winter water idea shows you might almost understand water conducts better than air. So it's just proof you don't read well. And either way, it's 1000x more extreme than what an laptop screen experiences.
Again, what you are describing will not produce thermal shock. Car wash water isn't "cold water" and is probably less than 10° colder than the ambient temperature, and it is applied relatively slowly, allowing the glass to equalize before it is stressed.
What is required is a sudden change in temperature. For something as thick a car windshield, you'll need a near instantaneous 40° temperature change. If your car windshield was blazing at 150°F and you tossed a bucket full of cold, equalized ice water on it, it's going to shatter.
But you have some good ideas, and I welcome new Apple laptops with quarter inch thick glass displays.
It most certainly has, but might not have been publicised. I remember some noise about iPhones screens failing in more or less exactly the same way ~10 years ago. These things are bound to happen regularly, but we don’t hear about it. Ion-exchange strengthened glass is resistant to microcracks, but even so fracture happens.
> The corners of my 2012 are noticeably deformed from impacts and the screen is fine
Glass is an interesting material. It can bend and deform in the right conditions, and shatter in others. Your experience would show that the screen is actually well designed (my 2015 MBP had also a deformed corner after having fallen open from a table; I was actually pleasantly surprised that the hinge survived).
Deformed corner here too! it was sitting precariously on a pile of papers on top of a set of plastic drawers on top of a standup desk which was half raised (where the printer lives, was silly I know). My daughter came in and bumped the table and my open MacBook fell directly on the corner of the screen. It has a dent there now but no other damage
Macs have always had that, but the newer ones have this issue where the screen hits the keyboard. Never happened with the older fatter models from a decade ago.
I have one of the last 16” intel macs and god I wish it was built like the 17” ones. Cleaning the screen terrifies me because the thing is so fragile. Not to mention how my previous screen had the coating get messed up from using glasses cleaner on it once.
Maybe it depended on use but I had this 2012 mbp that would be shoved into a backpack with heavy textbooks for 7 years before graduating to a lighter packing in the backpack. Never had issues, but the 2020 intel macbook air I bought that just sat on my desk during covid did develop those imprints within a few weeks it felt like.
Well as I recall 10 years ago we would use keyboard covers , and those caused imprints, but the keyboard alone never did. I cant imagine you could even use a keyboard cover today. Kind of just worse design all around on these laptops.
My HP also has a piece of cloth to put on the keyboard before closing the lid. I always suspended by pressing the power button and disabled suspend by closing the lid, so it is natural for me to use that extra protection.
The fracture pattern depends on the direction of impact. It's easily verifiable under a microscope. From the thread it sounds like Apple did indeed verify them with a microscope. However people are not always rational, especially when money is involved.
If you go through and read a few it becomes plain that there's a few themes emerging. Clean everything, lid closure.
I find it a bit laughable that they can "verify it under a microscope". The glass is present under tension, and a weak point releasing that tension could very well cause local divoting at the origin of the crack as the pressure is released towards that point and microsharding occurs.
I don't think that means much. There were 1500 complaints about the original 12" Macbook's butterfly keyboard in the OG thread[1]. That keyboard went on to be recalled.
...were? I just clicked it, both out of curiosity and spite (I had one of those damn keyboards), now there are more.
Your counterexample means even less, since my numbers are based on measuring something useful.
Besides which: what kind of case do you think you're making by pointing out that actual design/manufacture problems with Apple products show up in Apple forums?
Years ago, the screen of my 2012 rMBP had broken seemingly out of nowhere one time after I opened the lid. I knew someone who was carrying a couple pieces of paper stapled together inside the lid of their 2016-era MBP, and when they opened it, the staple had broken the glass. Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Glass breaks, it happens.
Screen glass breakage is very dependent on the shape and vector of the stress. Flexing is generally not that bad, nor are light impacts or scrapes on the front, but a remarkably tiny pressure on edge will cause a crack.
Exactly. The surface treatment of these glasses make their faces very resistant to fracture, but the layer in the middle inside is much less tough. An impact on the side is really bad for this type of glass pane.
> Thermal change caused the crack to spread. It happens all the time with vehicle windshields.
This happened to my brother’s brand new Tesla. Tiny impact on the edge extended all the way across after a week in Tucson. Very sad, especially because the service was difficult (had to return to SoCal for repair). The next week around Tucson I looked for and spotted over a dozen Teslas with similar crack extensions.
It’s probably safer for it to be flimsy. If it shatters it will become chunks and not shards. The Air screen is big enough to make killer shards...
Car windshields are laminated with plastic in the middle, precisely to prevent shards, and to not have it completely collapse in the event of an impact.
The rest of the windows are tempered glass, also to prevent shards.
Actually, windshield glass is designed to prefer cracking (and holding together) instead of shattering into chunks when it breaks like the side windows.
Computer screen glass is also usually laminated (though here the goal is to fuse the glass very closely to the LCD panel so there's no unsightly "air gap")
There used to be a science show on German television that always demonstrated interesting engineering science bits at prime TV hours (knoffhoff show). They demonstrated windscreen security glass by someone jumping on a large (2mx2m or more) sheet between two wooden blocks. It looked like someone jumping on a springboard. At the end another person tapped the side of the glass using a small hammer and the glass shattered into tiny little pieces. The jumping guy was still on it, but did not get cut because all pieces where dull shards.
This is a good place to remind that _never ever_ buy a Tesla. I was a huge fanboy and I do love my car, but their customer support and service centers are absolutely horrendous.
It's all great when nothing is wrong, but things eventually go wrong and you regret ever owning one. - Signed, a Tesla Owner who has been dealing with a very minor damage because some idiot couldn't take their eyes off of their phone in a 25mph zone.
Correct. There was no authorized repair available in Tucson. The mobile windshield repair service declined to touch it. There was a possible repair in Phoenix (130 miles) but it wasn’t certain.
Correct re Southern California. He drove it back though. The rest of the family went back in a separate vehicle.
> It happens all the time with vehicle windshields.
Easy solution for windshields which avoids full replacement is to go and have somebody inject epoxy(? some sort of agent) into the crack which will prevent it from spreading larger
I still don't understand the appeal of aluminum/glass construction. I couldn't think of a worse set of materials to make a laptop out of.
For comparison, nearly every other ultrabook manufacturer has moved onto magnesium or carbon fiber for chassis construction. Both materials are much physically stronger, lighter, and (most importantly, imho) offer more intrinsic shock protection.
I know people enjoy the "luxury" look and feel of a Macbook and criticize other manufacturers for using composite materials. But I don't think most people understand that for other manufacturers, moving to aluminum unibody construction at this point would probably be a cost-saving measure.
Apple does not offer a single product that is MIL-SPEC tested, despite nearly every other manufacturer having some or all of their product line submitted to standardized endurance testing.
There's an ongoing joke in the military, MIL-SPEC just means it's a piece of crap that's going to break pretty soon. From an engineering point of view, I'd like to believe that using all MIL-SPEC components which are rated to last longer and in harsher environments would amount to a more reliable product. But maybe a product is more than the sum of its parts, and it's possible a company can build a more reliable product despite not using MIL-SPEC components or obtaining that certification. Just something to think about.
> There's an ongoing joke in the military, MIL-SPEC just means it's a piece of crap that's going to break pretty soon.
Yeah well, my M1 MacBook Air just friggin' screen-died overnight ten days ago. On the other hand my military grade LG Gram is still working fine after years and years.
I can hold the LG Gram's screen with both hands and start distorting it and it keeps working flawlessly: the screen is very flexible. That's how it was demo'ed to me and that's how I always demo it to people.
That and it's lighter than a M1 MacBook Air (yup).
It doesn't have a retina display. But it still works.
I think Apple screwed up big times and I think these M1 laptops would never have passed any MIL-SPEC. They're brittle little things.
To counter anecdote with anecdote, my M1 MBA is still kicking and has survived untold abuse. I carry the computer by the display, have dropped it multiple (over tens) times on to hardwood, linoleum, and concrete floors from 3'-4' high. The computer was on the ground and I accidentally dropped my phone on it, which left a nick in the screen but nothing greater. I spilled an entire pitcher of water on the keyboard and every component is working as usual.
So maybe my computer would pass MIL-SPEC ten times over.
I haven't spilled anything on it, but I have a mid-2013 MacBook Air running Sierra. It still works great, and the hardware doesn't have any defects that I know of.
The most surprising thing about using that machine is that it's shockingly fast. And I own an M1 Ultra Mac Studio.
and that is just the kind of assurance some consumers are willing to pay for.. with sophistication in manufacturing quality can be made to be varied from batch to batch. Sometimes they don't even bother, ie. I no longer trust board revision from gigabyte, same rev diff layout diff components are far too common. not sure how it's economical, but the fact that it IS economical tells me something is way off.
Sure. But I think there is a fundamental difference in philosophy when Thinkpad or MSI have web pages bragging about how well their laptops handle moisture ingress and Apple just has a warranty statement.
One get's ruggedness but carbon fiber is generally not a good thermal conductor which could be a problem for a laptop with no fans. And titanium is very expensive compared to aluminum.
I guess he was referring to the old titanium macbook pro (during the G4 era) which was amazing. I had one in my motorcycle sidebags and it survived amazing abuse.
Almost every metal laptop I've used has been an absolute pain because of the bending. The sound of fans scraping against metal is absolutely horrible and has killed more than one macbook of mine over the years. I even had one where my touchpad would randomly click unless it was placed on a perfectly-flat surface like a desk (no laps allowed!) because of bends. I'd much prefer a stronger material to stand the test of time, even if it chips.
Aluminum bends and flexes. Magnesium alloys would shatter (if you could even apply enough force). The chassis chipping or flaking seems preferable to bending and flexing for the longevity of the internals.
The glass is the bigger problem, not the aluminum. It looks sleek and shiny but will crack easily with forces that wouldn't do anything to a plastic screen.
It's their brand. Apple continues to use aluminum because they've invested a lot into it and they're good at it. I occasionally hear a quote get thrown about on apple-centric tech podcasts that Apple probably has the greatest concentration of aluminum material science expertise not just of tech companies, but of any company that exists. So much so that Elon Musk poached one of their engineers to work on aluminum for Tesla.
A friend just had this happen to their M1 Air under warranty and Apple quoted him $400 for the repair claiming it was "accidental" damage, even though he didn't do anything to it, like the 50 pages of people who replied in the thread.
Wanted to make a quick PSA against purchasing one of these to save a few hundred bucks vs the M2 Air which hopefully won't have this problem, and possibly put some pressure on Apple to take care of their customers for what is clearly a widespread hardware defect.
After the keyboard fiasco I am very nervous about upgrading my 2012 macbook. I tried the last intel model air (same body as the m1) and that computer was an absolute lemming. This 2012 computer sure looks old and ugly, but I can replace all the components myself with a screwdriver, and the body was designed so the cpu could actually work at 100% and not end up thermally throttled. The computer gets hot and the fans get loud for sure, but it doesn't throttle any. Back then the base clocks were probably set to more sane thresholds for heat's sake versus today's turboboosted cpus in thin cases with poor air circulation that inevitably throttle under long term load.
During a recent heatwave, I was working on my back patio, where the temperature peaked at 104F.
My 14” M1 MBP didn’t notice. No fan noise, no performance issues. My windows laptop that I was barely using to test and issue struggled. The CPUs were throttled down and the fan was throttled up. My body found itself wishing that I had an internal fan! :)
Given the number of models with the butterfly keyboards which were somewhat similar (model-wide issues, not acknowledged by Apple, blamed on the user), what makes you think M2 Air is going to fix any potential screen issues?
Earlier this year I threw my son his USB earbuds container. Not a heavy thing. I threw it in a high arc, and on its way down it glanced off the edge of his MacBook screen. It seemed like the lightest of touches, but it must have hit in just the right (or wrong) spot, and the screen ended up with a large crack, and stopped working. I was super surprised how fragile the screen was, especially given how tough iPads and iPhone seem to be. When it happened, I couldn't believe such a light glancing blow could have done it. I was definitely responsible for cracking the screen through my actions, but it did highlight to me that macbooks are not robust at all, not the high quality I had come to expect.
First rule of a longtime Apple user: Never be an early adopter.
Second rule of a longtime Apple user: Always use AppleCare+.
Third rule of a longtime Apple user: When you have a problem with your beloved Apple hardware, always have a pile of cash on you, just in case.
Don't pay a premium for new hardware as its more likely to break. This is your own fault for being an 'early adopter'.
AppleCare+, pay even more for 'Apple Insurance' so you can repair the expensive defective product sold to you already covered by warranty and consumer law.
Have extra money available to pay for repairs that can only be carried out by Apple for the laptop you paid a premium for with the mistaken belief it was reliable.
Forfeit your money and do not question Apple's role in selling you a defective product. Besides, we can't expect Apple to cover the costs of repair for the defective products they sell, thats just asking too much. You're just unlucky to have picked up a mac from a 'bad batch' of units.
Just one of many examples in my 20+ years of using Apple computers and hardware, personally and professionally, for my company employees.
First Cinema Display 30". In my country of origin, at the time, the cost was comparable to a second hand good car. Only 5 displays were sold, 4 of them for a local telecommunication provider for their luxury offices. One for me.
The screen was unevenly lit and on white/gray background introduced a visible pink to blue shift. After several unsuccessful attempts for calibration with the Spider Pro 2, the local Apple authorized representative filled the forms for replacing the unit.
Thanks to AppleCare+ after 3 displays with the same problem, finally I had a luck and received the perfect display. Still using it in my art studio to this day.
Aren't you simply justifying the cost of AppleCare+ to yourself?
What if they gave you a working product as one would expect at that cost? AppleCare+ is pointless.
If they gave you a defective product with no Applecare+? Tough luck?
You are also coming at this from the perspective of someone running a business, purchasing bulk items. Not that it is justified on Apple's part, but AppleCare+ would lead to less 'friction' from Apple as far as repairing defective units that are more likely at that number. Likewise, you could probably claim AppleCare+ as a business expense.
In the case of the Cinema, the official policy for replacement was tied to dead pixels. Not to my professionally deformed eye in search for the perfect and evenly lit display. AppleCare+ helped in this situation a lot.
Don't get me wrong. I don't like it, but it helps. And I had also a good experience without it, once. Exchanged my iPad Pro 12" for backlight bleeding without any problem.
But as you sad, when you are buying 20 or 30 MacBook Pros for your company, it is considerably better to be sure that you will get extended damage coverage.
Where I am, you could return an Apple product whether you had AppleCare or not. I returned three 2009 iMacs before getting an OK one, never had AppleCare.
You might get “lucky” sometimes but generally insurance is sold at a profit, so if it’s something you can afford to self-insure (and it’s legal), you’re usually better off with that in the long run. AppleCare isn’t bad, though, IMO.
There is. If you find a defect, just hold a heat-gun near your screen for a while. Apple will not be able to explain the cause of the resulting damage. You will get your money back, as you should. Here is a script:
You: there is a crack in my screen. It appeared spontaneously.
Genius bar guy: that's a point contact crack; it's caused by the user.
You: well, how do you explain this burn mark behind it? It's more likely that it overheated and then the screen snapped.
Genius bar guy: err, ok, we will have it fixed.
You: sorry, but I lost trust in your brand. The device could have started a fire. I want my money back.
I'd imagine most people deliberately using Apple products have made considerations for other options. Unfortunately there is no panacea like you seem to be alluding to, just a different set of tradeoffs.
They are a new hardware company that shipped their first product less than 12 months ago. They are not going to make everyone happy in their first year. What they are selling is reparability and upgradability in a good formfactor. If they launch a high-end ARM chipset next year, you can buy it and then install it in your mac-book air sized laptop in 10 minutes. You can then take the old MOBO/CPU and use it as NUC. When they launch better screens, you can take the stock one out and spend $40 on a USB-C adapter to turn it into an external monitor. I'll take that over Apple's "you get what you get, and you will like it, because we know better" approach any day.
I can say without a doubt, the Mac minis are really good though.
It should be illegal to sell a desktop computer with a hard drive that can never be replaced.
All hard drives go bad eventually, and while my 2012 Mac mini allowed me to keep swapping out the hard drive. Which made it a great computer up until I kind of retired it when I bought a new m1 Mac mini.
The current m1 Mac minis are all guaranteed to die within 10 years when the hard drives fail. Sure, you can do an aftermarket replacement, sure, I guess you could weld a new hard drive in .
But most people are going to just throw them out and buy new ones. I imagine depending on your usage, you might blow out your unreplaceable hard drive even sooner. Won't surprise me if these drives start failing within five or even 3 years for people storing tons of large files
Say you make a lot of 4K and 5K movies, I can't imagine a tiny 256 SSD getting files written to it, and delete it from it over and over again will last that long.
> I imagine depending on your usage, you might blow out your unreplaceable hard drive even sooner.
It's possible, but seems unlikely since TBW ratings are super-conservative.
> Say you make a lot of 4K and 5K movies, I can't imagine a tiny 256 SSD getting files written to it, and delete it from it over and over again will last that long.
Honestly, that wouldn't be enough to do much anyway. I'd venture that pros are more often using external TB3 SSDs (often in RAIDs) or a DAS. I understand that the boot drive may be used for caching even in that case.
Some real-world data: My M1 Air /w 1 TB SSD has written 368 TB total, and SMART thinks it's got 88% of its lifetime left. Depending on how good SMART is about estimates like these, that would give the Air SSD a TBW of 3,000 or so.
It's so ironic that this is the end game for a company that thought they were saving the earth by making you buy a charger for you cell phone separately
Actually most budget laptops still use plastic screens... It's only the high end models where things become glass.
It almost makes sense, since if you're buying an expensive laptop, you're probably OK with higher cost of ownership too (as seen by the other replies on this thread of people spending multiple hundreds to repair their screens).
> (as seen by the other replies on this thread of people spending multiple hundreds to repair their screens)
I'd rather buy a 500 EUR non Apple laptop than pay the 490 EUR I was quoted to repair my M1 MacBook Air's screen. I mean: I get it fixed, than what? It's still a prone-to-crack screen I get.
And there's no way I'm thinking: "Oh well, rather than pay 490 EUR to fix the screen, I'll buy another M1".
Well... I considered just buying a new M1: but not after having read about all the people having similar issues. Now I know I wasn't just unlucky and I know it wasn't my fault.
Actually they don't at all. I have a few older tablets that have plastic screens and touch works just fine (not great, but good enough).
The main benefit of glass is just that it looks nicer (clearer) and maintains the flatness of the screen better (compared to even harder plastic which will still deform a lot under pressure). On phones there is an additional benefit of scratch resistance, but that's less of an issue for laptops.
I don't. Those old plastic screens would get scratched so easily. Cleaning the screen with a microfiber cloth invited a 50:50 chance of damaging the screen due to some micro abrasion. There used to be a cottage industry of products specifically for screen cleaning so as to reduce cleaning cloth contamination. It was a mess. I can now take my shirt, a tissue, or wet paper tower to the screen with no issue.
Maybe internally, but we have to remember how long it took them to return back to the old keyboards without ever acknowledging it was a horrible mistake.
Whoa, I read it as 49 of 49 replies and thought: it might be a problem but doesn't seem to be widespread. Now as an owner of a M1 myself, I am really worried.
I don't think this has anything to do with the M1 chip. I think the case may be a bit too tight, and flexes when it cools, and that is enough to cause the crack.
Yes, I know, but I don't think the chip is the reason for the cracking. I think it may be tolerances in the case.
Maybe they also started using a different, more brittle glass, with this generation. Maybe the stress has always been there, but didn't cause cracks, with the last type of glass.
You missed the point. Nobody’s saying chip is the culprit—“M1” in this context refers to the Macbook series powered by the eponymous chip. Which means those Macbooks are only a few years old at most, yet there are 49 pages of user reports that their screens are prone to cracking for no reason.
I got a 14" MBP M1 recently. It felt so incredibly fragile that I was anxious moving it or opening it.
I'd really like to emphasize the word "incredibly". That is, I don't think I could credibly describe how fragile these laptops are without having one as an example.
I already considered Macbooks to be a fragile series of laptops, given longtime users insist their insurance-subscription "AppleCare+" is a necessity. (This is not normal for laptops.)
So, I searched to see if it had durability issues, and found this, and immediately returned it. Not worth the risk!
I stopped by Sony phones because of the same issue. Sony Xperia Z-series phones would spontaneously develop serious screen cracks. I thought it was a fluke, but it happened over, and over, and over. The last Sony phone I bought was in a padded case in a padded bag when the screen cracked.
My friends iPhone got replaced 3 times, every single time the same fault. Something to do with audio interface going missing and mic not working.
His next phone was an Android.
I remember looking it up and there were rumours that Apple had initially acknowledged this fault and replaced them with no questions asked but then withdrawn the memo.
My Pixel 4XL, that I bought second hand, had it's battery replaced TWICE under warranty. Then, it started failing against, and I got an OS level alert saying they're detecting another battery fault and that I was eligible for a warranty extension at no cost, and to go and get it fixed. I just take it to the nearest UbreakIfix (or something like that) and they fix it in an hour sometimes, once it took a few hours because they were extra busy.
I was so impressed I bought my dad another used Pixel 4xl because I trusted them. And I'm someone that in general dislikes Google for losing their way the last 5-10 years.
Many faults like this are caused by some behaviour of your friend that none of Apples internal testers did.
For example, maybe your friend used a specific app that no tester every used.
I remember once a big company doing an emergency product recall because they hadn't tested putting the product in fleece lined pockets. If you put it in fleece lined pockets, it wouldn't boot anymore due to the static discharge of the fleece rubbing on the plastic surface as you walked around.
Yet they had 1000+ beta testers, yet were somehow unlucky that not a single one used fleece lined pockets!
Interesting... I recently had to take in my 2021 MacBook Pro for a cracked screen repair. Mine had a reason mind you, but one that I'd never seen before... My cat bit into the screen while relaxing behind it.
A very mild play bite. She does this whenever she wants attention but I'm in front of a screen. I heard a crack and immediately it went black. It was like a delicate pane of glass cracking.
She bit my previous computers (MacBooks) without issue, cell phones, etc. First time I'd ever seen it happen. On a two month old laptop too.
Didn't pay a cent for service luckily, it was covered. I didn't let them know what happened, and the crack was so subtle that I guess the tech didn't catch it.
My guess is that the `origin-discussions2-us-dr-prz` subdomain refers to a set of servers which the main discussions.apple.com host would dynamically route you to based on IP location?
"A class-action lawsuit is being planned on behalf of M1 MacBook owners who say that screen cracks were occurring during normal use, with both the M1 MacBook Air and M1 MacBook Pro affected.
Apple has mostly claimed that the cracks are the result of accidental damage, including in the case of the 9to5Mac reader who first contacted us"
I've had the same happened to mine because of the camera cover. When lid is closed - it rubs against the trackpad edge and a little pressure from the top, when it's closed, will cause it to crack.
Mostly likely culprit, if this is a real problem, is a poorly-annealed batch of screen glass. If the glass is under internal tension, it's only a matter of time before cracks show. Conversely, screen glass is ordinarily pretty hard to damage and screens are designed to handle any expansion in their frame as a matter of course.
At this point, there's no way to tell if this is an actual issue, or if it's just the enormous customer base of Apple amplifying owners who damaged their screen and would like Apple to replace it for free.
I'm sympathetic after owning one of the cursed butterfly decks, but I'm pretty wait-and-see about it. I'm not nervous about my 16" M1 Pro, which is the most tank-like laptop Apple has made since the days of removable batteries and built-in DVD-R.
> or if it's just the enormous customer base of Apple amplifying owners who damaged their screen and would like Apple to replace it for free.
Apple has had an enormous customer base for decades, they've had a support forum for probably as long, and people have been wanting free repairs for their broken idevices since forever.
And while I'm no expert on the history of Apple's support forums, I think it's safe to assume that a 49-page forum thread about an issue like this isn't a common occurrence. (maybe the butterfly keyboards got one like that)
Plus Apple is not the only manufacturer with a support forum and a large customer base, and I don't think I've ever heard of a mass concentrated effort to get free repairs by spamming a support forum.
Maybe in a fraction of the cases but from reading the thread, I, pessimistically estimate that most of the problems are user induced or a different issue.
I'd have to agree. I don't know how many companies supply Apple with MBA M1 screens, but I've had mine since they came out. Dragged it all over the states and still no crack.
I always open it in the middle, and I don't wrench it open. For some reason, some people don't understand that thin and light doesn't mean indestructible.
There are many people that are complaining about this issue. But the total number of owners are way higher than the typical laptop. The MacBook Air M1 is allegedly the world's best-selling laptop.
I'm curious. How many screen cracks is too many, and should be considered a design/manufacturing defect? How is something like that determined?
I had an M1 Macbook Air screen delaminate for no apparent reason. I'm guessing that was the reason, but it looked like a giant bubble formed right in the middle of the screen. I'm guessing all the edges delaminated? It looked like water damage, but of course was never in contact with water.
I had it happen to me ten days ago, just before going on vacation. I'm going to the shop where I bought it tomorrow to see if any warranty is available. The first quote I had (from a close by shop) was half the price of the brand new thing (for a 30 min job: the guy tells me it's simply the part that's super pricey).
We went to sleep, woke up in the morning: open the lid, was all messed up. It looked exactly like several pictures/videos I saw on the net.
I'm super pissed off: lasted 10 months of very light use.
On the other my old LG Gram which, granted, is military grade rated (whatever that means), is still going strong. It doesn't have a retina display but it has the benefit of still working.
It’s possible that there are some issues here, but the fact that these comments talk about a wide variety of laptop models with completely different screens, form factors, manufacturing processes, etc, suggests that there may not be a systematic issue.
One model having the issue would suggest a manufacturing issue. However it’s unlikely that completely different models all exhibit the same issue in the same way.
More likely, screen damage is a common form of accidental damage, and anyone googling for support will find threads like this and pile on with their own experience despite no actual link.
But having said that Apple would never admit to such a widespread fault even if it did plague their laptops. I fondly remember the 2015 A1502 trackpad cable failure where the keyboard and trackpad fail because of a deteriorated cable. It's a well known issue, but Apple just refused to acknowledge fault.
Took them forever to admit that their butterfly keyboards were faulty too.
Having said that, this apple discussion forum is probably a terrible way to organise around a supposed model being prone to screen cracking. The quality of the reports are bad. Also for every reported m1 air that has a screen crack, it would be nice to see pictures so a pattern -- if one exists -- could be identified.
I've replaced two screens now on my 2019 MBP. The first one happened when I was cleaning the camera before a video call. Apparently I pressed just a bit too hard with the cloth and that pressure broke the connection to the screen and it went black with intermittent white lines. It was under AppleCare so Apple fixed it for $99.
The second time it happened my cat lightly bit the right edge of the screen and that was all it took to kill the entire screen. Again, repaired under AppleCare.
There's clearly a fragility problem with Apple's recent screens. My hypothesis is that in Apple's zeal to make a borderless screen, there's no longer any protection for the connectors at the edge of the screen. A little bit of pressure on the edge could never have killed the older MacBook screens because they had a border of metal around them.
The lesson is that one must be extremely careful with the screens on late-model Apple laptops. Any pressure near the edge beyond a very light touch can completely destroy them. Any dirt or debris on the keyboard deck when you close the laptop can destroy the screen.
I'd love to find some kind of case for the laptop that protects the edge of the screen to make it a little more robust, but it seems like any such solution would be too thick to allow the machine to close.
Sounds like a manufacturing or sourcing issue. I can only imagine Apple hasn't recalled or notified customer support to be on the lookout for this because Apple themselves isn't even aware of the issue. How would they know? Techs writing up these issues are probably attributing them all to user damage. Unless someone is actively looking for a noticeable uptick in user damage cases I doubt it even comes up.
Apple is notorious about keeping information secret. We won't know if they know about the issue or not until they act on it. There's next to no chance that they'll say "we've noticed this issue increasing and are discussing internally how to handle it". It took years to acknowledge the keyboard issues.
They should know it's not normal to replace this many screens on a ~2 year old product line, they should be monitoring this type of data. It shouldn't have to bubble up from the front lines of tech support
$800 for screen is ridiculous. This issue is not limited to Apple products. My Asus laptop's screen cracked overnight. My laptop was out of warranty period. But the new authentic ASUS display only cost me $100. So I got it repaired and its working fine since then. The point is expensive doesn't always mean good.
This also happened to my own 2019 16" Intel MacBook Pro, and an acquaintance with that same model laptop even had it happen twice - to both the original and the replacement screen.
In all cases it wasn't a full crack but rather some sort of depression/fold mark, starting near but not touching the bottom edge, and all shared a similar bendy shape.
We both individually got the standard "first time we're seeing this" when first contacting support, and also both felt there was some sort of unnatural/forced tight-lipness or non-responsiveness in response to any speculation as to the cause.
To me this behaviour indicated that they were not particularly happy with either the responses they were giving, the nature of the request, or whatever obvious or non-obvious consequences any of this would have for either party.
I had a brand new MacBook Air M2 whose trackpad arrived cracked. Didn’t even know there was glass in the trackpad. For the first few hours of using it I thought it was a hair or something that had fallen on it. Kept trying to wipe it away and triggered all sorts of gestures.
I know someone who put a square of gaffer's tape over their Macbook Pro's video camera (in theory to protect their privacy) and one day they lifted up the screen and it was cracked. It seemed like that little bit of tape might have been the culprit.
Has anyone tried their hand at replacing a cracked screen/display themselves?
I've looked at the ifixit videos and it's just a lot of screws to remove, but seems doable. The main thing is that for spending $300, I cannot tell on Ebay/Amazon which sellers are actually selling legit display assemblies versus those that are "offbrand" or have some issue where the Truetone setting is no longer available (to name one issue they point out).
It's even hard to tell whether the unit you order will have the Apple logo on the aluminum cover.
Anyway, it's $300 + potential aggravation do it yourself versus $600 have the Apple service "genius" do it.
You certainly can, and more technical folks will have an easier time with it. A happy medium is an independent repair shop (not Apple affiliated.) Check Yelp near you for one with good reviews. Try to avoid franchises.
I have another issue. Randomly my M1 Macbook Air's frames drop below 20fps and I can see a trail behind the cursor and when I swipe between diff apps. Happens quite regularly with cpu idling at 97% and 6-7gb of memory left unused
I've had this happen once so far in my 2-year ownership. A reboot resolved it and it hasn't returned (yet). Feels like it could be a display driver bug.
It almost sounds like they’re cheaping out in build quality to compensate.
I can’t help but hope this is the beginning of Apples commercial decline. That consumers will finally see them for the mediocre culture hoarder they really are, but I dream.
I own an M1 mac and, although I haven't exactly abused it, there's been multiple times where it fell pretty hard both flat and on corners, and it's held up extremely well.
However, it being a very thin laptop I think puts it at greater risk of catastrophic damage, which is why I back up most things in my home directory and treat the Air as something that will either break or be traded in. That way if anything goes wrong, I can get a new laptop and be minimally affected.
This isn't to say that Macbooks should crack so easily, but I think this is the right way to approach basically any consumer grade device.
I have an M1 Air, under enough load it'll run right up towards 100C and that heat is localized over the processor. It seems possible there's something about the thermal design that makes this configuration more prone to this problem than previous machines. Aluminum expands more than glass so the problem would most likely be something around the chassis / hinge area.
What's with all the comments on that Apple thread where people are saying "I didn't have a grain of cereal, rice, etc between the screen"? Are Macbook screens that fragile now?
Yes. The tolerances between the top case and the display are that tight when closed. Apple has a literal support page telling you not to close the laptop lid with anything thicker than 0.1mm.
Many laptop screens are that fragile. We repair computers and it’s quite common to see a broken screen because someone closed something inside the clamshell accidentally. I’ve seen everything from pencils, pens, erasers, paper with staples, paper clips…
Some models have little to no clearance and if you close the lid with a grain of rice and apply pressure it'll break the screen. Closing the lid probably isn't enough, but picking it up could be.
This is obviously a serious issue, perhaps with manufacturing or a batch or two in the supply chain.
Thankfully my M1 Air has been fine (aside from one fully dead pixel from day one), and it has traveled around the world with me.
Apple should take responsibility for this, but for this current risk and possible owner-fault risks, I do find AppleCare+ worth it. There's almost no repair that can be done which would cost less than the plus warranty costs, so it's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned.
This has been going on since 2017, when they first started thinning their laptops to the limit or maybe beyond as far as the LCD glass reliability is concerned. My Macbook pro 2017 screen also cracked for no apparent reason and had to pay Apple the full price for a screen replacement for no fault of mine. https://youtu.be/Z--7YRRhCWg?t=38
This is the dark side of dealing with Apple. They won't take responsibility for anything. I bought my partner and iPhone 11 Max Pro and shortly after the warranty period ended a vertical band of light appeared spontaneously on the screen. No concession from Apple so £309 for a repair. Gouged doesn't come close.
Maybe it's a quality control issue?.I ordered a fully spec'd macbook pro and it had a small dent in the frame of the screen. It's really small but still piss me off that I paid 4k+ for a device that was not pristine when I opened the package
Yikes! I've noticed the lower left corner of my M1 Macbook Pro 13" is brighter than it should be - I only noticed it when watching a movie and what should have been black, wasn't. I'm not looking forward to that getting worse.
This is a widespread issue, it's almost like the computers are designed for this to happen. I've seen Windows laptops without any glass protection at the front with better durability.
This is already beyond planned obsolescence. This is purely scamming the users to pay a buttload of money in their repair centers. Here a new screen is about 650€, when the MacBook itself comes out of the shelves for about 1500€.
You can see how Apple managed to make itself one of the richest companies in the world. It wasn't for being customer friendly, they have a support even worse than some chinese brands.
There is at least one report in this HN thread, and some in the forum.
16" is less popular, so fewer reports, I guess.
I'm somewhat afraid for it because there is no AppleCare+ in our country, and I had to pay up to 700 euro for the keyboard problems in the last model before they replaced it for free.
The current macbook air body is pretty poor. I had one of the late intel ones for a spell before overheating killed the logic board, and it developed an outline of the keyboard on the screen within a few months just from the clamshell being closed daily. I wasn't even carrying this thing in a bag, it just sat on a desk.
I see, I didn't realize. It's probably for the best they left that m1 body behind then. Hopefully they solved the keyboard imprint issue as well with the redesign.
Owned a 2015-2016 MacBook for college. It shit the bed 2-3 years later. The cost of replacing the motherboard vs buying a brand new one was nearly identical. Ended up just splurging for a 2017 MBP.
Besides the butterfly keyboard going to shit (fortunately, replaced under warranty) 2 years ago. It has worked wonderfully for me so far.
Apple has always tried to blame customers whenever they can.
I remember when my MacBook pro 2015 started glitching and Apple voided the warranty by saying there was liquid spillage/fluid damage.
So apparently macbooks have these small stickers inside them which change color upon contact with liquids to help detect liquid damage but the issue with those stickers are that they also change color if you live in a humid area.
They made me pay for that repair even though the customer support guy at the store agreed that the color could change because of humidity but it was company policy to charge for those repairs.
Several years ago I brought my Macbook Air to an Apple store to get the battery replaced under warranty. The computer worked fine otherwise, it needed a new battery.
The 'genius' came back with my laptop after a few minutes saying it had water damage and trying to pitch me on a new laptop. After I refused and started insisting that the battery was under warranty he eventually relented and acted like he was doing me a favor to give me the new battery I was entitled to. Then when he finally came back with my newly batteried laptop, he mentioned my android smartphone and started trying to sell me an iphone. I'm never buying a computer from Apple again, it was a terrible experience.
Assuming he wasn't lying about the water indicators being tripped (he may well have been, for all I know), the only way I can think that would have happened is from the humidity in the air. I never dropped any drink on the laptop, never used it in the bathtub or anything like that. I don't believe it was ever in contact with liquid water at all, only water vapor.
They tried to sell me a new MacBook by suggesting that I trade this one in to get a small credit. I would rather use that macbook as a paper weight than to give it back to Apple so that they can sell it to some poor guy.
I suspect there are some differences between regions. The staffs in the Apple Store in Macau are more aggressive than the staffs in Canada, in my experience.
On the other hand, there were some screen issues on 2015 MacBook Pro laptops that I ended up experiencing. I inadvertently found out that they had extended the warranty well outside the usual period and fixed it for free. The only comment from the "genius" was it was one of the more interesting patterns he'd seen.
Apple's certainly far from perfect but I've been pretty happy with their customer service.
Heh, the punk at the Amsterdam Apple Store had the audacity to guilt trip me for a complaint I had within the mandatory EU warranty.
According to him, I had exposed an iPhone to excessive humidity despite the sensing sticker remaining white. His reasoning was that if the connector was growing copper corrosion it must have been humidity and therefore my fault (not a bad batch of connectors.)
I chuckled and asked him how could that happen if I always keep the thing in my pocket and he said “well that’s a humid environment and the phone is not designed for that.”
The fact that he also called a security guy before lecturing me about my warranty expiry was a clear indication of the sort of narrative and treatment I’d receive if I insisted, so I walked. Other times I was given red-carpet treatment and expensive replacements without a peep.
I guess it really depends on whether Cupertino acknowledges the defect, until then Genius KPIs must include how many customers they successfully subdue and kick out.
I've witnessed an interaction like this in the main Apple store in Berlin, where a woman came (with a friend) because she had an issue with having forgotten her password and wanting to get her photos back, which wasn't possible. The security guard was extremely fast to show up behind her back as soon as despair could be heard in her voice.
That gave me a very different image of Apple all of sudden..
>I chuckled and asked him how could that happen if I always keep the thing in my pocket and he said “well that’s a humid environment and the phone is not designed for that.”
> Apple has always tried to blame customers whenever they can.
+1 to this.
Apple has never admitted fault for their shoddy MagSafe 2 charger (and older Lightning) cable insulation, many of which have ended up disintegrating and spewing blue stuff all over my furniture.
I've had multiple cables flake over the years, and every time I bring one of the chargers to a Genius bar (so far: Australia, Japan, and Singapore), they've always fallen back to "policy" and blamed it on me for not taking care of it properly.
Apple doesn't want to do proper strain relief on their cables because it's ugly and unaesthetic. Apple has basically always prioritized form over function.
Apple wasn't always like that, just the current iteration of Apple. Back in the 80s and 90s Apple was more focused on longevity and building really great user interfaces than purity of design. Their Human Interface Guidelines were some of the best in the industry and they spent a lot of time and money on human factors research.
I feel people often have pink glasses over the old period of Apple. 90s was tons of Mac product lines competing with each other. No shortage of quality problem on those hardware. A nice operating system but was falling behind in many modern OS concepts (while trying to build a new OS from scratch and failing).
I used apple all my life (including the 90s) and it was definitely not the best period of apple.
Yeah, I burned through a few new Macs in late 90s early 2000s. They all were obsoleted pretty fast. I have an old Silver Door Mac G4 that was really just crap new out of the box.
But, the Late `09 Mac Mini I bought new has been as solid as one could ever hope for. I just ordered a refurbished late `14 Mac Mini from OWC to replace it and I expect it should last a few years too.
I mostly just write code for a web app I sell so I don't need the latest or most powerful Mac and the `14 model will run the current Mac OS and the latest versions of the software I use most, mainly BBEdit and web browsers.
I know I'd be pretty disappointed if I'd bought a Macbook M1 and that happened to me.
I consider M[Int] Pro line as a solid return to form, and I bring that up here because of the braided MagSafe cable which comes with it.
I'm hard on cables, and I have an instinct for what's going to crap out on me. I expect this cable to last. That thing where they can afford to make a decent cable, know how, and just... wont? This cable isn't one of those.
It will, however, show grime. They haven't let go of Apple White Which Reveals If You're a Slob yet, and I'm dubious they ever will.
Edit: have to take that last paragraph back, they sell them in black. I did figure on having two...
> It will, however, show grime. They haven't let go of Apple White Which Reveals If You're a Slob yet, and I'm dubious they ever will.
Haha, we had an all-hands meeting in-person for the first time since Covid last week. There were about 15 of us sitting around a huge conference table. Many white Macbook chargers and their cables sprawled across the table.
I did get very self conscious when I realized all the rest were pristine white - as if they had just unwrapped them for the first time - while mine was pit-stain yellow with the connector frayed and blue. I had never noticed how gross it was until seeing it right next to the newer, clean chargers.
I blamed it on the cat - he sits on the cord when it's lying on the bed. I'm not sure they were buying it, though.
While Woz certainly made some good decisions todays PCs are incomparibly more upgradeable and have longer shelf life due to also changing the CPU to a better model or use 5 years from the future graphic cards.
I had a MagSafe charger that the cable basically disintegrated on me and no amount of epoxy and electrical tape would keep it together.. Not good. On the other hand a new charger is a lot cheaper than having to replace the computer.
Sinclair Research made early home computers, well known in the UK, not so much elsewhere. These were tricky to set up, and often returned as broken. To cut their support costs, supposedly Sinclair, on first receipt of a 'broken' computer would simply add a sticker and send it back, 'repaired'. Often the customer would get it working on this second attempt. Only when a computer was sent in with this sticker already applied, would they actually investigate to see if anything was wrong with it.
Back in the days of the Toshiba laptops with the orange plasma screens (T3100 and T3200), a small batch had out of spec panels that were thicker than the right ones. These panels were under more tension in the bezel and had a tendency to shatter.
I worked for a Toshiba dealer/repair centre and the first we knew about the problem was when a Tosh came back with a screen that looked like it had taken a bullet. The owner swore that the screen just went 'bang'. The crazy thing was that it still worked!
We checked with Toshiba and they basically said 'Yep, replace it' and so it began.
We didn't see a lot of these screens, but it was a notable problem.
Also there was a famous media interview by clive sinclair telling customers they could fix an issue with the a ram pack upgrade falling off with the use of blu tac
A warranty that can be voided just because some little sticker a user can't access indicates moisture detection doesn't even sound like it should be legal. If you've done something obviously stupid like drop your monitor in the bath then you're hardly going to need such a sticker to detect "unreasonable use". It seems pretty reasonable to expect consumer goods to tolerate small amounts of moisture. In fact a monitor I just bought recently got water on it due to some dripping house plants above it. It was fine. So far anyway!
Those liquid damage indicators might need to be made illegal - water damage that would cause the machine to fail is readily visible without any stickers, and if it isn't visible then the machine is likely to work just fine.
My wife had a MBP with support plan years ago. The track pad started failing and it wouldn't always click even after you felt it depress and was slowly getting worse and worse. I took it in and the guy basally said there was no problem and I was just not pressing hard enough or something... It was very noticeable after using it for a while... Anyway I ended up ordering a new track pad online and replaced it myself and of course it fixed the issue. Still bothers me today.
Technical quibble here. The batteries are glued to the case, not soldered to anything. The power cables still use connectors and can be easily popped off.
At this point I’m thinking the 2012 I own could be the last laptop I bother buying. Its performant enough for being a day to day computer with an ssd and 16gb ram, and these days if I need more horsepower for one job I’m better off using a server. Plus the parts are so cheap on ebay and you can do most repairs with a phillips head screwdriver.
They solder components to save space and increase the reliability and power efficiency of the connections. Apple doesn’t care about self repair, but they aren’t using solder instead of connectors as part of a scheme to actively thwart it.
(ii) Does Apple solder certain components primarily because it makes repair more difficult?
Even if the answer to (i) is yes, the answer to (ii) can be no.
Most unpluggable components in most laptops are never intentionally unplugged over the lifetime of the device. Connectors take up space, can come unplugged accidentally, and degrade signal quality. Those are the reasons for soldering components in a modern laptop.
I would argue that they aren't anti right-to-repair. They are against poor quality repairs.
The issue is if you let individuals and 3rd party stores do repairs, there is no way to validate that they are doing it in a reliable/quality fashion. This is especially problematic when phones are getting more and more resilient to various environments (Like the addition of IP68)
When a customer has a repair done poorly and issues come up, they come to Apple for support.
Rossmann went on a drunken, paranoid rant about how the macbook webcam has secret hardware to spy on him. He took the video down after widespread ridicule.
I know there was a class action in late 00s for that where I was compensated because I had a similar interaction with an Apple Store genius. I was of the understanding they changed their "liquid damage" policy due to that lawsuit.
So, on the topic of sturdy.... I have the Macbook Air M1, bought it pretty much directly after it came out, and it is sturdy as shit.
Just to iterate on the kind of abuse mine has already endured - without even the slightest dent or crack:
1) I put the Macbook on a chair and, without thinking, put a blanket over it while cleaning, causing my girlfriend to sit on it with her full weight for over 2 hours
2) I have dropped the laptop two times while carrying it
3) The laptop has fallen off my desk also two times because of the lack of Magsafe
4) The laptop was, in its silicone case, in the passenger seat in a 25-30mph car crash, got shot full force against the middle console
Not a single dent. Just some scratches on one edge from the car crash.
I've also dropped mine several times (it did get a minor chip), beat it up a bit (despite trying to be careful), and even spilled water on it... liquid got behind a good 25% of the screen and I thought I would have to just suck it up and repair it, but it just evaporated/resolved itself after a couple of weeks.
Yup, forgot about that. I also spilled a glass of water over the keyboard, although not behind the screen like you. Evaporated after a while by itself... very, very happy with this laptop.
> A customer waiting to buy a decent laptop that is sturdy and comfortable to type on.
Dear Apple, your keyboard looks like an almost perfect arrangement of squares. The only problem is that it's not ergonomic. Humans prefer keys that are not flat, but slightly concave, for a more organic feel (for example). Style over function/ergonomics is not going to win me over.
Then don't buy an Apple laptop, simple. Buy a Thinkpad that is almost indestructible and you don't have these kind of problems, or as I did a Dell XPS 15 (though I can't talk about how solid it is, since I have it only since 2 months).
Surely I would prefer Dell for the support, I have 1 year of premium assistance (if there is a fault a technician will come where I am to make the repair, I don't have to bring it to a store that takes days to do the repair on a computer that I need for my job) and with like 20$ more I got the coverage even for accidental damage.
Apple doesn't have correct policy, first it doesn't recognize in warranty faults that should, and secondly repairs outside the warranty period cost more than buying a new computer, and it doesn't sell spare parts to others that are not Apple authorized repair center (that needs to apply the policy of Apple otherwise they will not send the spare parts): something called mafia.
> Then don't buy an Apple laptop, simple. Buy a Thinkpad that is almost indestructible and you don't have these kind of problems, or as I did a Dell XPS 15 (though I can't talk about how solid it is, since I have it only since 2 months).
Sure but now I have to use Windows if I do that, unless there are Thinkpads that come with support for Linux from the OEM.
I've had my M2 MBA for a few weeks now and it just feels flimsy. I am not surprised this is happening at all. I used the MBA'2013 for all these years and never once did I think it was heavy/thick. The aluminum shell it was in felt solid, this one feels like it's as thick as a coke can.
So slightly better than garbage is your barometer for quality?
I can easily contort/bend the frame with my hand if I wanted to. I'd have no confidence in this thing actually being on the go (in and out of bags). Even just a fall from the couch could RIP this thing is how it feels anyways. I could be wrong of course. But, I do feel that this vs quality is at odds and this one has stepped into the other end. I hope I'm wrong of course as I have never had to deal with getting an Apple product repaired and the whole idea of it is foreign to me (again, 2013 is my last purchase other than phones and since then I read about all the issues with keyboards, etc and it seems like they just don't give a damn anymore).
The original MBA is my ideal thinness goal for laptops honestly. It's just thick enough to make you feel secure, but thin enough and light enough to not hurt your back when you travel with it on the go, unlike a 17 or 15" typical laptop.
Thick? Sturdy? They're 15mm/0.61 inches thick. Most of that is used up by the base, the screen is a terrifyingly flimsy 3.6mm thin.
Comfortable? The key travel is 1mm. I'd hardly call that comfortable, that's a concession to thin-ness.
And they're not that fast just looking at power specs - the new processors are impressively efficient, but if they prioritized professional performance and effective heat dissipation over being skinny, just imagine what that efficient processor could do with 70% more power dissipation/heat removal.
Also, "fast" and "beast of a battery" may be true for now, but in a few years, when memory and storage are cheaper and faster, you won't be able to update, and when your battery starts to degrade you won't be able to click in a new one. Again, because long-term performance, upgradeability, and repairability have been sacrificed for the sake of thin.
I can see the merit in offering a “workstation” model that throws noise and heat out the window in favor of power, but as a native mobile dev who’s compiling all day I think the 14”/16” models make the right tradeoffs for the overwhelming majority.
No, my company provided work M1 Pro 16” isn’t going to beat my 5950X custom built tower or some of the high end Ryzen 6000 series laptops, but that’s fine. It’s still very fast and responsive while being inaudible 99% of the time, never hitting lap scorching temperatures, and having battery life measured in double digits.
I suspect that an unwieldy, hot, loud desktop replacement M-series machine would be very niche.
Further PSA: don’t buy the m1/m2 MBPs. It’s a weird machine now that the m1 pro/max MBPs are out, and the m2 air with its redesign is also out. Get one of those instead
Some firm already filed a class action complaint, and I submitted my details: https://classlawdc.com/2021/08/04/m1-macbook-screen-crack-in...