In countries like India we don't really have too many consumer protections. Apple tends to operate similar to a criminal enterprise - they sell defective products / products which become defective after barely any use.
I bought the 2015 Macbook Pro which developed the "staingate" issue. In first world countries, I hear that Apple replaced the screens for customers for free (I'm not sure if this is true or whether it's astroturfing). There is no such system here. Both speakers in this Macbook developed tearing and are no longer audible. Other laptops - Samsung, Lenovo, etc. in my household have worked perfectly. One laptop developed an issue with the keyboard, which was replaced for $50.
I received Airpods as a gift this year in February. One earphone stopped working within 8 months. Apple told me they weren't going to do anything about it. I must have used them about 20 times total. I also own knock-off Airpods. They work perfectly.
I follow Louis Rossman's YouTube channel where he opens up the devices and showcases the various corners that have been cut in the manufacturing process. He also exposes the unethical behaviour of the Apple "Genius" employees who overcharge customers for simple repairs. In one case he just plugged a loose connection back in and charged the customer for 20 minutes of labour whereas Apple said it would require a screen replacement for roughly ~30% of the cost of the device.
Repairability is becoming near impossible with these products now. At one point in time you could salvage together parts from dead devices to gather spares, but now Apple is working on technology to ensure that parts from different devices will not be compatible with each other.
Without legislation they will continue to operate like this with impunity. If enough key markets push for something like "right to repair" there is a small possibility that something will be done about this, otherwise the way things are headed, there will essentially be no accountability for cases like this.
I would not be surprised if there will come a point where they make devices stop working if you open them, and only they can restore the device back to a working state.
That's a good reminder of the consumer protections in the US.
The first couple times I ventured out of the US, I was struck by the differences in environment for some companies.
For example in Mexico, I was struck by plentiful advertising for cigarettes and hard alcohol. Strangely, Coca Cola advertisements on the TV always had a legal disclaimer, something like "always with food" (I recall poorly).
It's made worse by the fact that we pay more for the same devices because of import duties, and much more in terms of relative pay scales which are typically lower.
An average junior software developer here is making $10,000 a year. Hypothetically if they bought a new M1 Macbook Pro they'd spend $1,700 for the cheapest model (compared to around $1,500).
If there is a manufacturing issue that shows up after a year, they're down ~17% of their annual salary for a defective product.
While I agree with your general sentiment, your particular statement about Apple services in India wrt staingate is incorrect. I got the same problem with my 2015 MBP screen and got it replaced for "free" (had to pay Rs. 2500 service charges) in Mumbai. My speakers got busted[1] too after 4 years but so did my previous laptop's (Dell XPS 13 - 2011). While neither is acceptable, my point is that it is not unique to Apple.
However, I agree that Apple services are crap in India where they'll charge you Rs.2500 for even telling you what is wrong with your laptop and then maybe ask you to get the motherboard replaced for a minor repairable problem.
[1] It is fairly easy to repair them by using rubber cement but don't expect the original audio quality.
Wait, if you go to an authorized Apple service provider, they HAVE to provide you a with a free screen replacement as long as the device is it's within 4 years of purchase date. Either that or your the screen problem wasn't actually caused by staingate or maybe your device was not eligible for that particular service. It's obviously possible that the person there maybe didn't know about it (he's supposed to though)? In that case you could just go to a different service center.
Regarding Staingate - I checked with a few of them and they said they didn't know anything about it. I got puzzled expressions when I mentioned it.
Furthermore, one of them knew about it and quietly advised me not to do it because it is an extremely harsh and clumsy with scraping of glue and other such steps involved, some of which may inadvertently cause other damage, and so they recommended I just deal with it and upgrade eventually but they were happy to attempt it.
So my choices were to either live with the stains or risk the replacement based on what I was told. I use it with the stains till this day.
Yeah you got some really terrible service, I live in India too and they just replaced my screen assembly (not just the panel).
Same experience with butterfly keyboard servicing on my current MBP. Obviously these flaws shouldn't exist in the first place but they treated me well.
This is a great read about repairability, and we should also not forget that apple are the worst when it comes to repair. They essentially said “Our Manuals Could Make Repairs Safer, But You Can’t Have Them” (source here: https://www.ifixit.com/News/33977/apple-told-congress-how-re... )
>But to replace the battery, you need to disassemble almost everything (Harddisk, Speakers, CPU, fans, etc.) in a macbook and use chemicals (acetone).
>The Macbook pro will not work without a battery even if it is plugged in an electric power supply.
>The only reason I bought the Macbook pro in 2016 was because I had to do some iOS app development.
Yeah... I'm writing this on my trusty MacBook Air 2011, but this is why I won't touch anything Apple anymore.
I first got a Mac Mini, and then an iPhone, and it seemed nice at the time, so I invested more in Apple...
But the relationship has been turning more and more abusive and controlling since then. If a human abuses me, I distance myself from them and eventually let the relationship fade away. It shouldn't be any different with a corporation.
Repairability is a big concern for me for the majority of things I purchase and use on a daily basis. All my computers, car, clothing, furniture in the apartment. Some things are more repairable than others, like a computer is obviously based on specific parts I can purchase online where as my clothing just needs a needle and thread. Still, keeping repair in mind when possible is important to me for a few reasons:
1. I like my items old and lasting because it makes them more personal and gives it history.
2. There is a sense of pride when you fix something, whether that be a coffee table or a bug in software.
3. Reduce waste.
4. Save money.
Repair (especially in technology and cars) has become more and more locked down and difficult, and the right to repair is one I think we need to continue to strive for.
5. Avoid having to set up a new device everytime something breaks.
6. Repairability often comes hand in hand with better control over what a device does/does not enforce about how I can use it. (Read: better Linux/FOSS support without garbage bloatware.
Just ordered a second replacement battery in under 5 years for a Dell XPS laptop due to the battery swelling. The first was replaced under warranty (and the trackpad was also replaced as it had been slightly bent).
The laptop is now out of warranty, so I contacted Dell to see about a replacement battery. "Sorry, we don't support laptops more than 4 years old" was the response. The support person suggested I source a replacement battery on Ebay and find a local laptop repair place to do the swap.
I deliberately chose to purchase a high spec (for the time), expensive laptop so it would have good longevity and previously I have had good support from Dell. Seriously disappointed by Dell's response this time.
Will be giving careful consideration to repair-ability and long term support before making another laptop purchase.
I've dealt with two swollen batteries on Dell laptops. Both times the laptop was out of warranty but was in the service window. Dell said that the battery was not a "user serviceable part" and would require me to ship the laptop to them with a estimated 2 week repair turnaround.
I ended up buying a battery on eBay both times along with a screwdriver kit with a T5 star bit (I think that was the size) the first time. It takes about 5 minutes to swap the battery.
I just looked in my email and the seller I used was "good-batteries" but it looks like they don't sell on eBay anymore.
"Thankfully Apple is not yet making cars, otherwise, to change Engine oil, we may have to dissasemble the headlamps, engine, transmission, differential, etc."
Of course, an Apple car would be an EV and there would be zero user-servicable parts, for sure!
I do want to note that, my 2012 Macbook Air still runs, but the battery does indeed need to be replaced. And I fully agree: It would be very nice to be able to use the laptop with a dead battery as long as it was plugged in.
My pretty standard Volkswagen Golf is effectively not user-serviceable by me because I know nothing about car mechanics, and don't want to. I think you'll find the same is true for the vast majority of people, so I don't think this is a good analogy.
I have an iPad pro wifi from 2018 with totally dysfunctional wifi and speaker and IPS bleeding. This is my second one, the first one I exchanged for screen bleeding also. I have the last usable Mac Book Pro (2013) custom order with i7/750ssd/16gb ram and will change the battery myself soon (Apple refuses to fix laptops from 2013).
The last Apple product that I have bought is Mac Mini 2018 - unlike other Apple products, Mac Mini is easy to open and installing the ram was a surprisingly light experience. I expect next generation of Apple products to be totally glued, without option to repair at all. I have no problems with this, because I will not buy any Apple product in the future, but Apple creates trends and other manufacturers copy quick.
I don't see change for good in this direction unless legislative measures arise and insist repairability to be mandatory.
I held my 2013 MBP for a long time because of the keyboard issue and finally replaced it with the late 2019 MBP. I find the new keyboard fine (though this year it’s spent its time in clamshell mode mostly).
My MBP 2013 was "The Desktop Replacement" machine. Not anymore, all the rage about "death of the desktop computer" and now in 2020 I rock monster Ryzentosh with joy.
Not that it's a justification, per se, but a lot of modern laptops won't boot without a battery. The power adapter often can't provide sufficient power to spin everything up at boot, and needs the battery as a buffer (this is why, if you run your macbook battery completely flat, it needs to charge for a few minutes before it can boot back up).
They can't boot without a battery, but for a different reason: The laptop only draws power from the battery, not from the power plug. There is no power connection other than through the battery.
Why are laptops being sold with insufficient power adapters then? That also sounds just flat wrong. Most non-gaming laptops have power supplies with significantly higher outputs than their maximum power draw, and the boot-up surge is incredibly tiny. I would be flatly amazed if a MacBook boot up power draw was even 10% higher than system power draw under maximum load.
MacBooks in particular use USB-C for power these days, which is currently capped at delivering 100 watts. By comparison, many gaming laptops over in the Windows side of the world ship with 180-230 watt power adaptors (using proprietary connectors).
Perhaps among other reasons, folks don't want to carry a giant adapter around with their laptop. I've seen adapters for "engineering" laptops, that seemed as big as my entire laptop.
Considering that the battery in a MacBook is non-removable, it's not just a corner case - it's a warranty-voiding act that the designers explicitly don't have to account for.
Well I literally powered up an oldish laptop two days ago that had been sitting there for a few years, and it turned off three times within a few seconds of booting until I let it sit for a few minutes for the battery to charge.
The power brick is rated at 19V 3.16A output, so 60W, the CPU is a 35W TDP second-gen i3.
Of course a big part of that is spinning up the disk, so as you say I imagine this is quite different these days with SSDs.
> I've not come across any laptop or Android smartphone that wouldn't power up without a battery.
I had the pleasure of working on an Android smartphone that wouldn't power up without a battery. Or even with a battery, if the outside temperatures were sufficiently low to cause the battery voltage to drop below the FCC-defined limits for running the radios.
Eh, all these broad brush sweeping statements and specific individual issues are just noise and random data points. It all just depends on what you want or need. I’ve been on Macs and iOS devices since 2008 and it’s bee great. Excellent well supported high quality systems that have lasted many years and given me outstanding value for money overall. Yes I’ve had hardware failures, including 2 hard disk failures. One was on a 6 year old machine so par for the course, the other was a few months out of Apple Care but they replaced it for free anyway.
I completely believe the horror stories though. They’re a huge company operating all over the world. Frankly these things can happen with any company. I only use iMacs and a Mac Mini so can’t comment in detail on the laptop keyboards but I can understand why people were upset.
It entirely depends on your own specific needs and circumstances. For me a Mac is a powerful, well built consumer desktop and Unix workstation, with some great convenience features. For someone else they might be over priced inflexible systems lacking needed capabilities.
You are correct that its easy to mis-apply broad sweeping statements based on individual complaints, however, Apple's extended warranty program generates billions of dollars and the Apple repair market is also worth hundreds of millions (sorry don't have a handy link, this is just waht I remember the last time I looked. Should be easy enough to Google). Its clear that like any other product Apple products too fail, and its also clear that the customers understand that Apple products fail.
Apple has more and more in common with other luxury goods, such as expensive cars, which have a glamourous reputation but are notoriously unreliable after only a few years. Then they are eye wateringly expensive to repair.
For someone buying simply for utility, Apple is best avoided. Their market position and financial incentives are aligned against selling you a machine that is solid in the long term.
Apple is more akin to a Fashion Line than an Electronics company
They have a premium price not because they are a premium product but because "influencers", celebrities, and the wealthy use them, thus they "must be premium" and must have a high $$$
It is perception vs reality, it is marketing vs substance
In this Apple is Genius at perception and marketing
I have flooded it twice, once a month after buying it with hot latte. Then second time two years ago when it was dropped into clean water. In the second case the water got absolutely everywhere including between individual leaves of the LCD panel.
Thanks to how it is built, both times I was able to disassemble it myself and clean it properly to remove any water and residues.
I have also changed internal battery which was as simple as unscrewing it and disconnecting from main board. I hacked BIOS to accept 4G M.2 card because when the laptop was certified 4G wasn't even a thing yet.
I will be giving it away and replacing it with a newer one but only because of some outdated technology. It still runs fast, doesn't get hot, panel is perfectly readable and everything works smoothly.
I had an A1398 2014 MacBook Pro 15" until a few weeks ago. I also experienced the battery expanding (it was last changed in 2018 just as the AppleCare warranty expired).
The replacement battery killed the GPU.
The screen turned blank when waking from sleep. It survived another week, but after that, would crash whenever switching to NVIDIA graphics.
I can't just replace the battery now - I need to change the logic board ($500). Repairs for the 820-3787 are possible through Louis Rossmann, Paul Daniels, etc - but cost a similar amount to a replacement board.
Original batteries cannot be bought from Apple - the laptop is obsolete. I don't know which batteries to trust.
Non-Apple devices lack MagSafe, Thunderbolt, iSync USB, and Time Machine. Newer Apple devices lack most of these too, and can't even upgrade the SSD. The latest M1 MacBooks can't even dual-boot, or use Target Disk Mode for recovery. In the end, I'm probably just going to have to learn how to use OpenBoardView, buy a better soldering iron and microscope, and go for the real full-stack, hardware as well as software.
This person may have a point, but I find it hard to read past hyperbole like "Luckily, I did not purchase the touchbar version which probably is one of the worst electronic devices ever manufactured." Sure, he may not like it, but that's such a wild overstatement that I find myself disinclined to read any further.
And seemingly unlike many others giving their anecdata in this thread - a pet peeve of mine on HN, because it's effectively meaningless noise - my 2014 MacBook Pro is still going strong after one battery replacement two years ago, and if it wasn't for the M1s I wouldn't even be thinking about upgrading.
It would force compromise on every other aspect of the product.
In the real world = more time (at every stage of the R&D and manufacturing process) + extra material costs (more tooling, more PCBA's, more screws, etc.).
I personally think that this issue will become a very big deal over the next decade or so, but at this point the market isn't applying enough pressure for the big companies to change their GtM processes.
No, but releasing basic board schematics - or even just allowing third-parties to freely redistribute their own custom-made schematics - is. Allowing your supplies to sell board components directly to consumers and third-party repair shops is. Allowing third parties to move used OEM parts across international bounds without fear of having their property seized for being "counterfeit" is.
There is a huge community of independent repair technicians out there who are constantly undermined by the likes of Apple and other major hardware manufacturers. The manufacturers don't even have to "design for repair". They just have to allow repair to be an option in the first place.
Maybe if repair becames a common alternative again, "design for repair" would actually be considered a competitive advantage.
Because Apple does not have their own service centers in India. It has been outsourced, sub-contracted again to mulitple layers that any meaningful repair/service is impossible in India.
Inb4 the comments that Apple build quality is "second to none", that Windows and desktop Linux are literally unusable so that the author, who computers for a living, has no choice but to buy Macs and run macOS, and anyway this is just one data point which, like a single stuck pixel on a 4K display, officially does not count against Apple's flawless record.
I don't know if that's the case. There are temperature ranges though, documented by Apple, in which you need to operate your devices. Can't really forbid selling devices in countries with the wrong climate, after all the buyer might be committed to only operate the devices within the documented ranges.
I bought the 2015 Macbook Pro which developed the "staingate" issue. In first world countries, I hear that Apple replaced the screens for customers for free (I'm not sure if this is true or whether it's astroturfing). There is no such system here. Both speakers in this Macbook developed tearing and are no longer audible. Other laptops - Samsung, Lenovo, etc. in my household have worked perfectly. One laptop developed an issue with the keyboard, which was replaced for $50.
I received Airpods as a gift this year in February. One earphone stopped working within 8 months. Apple told me they weren't going to do anything about it. I must have used them about 20 times total. I also own knock-off Airpods. They work perfectly.
I follow Louis Rossman's YouTube channel where he opens up the devices and showcases the various corners that have been cut in the manufacturing process. He also exposes the unethical behaviour of the Apple "Genius" employees who overcharge customers for simple repairs. In one case he just plugged a loose connection back in and charged the customer for 20 minutes of labour whereas Apple said it would require a screen replacement for roughly ~30% of the cost of the device.
Repairability is becoming near impossible with these products now. At one point in time you could salvage together parts from dead devices to gather spares, but now Apple is working on technology to ensure that parts from different devices will not be compatible with each other.
Without legislation they will continue to operate like this with impunity. If enough key markets push for something like "right to repair" there is a small possibility that something will be done about this, otherwise the way things are headed, there will essentially be no accountability for cases like this.
I would not be surprised if there will come a point where they make devices stop working if you open them, and only they can restore the device back to a working state.