Apple Admits to Hardware Quality Problems with iPhone X, MacBook Pro
thurrott.com
thurrott.com
On the MacBook Pro front I've had the sticking keys issue on the left command, C, B, G and 3 keys - so took it in finally after being tortured by this for months - 1 week later and I called them to see what was going on and they said that the whole top piece needed to be replaced, but when taking out the motherboard they have snapped the thing in two.
Making these machines difficult to repair doesn't just effect end users it seems.
Still, I'm glad that Apple are still the sort of company that replace the whole machine in these situations. I'm sure there are bean counters who will be thinking making it harder to get things fixed is the solution though.
Oh and I should have said originally I'd already dropped something on the screen which shattered and they did charge me the £700+ for repairs at a previous date.
It does make me question how long this machine will last and if I should sell it while it's pristine before anything bad happens to it...
Don't MacBooks have the SSD soldered onto the motherboard now, so motherboard damage == total data loss?
Edit: yep: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/touch-bar-mbp-teardo...
If you're going to make something almost totally unrepairable, you'd better make it almost totally reliable as well.
But it also came back in like-new condition, so I don't really mind.
They say it improves security, but certainly it's possible to have FDE which can be copied onto a new disk --- you're just doing a bit-exact copy of the ciphertext.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/362635/data-recovery-connector-re...
https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/20/apple-t2-data-recovery-transf...
Apple has recently documented a new data recovery process internally for Macs that utilize its T2 chip introduced with the iMac Pro and the 2018 MacBook Pro. The new process for repair staff is being introduced due to the T2 chip’s advanced security features including hardware encryption for SSD storage that isn’t compatible with Apple’s previous data recovery methods used on older machines.
PCMag should update their article.
The market demands thinner laptops with amazing battery life. The market - in general - isn't demanding a more serviceable macbook.
It doesn't. This is false. Noone cares about thin laptops. People want light laptops but thin is completely artifical and doesn't improve your experience.
One might say it was Jobs' plan to destroy the laptop industry with it and it worked.
https://i.imgur.com/dV7WHCD.jpg
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kfOpFgAZ4kfdK8vNUNMOlKjuYwc=...
I've owned both of these. They both have good specs for their time. The ThinkPad keyboard was wonderful. The trackpad of the MBP is wonderful but so is its size and shape. The ThinkPad was a brick.
You say no one cares about thin, but once you have seen the MBP, the ThinkPad is a hard sell. (Though you youngsters should try one of those keyboards to see what you missed).
But I think it's fair to say customers don't care about the last 2-3mm of thickness that Apple is sacrificing the ability to repair in order to squeeze out.
Generally speaking, maxizing a single aspect of a design is rarely a good choice. Making notebooks or smartphones as thin as possible (or pretending to do so, the strategies used here are borderline gaslighting) is not an intrinsic good.
Replaceable RAM and SSD. 4.06 pounds. The MBP 15" is 4.03 pounds.
Now, the keyboard definitely isn't as good as it was (RIP old keyboard, may you rest in peace), but it's definitely still very competitive.
That TP 340 I bought in 1994. It was a marvel for its time and much more affordable than the contemporaneous Mac: a more stylish brick like so:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/540c_ope...
Either way, arguing against "consumers don't really care about having the thinnest brick on the market" by invoking early 90s hardware by comparison is of course a B/S way of arguing things.
MacBook is actually really bad in the keyboard department when you consider that it's 15" - it has tiny up/down arrows, and no PgUp/PgDown/Home/End. Which is a shame, since these all would easily fit if speakers went elsewhere, and the touchpad was just a wee bit smaller (I mean, seriously, does it really need to be bigger than a 6" smartphone?). For a productivity laptop, these are very weird trade-offs.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x/Thi...
I used to carry a 7 lb laptop (3 kg). Now it’s 3 lbs, plus dongles.
Getting to 2 lbs is barely noticeable. Thinner by 3-5 mm is imperceptible. Longer battery life is very noticeable.
I suspect that when you say "noone," you mean "noone except for all those weird people who bought the first generation of Macbook Air, and then another, and are now ready to buy a third Macbook Air."
Like me. And judging by recent Apple history, I am not an outlier. They have sold a LOT of Macbook Airs, to people who could have bought a "more powerful" machine with a different form factor.
Yes, absolutely I love its light weight. But I also like its profile, and the entire "thin wedge" design principle is to increase the appearance that it is thin.
I’d love for laptops to keep getting thinner. The X1C is almost thin enough to easily carry around with a stack of papers, but if it were thin as an iPad that’d be even better.
MacBook Pro 13” 2017 - height: 1,49cm, width: 30,41cm, depth: 21,24cm, weight: 1,37kg
X1 Carbon 2017 - height: 1,52cm, width: 32,26cm, depth: 21,59cm, weight: 1,13kg
Perhaps the X1 has some perceived slimness going on, like the MacBook Air..
To be clear, I’m not against the X1 Carbon in any way and I’m glad the XPS 13 and MBP have competition.
What did Lenovo do? Made them pointlessly the same shape without a hint of cable management[1]. Along with lots of simple rectangular bricks. Strangely they still seem to keep the fixed cable exiting sideways on nearly all of them - that was for easy cable winding that you can no longer do.
[0] https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/w2cAAOSw-0xYY4l3/s-l1600.jpg
[1] https://www.astringo.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/lenovo...
You'd be surprised: "I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky things. Yes, there are vendors that have tried to emulate it, but usually pretty badly. I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light" (Linus Torvalds)
Blew me away in that Facebook dating thread yesterday how many people were saying that nobody uses Facebook.
I had a 2012 Macbook Air. Used it until 2016 when I spilled coffee on it and frantically replaced it with a 2015 macbook pro within a few days.
A year later I still missed my Air, and figured I could just open it up and try to clean it out with alcohol. Figured although I could take it to someone for them to try to fix it, I could learn something new if I did it myself and if it didn’t work again nbd.
There was sticky coffee on the motherboard and on the case and at the power button, but I took my time to clean it all out, dried it out, and reconnected the battery and it came back to life!!! I was so happy. And when I started using the Air again I noticed how much I preferred the form factor. I immediately made my 2015 rmbp the backup and went back to using the 2012 Air as my main.
They both had similar GHz and the same storage. Ran the same OS. I could write production code just fine on either of them. They ran the same IDE’s and crunched the same numbers. However the Pro did have the better screen. Still I preferred the Air to the Pro because of the form factor.
Every time I let someone borrow my air for a second when we were together they’d complement on how thin and light it was and they liked that. I think Apple figured out a market segment and there’s more of us than you’d think. And unless you’re editing videos for a living the Air is a capable machine.
MacBook Pro had same Ram and storage but with the i5. Difference between the 2012 i7 and 2015 i5 in GHz was negligible as far as I was concerned.
Laptops were the first to succumb to the thin/miniaturization cancer, and phones really took off with it. The best form factor smartphone IMO is still my first cellphone I had: Samsung SCH-i730. It had a screen which slid up revealing a physical keyboard, it had a camera, it had a large extended battery, it even had an extend-able antenna! It was not shy about being thick! I grew up loving tech, and now with faceb0rg + scr00gle spying, crapple + android thin-sh1t hardware, "smart tvs," more and more user-lockout in hardware (intel ME?), I'm finding myself hating it all more and more!
Nobody buying something that doesn't exist is not proof that nobody wants it. If nobody wanted it then why are people asking for it?
Lenovo makes modular laptops and sells more laptops than Apple.
HN and the techy types are a huge market, especially for high end hardware and especially for Apple. I need something I can run macOS on for testing, but I can get the cheapest available Mini (and then not replace it for a decade) and a high end PC laptop to actually use, or I can buy a new high end Macbook.
> Joey Beercan just wants his device to work.
Which is why the first generation or two that can't be upgraded or repaired still sells. Ordinary people haven't figured it out yet. Then some time passes, they go to have it upgraded or repaired and discover it's now slag, so they go to their nearest HN or techy type to ask what to buy instead this time so that doesn't happen again.
But the reason most people choose Lenovo over Apple is not modularity, it’s cheaper price.
Toyota sells more cars than Rolls Royce’s, it does not mean that people buy Toyota because they think it’s better quality than Rolls Royce
I've been a Mac user since 2006 & own 4 MacBooks, but I just ordered a Lenovo X1 Thinkpad because I'm sure it has to be better quality than the last MacBook Pro I bought. That MBP is a completely unreliable lemon, it's been serviced by the Apple Store 5 times. And when I hear friends complain of broken keyboards, failing SATA cables, and now failing SSDs on their Macs, I just can't trust Apple laptops anymore.
The deciding factor for me was Lenovo's replaceable SSD, which meant I could upgrade it to more storage than a Surface Book 2 (so modularity was important). The fact that the Thinkpad was $1500 cheaper was just icing on the cake, not the deciding factor. I also thought the Thinkpad was likely to be less fragile than a Surface Book 2.
But I do agree the majority of Lenovo's unit sales are probably their awful cheap consumer line that sells in the $400 range, not $3000 Thinkpads.
I bought an X1 less than 2 months ago (after 8 years of MacBooks) for the same reason: it _has_ to be better quality.
I take extremely good care of my laptops, but nonetheless after 3 weeks the screen was scratched, because when it's closed the lid pushes against the keyboard leaving marks (and eventually scratches) on the glossy HDR display. Also the lid doesn't close properly [0] on one side, which just drives me crazy. For a $2000 laptop, I am pretty disappointed.
[0] https://mensfeld.pl/2018/07/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon-6th-ge...
Two can play at this game. "But the reason some people choose Apple over Lenovo is not lack of modularity, it's ability to run macOS." It's trying to make the original claim untouchable by discounting diverse evidence with a monolithic justification, even though that doesn't account for everyone, and on net may even make the original claim weaker when all such things are considered.
Also, many of Lenovo's products are the same price as Apple's, and they still sell really well.
MKBHD's Pixel 3 also had a similar issue.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/9r0hsh/mkbhd_im_no...
https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1055440851550326785
To quote from the above tweet,
"Turns out about a week before this line showed up, I had a small pocket-slip drop (maybe a foot)."
More context from reddit,
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/9r0hsh/mkbhd_im_no...
That's just great - yet again, practicality is sacrificed for the sake of pointless flashy design.
Is this on the 2018 MBP?
It is possible because customers pay for it. It sure as heck is not coming out of the profit for the shareholders...
Huh, in Norway there are multiple cases of them refusing to follow the law when it comes to repairs. Norway has good consumer protection laws, better than the guarantee most companies provide, and Apple is known for not honoring this.
Because one costumer decided he wanted to have his laptop repaired instead of the Apple's usual practice of giving a refurbished device?
That's not what most people want. I would rather have a refurb that is better wear and tear state than my device, and has a new battery, than have my previous device repaired.
I have no affection for pieces of plastic and aluminum.
How exactly do you know this?
I would imagine lot of people want their own device repaired.
I have no idea what you're talking about here..? It's not whether they repair or give you a new one, but them right out refusing to deal with it.
But my own experience has always been good. Myself and a friend have had devices replaced within the warranty period free of charge even though it was clearly our faults.
For instance, most electronic devices have 5 years warranty by law here, then it doesn't matter if some company says they give 2 years guarantee. They still have to fix it after 4 years if it breaks.
I so want to buy the MacBook Air 2018 but am afraid the 3rd generation keys only delay the known problems until I’m out of warranty. I have to wait and see if there is a wave of defects in a year or two to judge its reliability. Why did Apple have to sacrifice reliability for thinness…
The fact that devices get thinner and devices are sold in ever more numbers/profitably does not mean the device dimensions are the cause.
All I really want the new MBA for is the 16gb ram, but they bundled it with multiple new tradeoffs.
If my products went bad like, I'd be genuinely too disappointed. Luckily I've always had damaged / out of warranty products replaced by apple by being a little persistent.
The whole process, although annoying, was painless. The tech gave me the option of them trying to fix it by blowing dust out or just replacing the entire keyboard. I elected for the later given that it's a design fault. The repair took 1 1/2 days which I had done when I was out of town.
Since they glue everything together, getting a new J key also meant a new keyboard, touch bar, finger print reader, speakers, battery and touch pad. Which if there was no recall I can imagine would be a costly exercise. Hopefully after the recent recalls Apple engineers will be looking at making easier to service components.
2018 MacBook Air Teardown Confirms Improving Repairability With Adhesive Pull-Tabs Under Battery and Speakers
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/08/2018-macbook-air-ifixit...
Amusingly, the 13" MacBook Pro non-touchbar where they have defective SSDs are the only ones that have removable SSDs. The touchbar versions are soldered. I wonder if that's a happy coincidence that they're repairable, or if the reason for these defects is that Apple's engineers screwed up the socket since they have basically no experience with those across the rest of the product line anymore.
That's not a very long time. Business laptops' extended warranty is 5, and to be honest, 5-6 years old laptops - actually, nearly anything since modern sleep and aes-ni - are perfectly enough, so instead of buying new, it really should be possible to fix a hinge, a display, a keyboard once in a while, instead of needing to buy a new machine.
The only thing holding it back is I could not for the life of me get Boot Camp working with Win10 — UEFI nonsense.
The new Air is finally actually tempting me to upgrade. Before that there was nothing I thought was worth considering.
Funny you mention that - my MacBook Pro was repeatedly serviced during my 3 year AppleCare period, and I noticed that instead of my warranty status showing AppleCare on the statements, after the first couple of services that status had changed to "Australian Consumer Law Requirement".
They still didn't provide me with a replacement machine though - they just keep replacing the SATA flex cable every few months. I'm switching to a ThinkPad now.
A standardized form-factor allows easy replacement of motherboard, CPUs, screens, keyboards. Desktop PCs still use ATX cases, ATX power supplies, ATX motherboards.
Desktop PCs can be upgraded while keeping the monitor, keyboard and mouse: the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade can consists of a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU.
There's little reason laptops couldn't have went down the standardization path in the late 1990s. The chassis of a 1998 IBM ThinkPad should be able to components from 2019 without much effort. Just like an ATX desktop case.
I think this most illustrates not so much that components should be easier to service in and of themselves but rather that it should be Apple's problem universally, not just for a recall. On a product at this level standard legally required warranty should be more like 4-5 years. Apple (or anyone else) can themselves make the economic call on whether costlier repairs are offset by increased revenue due to feature advantages or other QA boosts, but they shouldn't be able to externalize the cost onto their customers and reap any rewards beyond egregious circumstances. The sticker price should include a reasonable expectation of fitness for purpose over a lifespan in line with the price at no extra cost.
Not definitive by any means but its all I can offer up to go on. YMMV but thats true of all hardware.
Anecdotally, my first-gen butterfly MB keyboard has been flawless, while I've had half the function keys fail on my fancy mechanical keyboard. (Though they failed due to a issue with the underlying mylar strip, and Kinesis was happy to sell me an out-of-warranty replacement part.)
I too have looked around online for reports of 2018 MBP owners seeing this same thing, but haven't found a lot.
(Also, my WiFi reception seems noticeably worse than my late 2016 MBP, but I'm not sure if that's hardware or some misconfiguration I haven't found.)
EDIT: Your username... Are you from Bloomington or is that a coincidence? :)
I'm sure there is an inflection point in terms of thickness where you have to switch from screws to glue. And I'm sure there are some laptops that straddle that line and are quite repairable. But it's not correct to say that Apple moving counter to the rest of the industry with respect to repairability.
More consumers have decided to value light and thin over repairable and upgradable.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's almost cheaper to stock/ship whole motherboard units than individual parts. And much easier to guarantee a tighter repair SLA.
Inventory tracking, storing, shipping, and training don't come free.
Especially if, as Apple, they can likely financially push back on their suppliers for some flaws.
You are really wrong to assume that thin and light can not be repairable. It's what Apple wants you to believe, but this is just not true.
The way out is to come up with entirely new products, which Apple has done remarkably well before. I think it's high time they do so again.
I think the drive to create high margin products is making Apple gravitate towards pushing out technologies that differentiate them from the rest, such as the touch bar, or these keyboards. But it may not actually be better.
He has been consistently wrong about the iPhone
https://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/
He doesn’t have the greatest track record when it comes to the iPhone.
https://jeremy.linuxquestions.org/2007/06/28/clayton-christe...
It looks like another case of “No Wireless. Less Space Than the Nomad. Lame”.
I'm pretty sure there will be a sizable market for Apple products. It's just that they might lose the edge after some time.
The symptoms of it is new entrants coming in from below with “good enough” products that are cheaper. Forcing the market leader to lower prices. Apple has been headed in the opposite direction for years.
He also predicted that “modularity beats integration” as a market segment matures because you have more companies specializing in parts of the product and putting R&D behind it.
But look at what’s happening in the phone market. Apple is consistently bringing out better processors than the rest of the industry. The operating systems are definitely not behind the competitors. By being tightly integrated for instance, they were able to tell developers to submit watch apps using bitcode (?) because they knew four years later they were going to introduce a 64 bit chip got the watch.
Another advantage you are seeing in the market because of integration vs. modularity is that Apple can push OS updates for all of its devices that have been introduced since 2013 in one day. The “modular” Android ecosystem, not so much.
Another thing is that there has never been a company that sell premium products and got 20% of unit sales market share and even higher in usage shares. At least I am not aware of. Apple may very well be the only one in history. And the unit sales, combined with high margin has allowed them to constantly innovate. The original theory behind innovator’s Dilemma never expected the innovator has such high margin and high sales.
And I think it is one reason why Wall Street has low valuing Apple Stock. They have never seen it, there are no case studies in all the text book.
As far as purchased media, music has been sold DRM free on iTunes for almost a decade and you can transfer most of your purchased movies between iTunes, Google, Amazon, and Vudu using Movies Anywhere (completely legal).
Most consumers in the US don’t pay for their phones. All of the carriers offer zero interest payment plans. The difference between a $300 phone on spread between 24 months and $1200 phone spread over 36 months (not a type. T-Mobile is offering 36 month financing on some high end phones) is a lot easier for people to stomache.
Tell that to average consumers. There are people who are even reluctant to upgrade their iPhone because they don't want to do Data Transfer. Let alone transferring to another system, say WhatsApp from or to Android. By far most people don't want to relearn what ever it is on a new system.
Don’t most apps like WhatsApp store your contacts on their server? I don’t use WhatsApp but all of the chat apps I use do.
It is actually easier for WhatsApp history to move from Android to iPhone.
And the fate of Samsung, (and some other company I can't even remember but that was dominant for Android phones before that) shows that the Innovator's Dilemma just doesn't apply, at least not yet. The theory's whole stick is that it describes a mechanism that cannot be defended. That's why it's termed a "dilemma". Apple has successfully withstood dozens of attacks with low-end generics, showing quite clearly that this is currently just a regular market.
Samsung and other competitors also show that it's ridiculous to analyse this market in time frames of "decades". At that resolution, it's quite likely that, when the history of this market is eventually written, Samsung wouldn't even show up! The rather wild swings in profits and market share of all competitors also show that for the market segment in general, a single year (which not coincidently aligns with the product cycle) is the adequate granularity. It's only Apple that somehow manages to show a rather strange stability among this volatility.
Even in the heyday of the Apple //e back in the early 80s, thier computers cost more than thier competitors.
As can be seen in the Android market and the PC market, it’s hard to “innovate” while competing on price.
No.
PS. Because of downvotes: doing it because of competition is a possible reason, not THE reason if the unit sales are starting to drop after 15 years. See whataboutism: https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Not to mention that iPod sales dropped from high of almost 55 million a year in 2008 to less than 10 million before they became basically meaningless and they stopped giving numbers.
So if they were going to not give numbers because a product line was declining in volume. They would have done it years ago.
But more importantly, the only product line that Apple has ever had volume dominance in was the iPod. When has Apple ever cared about volume and market share and not revenue?
It's probably easier to see when going back to the original word, which (for reasons that must have included either weed or a stroke) was replaced by this historical tragedy of naming that is "whataboutism", i. e. "hypocrisy".
They’re surely sensitive to this because Apple has always traded at a low P:E relative to their peers and even the market as a whole. IE. everyone has always tends to bet against Apple and expect them to fall apart “any day now.”
Considering a substantial portion of their compensation to employees is paid in RSUs it makes sense for Apple to try and get out ahead of the narrative and protect their stock price as best they can.
46.89M units last quarter is not that many?
And why they should?
Pretty much everyone has a smartphone now.
Trying to push more and more units is something that only a lousy manufacturer would try.
Apple is trying to make their devices to last longer.
So many things out there that I think apples ux centric design could really improve.
For example, they should make iOS devices true companions of Macs, to the point where you can simply use iPhone/iPad as a direct input. (Why they went the 1D “Touch Bar” route is beyond me; it makes much more sense to simply assume people already have great 2D touch screens and find a way to bridge to those.) Then laptops wouldn’t have compromises in multiple areas.
Even on the software side. They make money on the App Store but they could make way more money by giving consumers reasons to actually try things, i.e. “try before you buy”, paid upgrades, etc. They have created a software environment where things feel more likely to be scams than useful, which is nuts.
(Yes, I fully regret selling my previous gen MBP.)
Like another person on here said, these replacements & repairs hurt both the customer and the company.
I don't understand why Apple makes these drastic changes on major products without thorough, repeated, and lengthy QA processes.
What's happened?
There have been articles on Hacker News where people talked about it being extremely difficult for a hardware startup to do something as simple as achieving a uniform color to plastic components, or packaging their products in white cardboard like Apple.
One could argue that Apple is not accomplishing the goal of producing a premium product, but whether it is still a good strategy depends on a lot of numbers that are difficult to find. How much of the value of a MBP that is entirely replaced for the end consumer gets recycled back into the refurbished programs? 20%, 50%, 80%? What percentage of units have to be replaced? 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%? What is the margin on each unit sold? How much would fixed manufacturing costs increase if they retooled the entire line to revert to older style keyboards? How much is the damage to Apple's reputation costing them in dollar terms?
Perhaps they should focus on building a reliable premium product rather than a premium product that suffers failures due to too many gadgets (too put it simply).
As far as what is a better strategy for them moving forward on their policy re: replacement & repairs, they're probably trying to figure out what to do right now based off your mentioned hidden numbers.
I hope they do the right thing by the customer, as many of us are heavily invested in their product line, in multiple ways.
I'm hoping sanity kicks in by 2020 and there is a better keyboard. But I am not holding my breath, I'm sure they'll double down and have version 4 of the butterfly keyboard.
Same here. I have a MacBook Pro 2016 with AppleCare, that I want to sell before the AppleCare runs out (with some margin) and definitely before the extended keyboard warranty deadline is in sight. I am worried that, since these generations are plagued by keyboard problems, the prices will drop quickly.
I used to buy a new MacBook every 1.5 to 2 years. However, I honestly do not know which model I would buy. I do not want a model with a touch bar (I don't like the touch bar and it is slightly expensive). The MacBook Pro escape wasn't refreshed, it still has the keyboard without the silicon membranes. And the new Air uses much less powerful CPUs. Even if I would go for the Pro with touch bar or Air, I would still be worried that the butterfly keyboard problems are not solved, just postponed.
I agree that the Mac Mini looks like the only reasonable machine, performance-wise and quality-wise. Of course, it's not that handy on the go ;).
It seems thinkpads or some other dell laptops (or other brands?) have some kind of military grade requirements so they can sustain not only punishments and mistreatments, but also not have those faulty gimmicks that are caused by fragile designs.
It's the difference between wanting a fancy sports car and a good old military vehicle. There are designs that are well thought out, and are just more reliable in the long term. I don't want shiny, performant cool object, I want things to work. Not aiming at apple in particular.
While more modern Thinkpads seem less physically robust than the old guard (Mg castings and all), even the physically low-end ones are still quite ok (e.g. the E485, which incidentally also has a Ryzen CPU).
It's quite slim and not very heavy and still going very strong. Since I bought it I have upgraded the following:
* New SSD
* Added extra RAM
* Upgraded the screen to full HD IPS (turns out the screen of the following year's model is an exact fit for this one)
* Bought a new power brick (funnily, this is the only thing that failed on me in the 5 years)
All components were incredibly easy to install, even a layperson could do it with no issues.
I can't see myself buying a new laptop for the foreseeable future unless this one somehow bites the dust.
They can't repair it until "Find My iPhone" is turned off." Do you know how much fun it was to turn it off while my phone was sporadic in what it responded to?
Why not?
Why is it so special when this happens for a major hardware vendor like Apple? Is the expectation that hardware has no bugs? Is that realistic?
Every time I use a car I can't stop rambling.. because I'm a computer kid, not a car kid.
There is no ‘massive waste of resources’ and they are not one-use, and from an environmental perspective they are far lower impact than their ‘repairable’ alternatives, which in practice are rarely actually repaired.
Any legislation that mandates repairability would be a catastrophic environmental disaster.
Those last far longer, are rarely resold, and would need to be more repairable in general.
Even so, the same logic must be examined. It cannot be assumed that electronics designed for repairability have a lower environmental impact.
Since iOS 12.1 update, wireless will just stop sending/receiving data while still showing connection. I will now sporadically lose all cellular signal, until I turn airplane mode on/off, then back to 3 bars.
I've only seen 4 bars on this phone once, at the AT&T store when they gave me a new sim card. Promptly went back to 3 bars when I left the store.
Rebooting the device seems to recover but I hate this.
In my case, Carbon Copy Cloner plus Time Machine backups to a local NAS.[1]
[1] https://www.qnap.com/en-us/how-to/tutorial/article/time-mach...
(Edit: dunno that I represent the "average" user, but this simple setup has served me well for years.)
If it's been ~14+ days since your last backup, the computer will start displaying daily notifications reminding you to plug in the backup drive.
(macOS takes local snapshots if unused disk space permits. So you could revert back some files if the change is recent.)
Armed with this knowledge I'm going to wait till my company gets decent stock of the 2018 MB Airs then report my reproducible but not urgent issue on my current 2017 MBP.
Better late than never, I guess.
What if they delayed admission to reduce repair costs, and minimize brand damage? I don't trust them to be transparent, I hope regulators are watching this pattern.
Maybe we need to give up on designing (deterministic) things and have them evolve instead.
As for my own thoughts on how they do this, they really create a premium look and feel, which sells products. Less visible aspects take time to come to light, and you have the opportunity to put some spin on it and obfuscate numbers. Obviously, it works amazingly well in practice.
When people say "you can't judge a book by its cover", I think having an ugly cover with good insides comes to mind first (perhaps because books have much more meat than the cover.) On the flip-side, you can have a great cover on bad insides.
In that video, Rossmann details some substandard first-party Apple refurbishing for issues, and how they time and place recalls, extended warranties, etc. for minimum impact to Apple at consumer expense. The facts, without Apple spin, laid out plainly, really show a manipulative, anti-consumer company with a completely contrary facade, in my opinion.
No, he doesn't.
He is a liar.
How many do you want?
Here, he said that Apple puts a chip to break MacBooks after 3 years.
https://youtu.be/1AcEt073Uds?t=1m
Here, he says that "Apple" (actually a Customs office) sent a letter to him to pay for batteries that were legitimate, later, on Reddit, he admitted he bought fake batteries from China that had Apple logos (and therefore, should be, as they did) caught by the customs (because saying otherwise would get him in jail), his friends at Reddit, deleted the comments, but there are still copies of what he said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9pow06/louis_rossman...
Also, in his video, he says that Apple makes products "vintage" or "obsolete" after 4 or 5 years.
The newest "vintage" Apple product in late 2018, is from 2011:
No, he is an Apple hater and constant liar.
Also, he is an ignorant fool that pretends he knows anything about Apple.
He also instructs his audience to go to Apple-related communities to fill everything with Apple hating posts.
If you see his videos's comments, they are full of people hating on Apple.
Louis Rossman is an hate machine, that says that Apple puts chips on their computers just to break them after 3 years, "that's when AppleCare runs out, he says".
Louis Rossman, takes advantage of the lawless country that the United States is, and his friends at YouTube profit from that (he makes about $300K/year from his Apple-batting videos).
It's a laptop, if the keyboard routinely doesn't work properly, then it becomes a slightly more portable desktop.
Sounds kinda silly.
I'll make my point a bit more specific, how is that comment funny in relation to the comment it is replying to? It doesn't even make sense as a reply to it. I could see it as being more humorous as a reply to the comment I was replying to.
It's not a perfect solution, but the point here is to limp along until you have the ability to get the keyboard properly fixed.
-you may not own a USB keyboard , you need to buy one and hopefully you have enough ports free or yo will need to buy an USB hub too
-having the device repaired will take a while if you are not into a big city, it won't be fun without your computer, so it is a big deal that the keyboards is shitty and sometimes the replacement one breaks too.
-I hope they will fix the keyboard if it breaks exactly when your warranty expired, otherwise because of on ekey you will have to buy for all the parts that are glued with the keyboard.
Side note: I dropped from 110+ WPM to ~20 WPM because I had three keys with this issue and had to spent 5+ seconds every time I tried any of those keys. The worst part is sometimes it wouldn't register the key and sometimes it would register it on the first try but type the character several times repeatedly. It was literally hell.
Louis Rossmann, a highly-respected Apple repairman in Manhattan, NYC, explains the problems with the cult of Apple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hYHwkIuEMo