I don't have an actual refutation here (and certainly don't want to start some kind of Apple flame war) but something about this doesn't seem quite right.
Like their products or not, Apple has been extraordinarily successful both in terms of sales and critical reception of their products compared to most companies.
They have flops too (Siri, HomePod, others), but are mostly successful. The recent buzz about the M1 chip is a perfect example of their industry-leading engineering.
Or the airpods with non-replaceable batteries so you have to get new airpods for $49+ a piece every couple years?
They aren't perfect and IMO haven't been in a long time. That said, the build quality is good, and I chose to get a macbook as my work computer as a software developer and don't regret it, but I wish people would stop putting apple on a pedestal as the example of perfection.
The company I work for had 1-2 percent of devices in repair every week.
Not sure if this is just a strange coincidence, but I know of at least one other company in our town with the same scope of the described problem.
I know this isn't a popular sentiment with some people, but from experience, I am done with Apple after 28 years of experience. My first was a beautiful Macintosh Classic I still have. Together with a SE 30. Somehow I miss my pre 2018 Macbook Pro.
Now the butterfly keyboard issues have hurt MBP customer sat levels, but not enough to fall to Lenova/IBM levels.
This site includes a few different sources, and shows more or less the same reliability: https://www.geckoandfly.com/6311/the-most-reliable-laptop-su...
Because they are.
Edit: Overarching point is that Apple has a focus on aesthetics that is far less important in aerospace engineering, and has no experience on ensuring human safety.
But it’s better than almost everyone else, including Boeing because it does one thing very well. It doesn’t ship products unless they meet a high bar. It never puts schedule first over product quality.
Example: original iPad was canceled by Steve Jobs because he didn’t think it was good enough. Instead he had the team enter the Apple phone competition, where it best out the iPod team with its design for the iPhone. Five years later they got to apply all their improvements to make and release a much better iPad.
Apple canceled their AirPower charging mat rather than release something that didn’t meet their standards, even after pre-announcing it.
When I ran an product development organization, I made it clear that QA wasn’t responsible for our schedules. Sure they needed to test well and quickly to ensure that Product Management had the necessary info to make good release decisions. But their job was journalistic, to fairly and honestly report all issues. It was up to the engineers to find ways to meet quality goals in our schedules.
Boeing had test pilots misleading regulators to hide known issues. That’s the exact opposite of a test Organisation should be run.
I thought about their butterfly keyboards and didn't want to think further.