My MacBook Pro had over 10k USD in repairs | Hacker News Reader

My MacBook Pro had over 10k USD in repairs

pqvst.com

276 pointspqvst477 comments

As long as we're having a big bitch-fest here, I'll throw in my $.02. Other than expanding batteries, my laptops have generally been trouble-free. But the problem I do have is that the older my MBP, the slower it becomes when I upgrade the OS. When I upgraded my 2015 to Big Sur last year, it essentially became unusable because it ran so slowly. It now sits in my closet. Apple should stop nagging you to upgrade the OS if your hardware wasn't built to support the newer versions. Just give us security updates and leave the rest alone. I think that would make a lot of users happy.

Put Linux on it.

Yeah, I got a 2009 MacBook Pro for free (or like $10 or something, I forget), and it's now running the latest FreeBSD. BSD, GNU/Linux and other open source OSes typically run great on MacBooks, and give them new life. Try it out!

Exact same situation. Couldn’t upgrade macOS whatsoever and it was slow as anything. Whacked Ubuntu on there and it’s running as good as new, outside of slow disk reads.

Yeah! I actually dropped an old secondhand SSD in mine and it makes a huge difference. You'd never guess the machine is over a decade old other than the slightly bulkier form-factor and mediocre resolution, haha (and in fact I actually really like the keyboard compared to newer models!)

The newer butterfly keyboards got all the bad press (for good reason) but a while back I had to use one of the early aluminum models from when they were still thick enough to hold disc drives, for the first time in many years, and damn, I'd forgotten just how much worse the original slim driveless models' keyboards were, than those. Those were basically perfect, for a laptop.

Yeah that's exactly what this 2009 model is, the nice thick keys that actually move quite some distance when you press them. So satisfying and tactile! Now when I try the latest MacBooks in an Apple Store it's like typing on nothing. Very strange feeling.

The trick I find is to type very softly, then its an amazing wonderful experience. I haven’t used my MB keyboard for a while so when I went back it felt very jarring because I lost my soft touch. Have to retrain myself

I know it sounds crazy but you will get used to it if you use it for a day. I'm picky about keyboards and I thought I would hate it, but after a couple years I type as comfortably and quickly as I do with the cherry browns on my Das Keyboard

Yup.

I've had a lot of luck putting Ubuntu on older Macbooks for quite a few years now. Works quite well.

In my experience all software seems to slow down over time. Firstly, my expectations of "fast" change, but also all the various data structures a system needs to run grow and complicate. In addition we ask more of our software over time and run more of it.

For many, not even Ubuntu is immune. Hence articles like this:

https://www.techradar.com/how-to/how-to-speed-up-ubuntu-1804

Half of these tips have nothing to do with Ubuntu. Changing your SSD will do wonders for your Windows installation as well...

Yep, I'm typing this on a '15 macbook pro with PopOS on it.

A fresh install of Catalina was unusably slow on my 2010 Macbook pro (to say nothing of even trying Big Sur!). I had gone back and forth between MacOS and Linux on this machine over the years, and the Linux experience has been improving in comparison. Especially now that some apps are falling out of compatibility with High Sierra (the last version that ran acceptably on this hardware). And it's not as though you need to use a lightweight distro; regular Ubuntu works fine on old hardware. The focus on keeping everything lean and performant, while maintaining compatibility with older hardware, is a great advantage of modern linux distos.

Linux hasn't replaced my desktop workstation OS quite yet, but the last few years have definitely been "Year of the Linux Laptop" for me.

Apple is the master of planned obsolescence.

I see people say this but I can’t see that it it true. This current lockdown in New Zealand has 2011 and 2013 Macbook airs in daily use and they are working perfectly. There is an iPad 2 in daily use also.

Those devices have had hard lives.

I haven’t got any other electronics with anything approaching this longevity (unless you count espresso hardware). Presumably others are having a very different experience.

i basically can't use my ipad mini from 2012 anymore because the apps in the app store usually need a newer OS version than possible. A laptop from 2012 with Windows (whatever version) wouldn't have these problems whatsoever. I know it's another device type but it shouldn't really matter, both are computing devices.

There are absolutely windows apps that won't run on your 2012 laptop too, it's just less likely you would run into them. Lack of DX 10 and higher APIs as well as lack of things like AVX instructions will prevent certain applications from running at all.

That's a 3rd party developer problem, not Apple problem. It's like blaming GM for not making leaded gasoline for your 1950s car.

Because you happen to be using the good old Apple's MacBook. I mean a 2011 MacBook Air could still be sold for $120 2nd hand.

2016 Macbook has the worst reselling price out of all MacBook History. I think this tells a bit.

They do a pretty bad job of it if it's planned. My '12 MacBook Air works great (aside from needing a new battery) and I can still boot plenty of even older Macs, going back to a Quadra.

I'll do you one better - I still have a 2008 MacBook Pro that I use daily, it works fine. Also a 7 years old iPad Mini 2 that still gets security updates. Yes, planned obsolescence indeed.

I have Android tablets from 2014 and an ipad air 2 from 2014. The Android tablets haven't seen any updates since 2016 and are unusably slow while the iPad air 2 still gets the latest updates on day one with the brand new ipads and feels perfectly usable and sees daily use.

I don't know how you can say this after looking at the state of android. Beyond that, my macbooks have _vastly_ outlived any Windows laptop I've ever owned.

Yeah this argument comes up constantly. Sure Apple does a lot of nasty stuff that should be banned. But when I look around at the rest of the market, everyone else is doing the exact same things but 10x worse.

I think Apple cops most of the blame for being the most recognizable name despite having the least planned obsolescence of the OEMs.

my 2011 13" macbook pro, still chugging along... maybe there is Quality control issues on 2015->2021 models, but the 2011-2013 era seem good? less infatuation on thinnest laptop ever woo /s

A bunch of people here are talking about having 2010-2015 Macs running, in contrast you don't see too many PC laptops of that vintage.

They really aren’t. They laptops last a very long time and you will be provided with OS upgrade way longer than you could reasonably upgrade most other laptops, while still have reasonable performance.

I disagree. My family's cost of electronics plummeted when I switched all of us to iOS. This is due to longer device lifetime and fewer broken devices.

Anecdotal for sure, but my kids and most Android devices lead to numerous broken electronics, be it screen, micro USB charging port issues, or detached SMDs. My 5 year old going into Kindergarten has been merciless to his iPad Mini and it is still trucking along, after multiple years. My OG iPad Pro is still my daily driver for media consumption and is going on six years old.

Do you mean of master planners of recycling? Since rest of manufacturers mostly just make toxic plastic waste, not something that can be used 4x longer and then safely recycled...

You seem to be ignoring all of the people who are posting here saying that their older MBPs are running Big Sur without performance impact. Obviously something is going on on those machines that are having performance issues, but it’s certainly not planned obsolescence or inevitable. There may some shared situation that is the cause for just those machines or they may each have their own issues causing a similar impact. Hard to tell without specifics.

I got an iPhone in 2008 and 2 years later an OS update rendered it too slow to be usable. It annoyed me so much that it became the last Apple product I ever bought.

Every non-Apple smartphone I've had since then has remained usable until I was ready to replace it on my own timeline, even after as long as 4 years.

What non-Apple smartphone were you getting in 2010 that received 4 years of updates? My experience at the time was essentially no updates, or relying on custom ROMs for that sort of thing.

I think it was the Galaxy S4 that I had for 4 years, then the S8 for 3. I don't remember if/when updates stopped. I probably only had the phone I bought in 2010 for 2 years because back then they were still subsidizing new phone purchases at the 2 year mark.

you know, if expanding batteries were so problematic, why the heck does Apple glue them into the topcase?

To make the computer smaller and lighter.

I refuse to accept that as an answer as to why the battery is glued in. It's just laziness by apple, there's is literally zero reason to use glue to hold the battery, and it means that if you want to ever replace it yourself you end up looking at a 50-steps long guide on ifixit where one of them is pouring solvent behind the battery - it's insane. Just have a system of tabs holding the battery packs in place, glue is not needed.

No, it's not laziness. Nothing about the internal design of the Mac is due to "laziness". Apple has clearly decided that the battery is better held in place by adhesive than by a "system of tabs". This could easily be for durability or safety reasons. It's a big, big problem if a battery gets damaged.

If your argument is that the replacement process has too many steps, this argument fails: you'd save at most one step (out of your claimed 50) if the adhesive were not there. Because the battery is not terribly accessible.

>>If your argument is that the replacement process has too many steps, this argument fails: you'd save at most one step (out of your claimed 50) if the adhesive were not there.

Thank you for making an assumption on my behalf, but that's actually not my argument - I do have an issue with the fact that replacing the battery requires pouring solvent behind the case, as the guide clearly warns you that if you mess this up you will damage other components and the screen. That's an unacceptable process for a battery replacement, I don't mind the disassembly of everything else to get to there. I will repeat myself - there is absolutely no reason to use glue in a case as tight as that of a modern MacBook.

> Apple has clearly decided that the battery is better held in place by adhesive ...

They decided to glue the battery down. You may assume that each decision by Apple seeks an optimum, so you concluded this decision was for the best. But better for whom -- Apple or the consumer?

Note also, that when I replace a battery that's been glued in, there are many more steps than for devices that aren't so glued down. Possibly because the people who designed it were thinking about repair and replacement scenarios.

Glue is not protective. The only purpose of glue is to prevent the battery from moving around, which tabs and straps do perfectly well. The battery is protected by the metal casing and nothing else, glue or no glue.

This could easily be done for profit, as well!

Apple batteries are glued for two reasons:

  - The aluminium laptop case is part of the battery.  In the old days there was a plastic case/shell around the battery cells. Now the laptop case is that shell.

  - It allows them to make the laptops thinner. When you are talking about the need to save millimeters here and there in order to have a very thin total design then you need to remove screws, tabs and stuff that pads up space.

Planned obsolescence and user hostility, got it.

It's probably being done for ease of manufacturing. The bots can handle glue better than tabs and straps. Also, they can put batteries in every dead space available in the machine to maximize system battery life. I agree it's ridiculous you need to use a solvent, carefully, in order to remove the batteries. I suppose this is the state of the art for now?

My 2015 Air has an easily replaceable battery. It's needed replacement once and only requires a screwdriver. That's good design. Gluing a battery in is only "good design" if you want to make it as difficult as possible for people to repair their own machines.

Heck, I still have MBPs that had hot swappable batteries. That was even better design.

Permanently glued batteries are not any smaller and they are no lighter than strapped batteries with easily removed adhesives. It's a move to prevent repair.

This conspiracy theory doesn't even make any sense. Guess who has to replace these batteries? Apple. Why would they make it harder for themselves without a good reason.

The idea is that due to the special repair it will be costly enough to the point where you will opt for buying a new laptop.

It's $200 for a 2015 MacBook Pro for Apple to replace the battery. An aftermarket battery costs around $50 but it's tricky to install.

> The idea is that due to the special repair it will be costly enough

But Apple has to replace the batteries and pay for it under their warranties, not you.

Warranty only goes for 1-3 years. Where the rate of failure for batteries is very low. After that, you're stuck with high repair costs or buying a new device that falls under warranty again. It's a racket and people keep falling for it.

Maybe it's different in some parts of the world, but at least in the US, the scenario described by the parent will not be covered by the warranty, and you will have to pay for it:

> It's $200 for a 2015 MacBook Pro for Apple to replace the battery.

>But Apple has to replace the batteries and pay for it under their warranties, not you.

Apple operate the 1 year MacBook warranty policy across the world with only specific countries that they abide by the law of 3 years warranty. However if you dont mention it, as in UK, they will still charge you for it.

Batteries won't wear out in a year, and battery wear from normal use is not always covered by warranty. You're going to be paying for it in 90% of cases.

Apple wants to perform the repairs so they can charge a premium. If batteries were easy to replace, consumers would do it themselves.

IIRC iOS even detects if a battery has been replaced regardless of whether it’s an authentic first-party battery and warns the user; Apple technicians use a tool to prevent these warnings for first-party repairs.

What if I want to go to an independent repair shop to change my battery? Or even do it myself.

Apple will do it for you.

So this isn't an argument against repair - it may be an argument against repair by third parties if you want to suggest that? But then again why would Apple make a job that they have to do harder? Doesn't pass a common-sense test.

Because it gets harder for the opposition at a faster rate. The opposition is end user repair. But you know this, it is a common strategy, this is why you out skill your opponent.

There are widely reported cases of people taking their iPhones to the Genius Bar only to have someone swap their philips head screws for pentalobe screws.

Passes common sense.

Exactly, Apple is killing third party repairs, so they can demand for 10k USD from you as in the OP.

> so they can demand for 10k USD from you as in the OP

I think you and others in this thread are fundamentally confused - the OP has paid nothing - the cost is Apple’s.

Even if in this case Apple paid the costs, very often it's on the customer to pay for out of warranty repairs.

Apple choses which price to charge for a battery replacement. Their profit margin is whatever they choose unless other people are replacing it too.

But they also have to do the repairs. When they make it harder they increase their costs.

But they also dissuade people from doing it themselves. So a $50 battery becomes a $200 battery.

Disagree.

You can see for yourself:

Glued https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/noPvQ2CLs1jptX2p.med...

Removal battery https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/btDJQp5CYXdILTOO.med...

You get better battery performance, with higher CPU performance, better graphics, etc. etc. and save 8oz. in weight and nearly half the width.

Moore's law has tradeoffs. I think you can make the conclusion yourself with the facts.

EDIT: For the record - it financially benefits Apple to have an unremovable battery, but that doesn't mean its the only motivation.

This is hilarious. You're actually comparing two different computers.

A pull tab does not weigh 8oz more than a dab of glue. I don't get why someone would try to argue as much.

> You're actually comparing two different computers.

Huh? One is the previous MBPro with a removable battery and the other is the latest version MBPro with a glued battery.

> A pull tab does not weigh 8oz more than a dab of glue. I don't get why someone would try to argue as much.

I didn't say that. I said the form factor for a glued in battery doesn't it allow it to be setup as a removable battery configuration.

Gotta love the armchair hardware engineers in here.

You can use the exact same form factors for glued and removal batteries. They're all just prisms or a bunch of prisms. And yes it's ridiculous to compare two different generations of MBPro.

You can definitely mount those batteries in a removable fashion in any case.

None of that is true. The battery cells are the rectangular black pouches. They can be glued in, placed in with a ribbon cable, put inside a plastic outer casing, or any other variation; but the batteries themselves are exactly the same form and function.

Given the hard metal body construction with screw fasteners, there's no reason for gluing the battery packs themselves.

> but the batteries themselves are exactly the same form and function.

They are exactly not the same form:

https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/vlCsffdOoZSTCyJy.med...

https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/btDJQp5CYXdILTOO.med...

One is a big brick and the other is a set of 4 pouches carefully laid out to let connectors route to various parts of the motherboard. That is precisely NOT the exact same form.

Look at how intricate the battery replacement is for the newest MBPro:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Touch+Bar+2...

There are various terminals that weave in and out of the batteries. That simply is not possible to maintain the same weight and thickness by just carving out one big removal brick as in the previous generation of the MBPro.

These battery cells have the same physical structure. They can be shaped however is needed, whether it's one big block or several little ones connected by wires.

The same capacity requires roughly the same weight and thickness, although several smaller cells will mean more packaging material and less collective capacity, but obviously allows for more flexible placement within the chassis.

However, none of this requires gluing the battery to the system. That was the topic here. Why would you think using glue instead of just letting the back plate hold the batteries in place makes such a big difference?

> roughly the same weight and thickness

Are we looking at the same picture? They are 100% not the same thickness. They certainly could have the same mass, but thats precisely my point - if you want an easily removable battery you sacrifice other features (thickness for example).

> although several smaller cells will mean more packaging material and less collective capacity

Are you saying batteries didn't get more efficient (more capacity by size) over a 10 year timespan? Now I think you're just gaslighting me...

> However, none of this requires gluing the battery to the system.

I guess you didn't look at the link that shows the 1,282 step process required to even get to the point where the glue is removed.

> That was the topic here.

It wasn't. The glue is a red herring. The topic is about the ability to easily remove the battery - the glue being the part that you thought was impossible to do. That's not what makes it hard to provide a removable battery - it's the design of the overall hardware system. The hardware engineers (one of my good friends is an Apple hardware engineer btw) explicitly chose to design the batteries in such a way that trades off thickness and weight of the hardware with an easily removable battery.

You misunderstood their comment. Batteries of the same capacity at the same chemistry require the same thickness. So glue vs tabs has no impact on thickness. You don't need to change battery geometry for it to be removable.

It also doesn't take 1282 steps to get to the point you have to remove the battery. It takes 11 steps, most of which are just unplugging connectors. The 20 other steps are related to removing the adhesive, so unplugging and protecting stuff you wouldn't otherwise need to.

> "The glue is a red herring."

No, it's the entire point.

Nobody is asking to go back to the older "easily removable" designs with dedicated battery compartments. The problem isn't the design of the batteries being multiple smaller cells spread around but rather that they are glued to the chassis. This makes them harder to remove than if they weren't.

To be extremely clear, take a 2021 Macbook and just don't glue the batteries inside to the casing. That's it, that's all there is to it.

I'd prefer a system that was a bit more durable and also put the consumables in a place where they were easily accessed.

we've reached the point where all advantages to devices being smaller and lighter are diminished returns.

If you care about maintainability, you're just not the market Macbooks are optimized for.

While most brand-new laptops have unfortunately dropped externally removable batteries altogether, you can still find plenty that have internal user-replaceable ones.

At home I have a work-provided Dell Latitude, a Thinkpad T470 my SO uses and my own Thinkpad T490. Very happy with all of them 'cept mine has a shitty screen that I'm going to replace at some point.

I agree, same with my MBP at home. And I have the same issue with my 2015 XPS 15 at work which first was really fast, especially with Windows 10 and now feels slow for everything. Even though it is still running "Windows 10" (with Windows Update). Changed for the new XPS 15 with the new i7-11800H and couldn't be happier though.

Also have the 2015 and Big Sur was also a shitshow for me performance wise (no serious bugs otherwise though). Updated to the Monterrey beta and it’s back to silky smooth. No idea what they screwed up in Big Sur, but it seems like they fixed it.

It seems like they intentionally throttle older models as a feature of the update.. They do it on their phones at least.

https://www.phonearena.com/news/how-to-make-iphone-faster_id...

Your linked article is entirely about the phone. Do you have any sources about them intentionally throttling older computer models?

No, they do not, and that's an outrageous, silly, completely unsupported accusation.

Apple also does not "intentionally throttle" older iPhones as a "feature of the update" for some sort of nefarious bullshit "planned obsolescence" reason. The opposite is true: Apple reduces the clock speed very very slightly on older iPhones, so that they can be used LONGER and have a LONGER service life. The alternative would be, when the battery is starting to lose capacity, just having the iPhone randomly shut down. This would quite obviously be an inferior outcome for the user, so Apple thoughtfully checks for reduced battery performance in aging devices and reduces clock speed slightly to save power if necessary.

Apple's reward for this? Literally YEARS of bullshit, bad-faith, poorly-researched lying stories in the tech media about how they are supposedly "forcing" users to buy new devices, when in fact, they are enabling iPhones to last even longer. Anyone with any clue knows, of course, that iPhones receive many years more software updates than competing products, and are also in service for years longer than competing products, but somehow, this BS narrative has still taken hold, likely because many folks are lazy, desperate for any excuse to slam Apple, credulous, and don't really care what the truth is.

Because someone decided it was better to be opaque on the iPhone and do that than do the same thing they had on macs and throw a warning when the battery was on bad state.

At least all the drama ended with having a warning and a toggle for battery status.

Hopefully, Apple learned from their experience.

By the way, isn't it nice when the hardware manufacturer doesn't degrade performance on failing hardware but instead tells the user?

Honestly, I think the best alternative in this case would have been to degrade performance (btw, it's a very very slight degradation that most users would not even notice in routine use) and also inform the user.

But I agree with you, in that I do hope Apple has learned from this ordeal. I just wanted to speak out against what I see as very unfair, bad-faith attacks.

And yet many many people absolutely noticed it.

Because they didn't tell ANYBODY there were doing this. Did they give a pop up explaining that your phone was being throttled because the battery was degraded? No. Did they announce this "feature" at WWDC one year? No. Take your iPhone to a Genius complaining it was slow? Did they recommend you just replace the battery? No, they recommend you buy a new one.

Part of the problem is that Apple stuck too small batteries in their devices for years so they degraded fast. They KNEW they were making the phone slow for users in 2-3 years. Having a slow phone IMO is more of push to replace a phone than a bit worse battery life.

The original hate on this was very much justified for the reasons you listed. But these days they now have prompts explaining this and how to resolve it as well as a battery status page you can check any time.

Yes. As result of them getting caught hiding it and being sued.

> Apple reduces the clock speed very very slightly on older iPhones

On an iPhone 6s, the performance decreased by 42%. That's not how I would characterize very very slightly.

Apple lost it's lawsuit because they throttled phones when they reached a battery health level that was higher than the threshold for warranty replacement. Thousands of users, including myself, had a nearly new phone throttled and so we went to apple and asked them to replace the battery if it was going bad. They wouldn't. And so they got dragged through the mud because they fucking deserved it.

That's funny I recently upgraded a 2013 mbp and it's a bit faster now.

To Big Sur?

Yes and I find it snappier than before.

I assume apple does this intentionally :)

You have to poke around but there are ways to disable the update badges and checks, eg:

defaults delete com.apple.preferences.softwareupdate LatestMajorOSSeenByUserBundleIdentifier && softwareupdate --list

Sometimes I feel like an alien with my late 2013 MBPr working all the same with the latest os.

Yeah. Same boat, mine (15" with dGPU, base spec) just keeps chugging. Never felt like an OS update affected it negatively. I've often wondered if it has to do with the Crystal Well L4 cache they put on these machines.

Yeah, same here. I am using 2012 rMBP and usually upgrade OS and update quickly after release. No significant issues with the machine. It is still chugging along on Catalina. Only issue in last 10 years was replacing battery once.

But I am waiting for Mx version of 15”+ MBP to upgrade, just need more storage and memory at this point for heavy duty work.

Yes, 2014 MBP on Big Sur. No performances issues.

I suspect that some of these cases of slowdown are a result of something getting messed up in the update or some non-standard process that is getting bogged down on Big Sur.

If you have an Apple store near by they'll set it up for dual boot. If you don't mind do it yourself partition and install the installer to thumb drive.

I don't condone piracy but you can download the old installers(get creative) md5 checksum it and simply reinstall the old OS. I am still running a 2012 macbook pro for video editing with final cut pro.

You don't really have to pirate anything. Apple provides a guide for creating USB installers. Used it to bring my 2012 Mini back to Mojave recently.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

I had this problem with my MacBook Pro, so i upgraded it to Linux. It's an early 2011 model, and still going strong!

My understanding is that Sceptre/Meltdown mitigations significantly slow processors due to reduced speculative execution, and perhaps more integrity tests against attacks.

That's something that's near-universal across AMD64 / Intel architectures, regardless of OS.

https://www.howtogeek.com/339559/how-to-stop-the-meltdown-an...

One view is to blame the mitigations.

Another is to recognise that the previous performance was itself a mirage, created by ignoring the risks presented by speculative execution (which had been long voiced, and long ignored by major CPU vendors).

Is it possible to disable these mitigations on Mac?

It would be exceedingly unwise to do so.

Even on a single user system which doesn't run untrusted software?

In the unlikely event that you're absolutely confident that's true, you should also be competent enough to find the answer on your own.

If the device is network-connected at all, or is exposed to any external devices or storage (drives, USB or other devices), it is running untrusted software.

As long as you keep Javascript disabled in your browser...

> Even on a single user system which doesn't run untrusted software?

If you use the web you run untrusted code all the time, unless you block js and never turn it on.

Unless you verify each code, on each software you run and build it yourself or have reproducible builds, then you run untrusted software.

I would only be comfortable disabling these mitigations if the computer were air-gaped and never touched the internet.

So yeah, it' unwise to disable these mitigations, but, in the end, it's your call.

does JavaScript really have the level of access to abuse these kinds of vulnerabilities?

Every MacBook I’ve ever owned has ended up with a swollen battery

I've "owned" (they were either mine or belonged to the company i worked for) many macbooks since they were ibooks and powerbooks and I've only had one end up with a swollen battery (a 2015 13" macbook pro)

#anecdata

edit: sample size is approximately 12 machines since the ibook was introduced

same here. It's a flaw inherent in the battery chemistry. Apple knows it happens, they should make it easy to swap batteries out when they expire.

You should downgrade it back to MacOS 10.x version range. I'm still on 10.13 myself, I don't feel any strong urges to upgrade to Mojave or Catalina. If I stopped using homebrew and started using macports or pkgsrc I'd probably be even less bothered by needing to upgrade. (homebrew is pretty shitty with older OSes)

I'm also on a 2015 MBP that's still going strong. It's snappy and I'm happy. I upgraded the SSD last year, and that made a dramatic difference as well. Upgraded to 1TB, write speed jumped from 282 MB/s to 1321 MB/s, read speed jumped from 964 MB/s to 1505 MB/s. (2015 is the last year that Macbook Pros had upgradeable SSDs)

I would like to upgrade my disk while keeping the OS version (clone?). Could you please tell me how did you do?

I cloned to a USB drive, swapped the SSDs, and then booted up with the USB drive, and cloned back to the new SSD.

You will need an NVMe SSD adapter similar to this https://www.amazon.com/Sintech-Adapter-Upgrade-2013-2015-Mac...

There's a whole thread writeup here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/upgrading-2013-2014-mac...

You can also download old versions of MacOS installers. I forget the link to the easier scripts/installers, there's a High Sierra one at http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/

Personally I ended up using ./installinstallmacos.py from https://github.com/munki/macadmin-scripts to grab the catalog contents

and then temporarily blocked swcdn.apple.com in /etc/hosts,

and then served the /content/ directory so that swcdn.apple.com/content/ was pointed at 127.0.0.1/content (I used python here in the parent directory of /content/) > sudo python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80

and then I opened the High Sierra MacOS app store specific link to make it download & assemble the .dmg file properly

Open in Safari to ensure it launches App Store https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-high-sierra/id12462847...

Can use the same approach to grab other versions of MacOS downloaders from apple too if you look up the app store links for it and then serve the catalog locally I guess.

I did the same with my 2015 MacBook Pro, and I'm still amazed that a $5 adapter and an Intel SSD are super fast and don't cause any problems at all. The machine sleeps, wakes, hibernates without any issues whatsoever. Also, I sold the original, well used Apple 1TB SSD for more than I paid for the brand new 2TB Intel SSD.

I've used SuperDuper (both, the free and paid versions) to do this in the past.

https://shirtpocket.com/SuperDuper/

Not GP, but as others have described here, you can clone your entire disk to an external one (using an application like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner), upgrade the internal disk, and the restore from the external clone.

When it comes to hardware upgrades of the DIY kind, iFixit (https://www.ifixit.com/) is a great resource with detailed instructions, photos and even videos on how to do them for different devices. The site also sells tools and parts, but you don’t necessarily have to buy from there. For SSDs, OWC (Other World Computing, https://eshop.macsales.com/) has tested parts available for many older Macs.

I have an MBP2013 with Catalina and it’s been smooth sailing, good to know I shouldn’t upgrade to Mojave even

If you dont upgrade the OS they cant claim their installation rate and push their new API along with other API depreciation. So generally speaking I am pro OS upgrade. But I do think they somehow turn off certain optimisation for older devices. It is the same with iPhone as well. i.e New OS is only optimised for current set / latest devices.

I would go one step further and say only give us security updates and bug fixes full stop.

Every update I’m less satisfied with my OS. I just want it to run other things and stay the hell out of my way.

"Apple should stop nagging you to upgrade the OS if your hardware wasn't built to support the newer versions."

When Apple introduced OSX I refused to upgrade a G4; I stayed on OS9. I never connected that computer to the internet, it was only used as a DAW.

This "upgrade the OS" nonsense is an old trick. Microsoft made it infamous.

I had Windows computers back in the day, late 90s, where I only upgraded the hardware, not the OS. This went in direct opposition to all marketing, "technical advice" and hype.

These computers were always much faster. Hardware keeps getting faster and cheaper. Software keeps getting larger and slower.

Upgrades are almost never PRIMARILY for the user's benefit. Developers will never admit it. Upgrades are what developers want, not users. Then they try to convince people that everyone should want these "improvements".

Not that I know what other users want, but I want stuff that works reliably, does not slow down and does not need constant fixing. I prefer software that stays the same over software that is constantly changing. I like software that keeps doing what I installed it to do and nothing more.

I would love nineties Debian, with modern hardware support and security patches.

So basically void linux plus trinity (TDE) or mate for the continuation of kde 3 or gnome 2.

There is an issue to package TDE for void and it apparantly can be built.

https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/issues/19243

I used things like twm or fvwm at the time. in 2021, xmonad works well.

My concern, though, is that:

1) I've never seen modern "lightweight" distros work well. There isn't critical mass, and it's always my wifi or bluetooth or something. In the nineties, there were Linux HOWTOs. In 2021, there's always some kludge written by Ubuntu wrapping some kludge written by Red Hat wrapping some half-baked API and no documentation.

2) The instant you run an app, you lose all the upside. Firefox or Chrome can eventually eat up all available memory. Most apps are super-bloated, e.g. written in JavaScript/electron, and distributed in some containerized VM or some nonsense like that. If you skim out the 5% between apps and iron, it just doesn't help much.

3) Dependencies. If you want Bluetooth sound....

Is void better? Or does it somehow address this?

TLDR: It works for me which doesn't mean it works for you depending on your needs.

I use "apps" like firefox emacs mpd mpv not electron crap and it works well enough for me. I don't need anyones kludges to run well behaved native apps in their intended environment. Seems like you would be liable to experience hassle to the degree you decide to make it complicated.

Sound working on supported hardware hasn't been a problem in over a decade. Bluetooth is dicier but for example I didn't have much trouble using it for example on my thinkpad where its useful for a small portable wireless mouse to talk to the laptop. I've honestly never used it on my desktop. I still think it 99% comes down to supported hardware not distro.

Honestly although I've had working bluetooth sound I have entirely switched away from bluetooth because sound quality at least on affordable hardware is much crappier than wired. People that must have wireless especially because their phone doesn't have a port are selling Bose QC25 for $75 all day long. I bought a pair that I plan on using for the next decade. Look at the more recent competition. For $300 for the QC35 I could depending on audio codec have a differing degree of worse sound from noticeably worse to almost as good with a specialized battery that is going to crap out a few years and eventually need major surgery.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Bose+QuietComfort+35+Battery+Re...

As bad as the difficulty to replace is the fact that its built in and not hotswappable so if you forget to charge it then its down for the count. It's dead Jim. With my qc25 I pop in a freshly charged bog standard NIMH AAA for days of use and if it dies I swap in another. When they no longer charge into the trash they go and I get a replacement from anywhere. If none are at hand it still works just sans noise cancellation.

It's also easier to switch between an always connected set of headphones and speakers instead of a script shuttling everything between pulseaudio sinks and switching the default it now just needs to toggle which alsa output is muted a trick that worked 18 years ago.

It's like a microcosm of why new isn't better.

On the topic of firefox I've noticed the run away eat all your memory issue seems to be highly correlated with having a bunch of addons but I did learn a handy thing before I realized this. Userspace oom daemons. Something like earlyoom kicks in WAY faster than the oom killer with configurable targets. This means an out of control firefox trivially meets a fiery death instead of your session.

I'm pretty sure the QC35s still work fine as normal headphones with the battery dead and 3.5mm cable. That's how my Sony WH-1000XM3s work. You only need to turn them on to use noise canceling or have them be Bluetooth. They also quick charge giving a couple hours usage in a few minutes of usage. It's a bit of a tradeoff but the convenience is IMO worth it.

Well, I do have a job. I don't have complete control over what I use, since I'm not comfortable tenured/retired/living a life of leisure. There are tools I need to use. One of those was at 14gb when I was writing this message, so I could communicate with my coworkers.

For Bluetooth, I like a cheap set of headphones I bought for <$10 from some random Chinese seller. It's luck-of-the-draw, but these work well. People hear me well, and I hear them well. I don't need audiophile grade -- for that, I'd rather use my speakers. When the batteries die, I'll buy another set.

The nice thing about Bluetooth is that I can be gardening, cleaning, or otherwise keep my hands engaged during meetings. I find I focus a lot better if I'm not sitting at a computer.

I do have some fancier headsets for entertainment use, but those are not for work use. As a footnote, all the Bose headsets I've used have almost uselessly bad microphones.

I wasn't familiar with earlyoom. Thank you. That will be a game changer, if it works as I expect it will.

It's such a breath of fresh air to run a barebones OS that hasn't become corpulently bloated over the last few decades. This basically restricts you to slim server-oriented operating systems like {Open,Free}BSD and a small number of Linux distros. Everything feels lightning fast. Of course, if you need to use a web browser or something the benefit disappears.

Of course, if you need to use a web browser or something the benefit disappears.

Nope.

>Not that I know what other users want, but I want stuff that works reliably, does not slow down and does not need constant fixing. I prefer software that stays the same over software that is constantly changing. I like software that keeps doing what I installed it to do and nothing more.

This is exactly how I feel.

I think there are two camps - some people like shiny stuff for the sake of shiny stuff.

I want to perform the tasks I'm trying to perform as quickly and efficiently as possible. Often that means cli and custom scripts, if I need to use a GUI it's using the keyboard as much as possible and avoiding the mouse, and if I must use the mouse, then I have a lot of custom buttons mapped and/or ahk scripts.

When I see people entering username/password and not knowing that you can tab to get to the next field, I die a little inside. These are people who work on a computer every single day, but they never thought to look into increasing their efficiency on said computer, even for the most basic of tasks that they might do 50x per day.

How would you know you are doing something inefficiently, so that you can look into it?

And where would you look?

I've updated my old home PC to windows 10. It's a two core Athlone with 1 gig of ram. And it still usable. Quite long to load, but can run Chrome.

"I had Windows computers back in the day, late 90s, where I only upgraded the hardware, not the OS."

How would that be possible since Windows almost invariably came pre-installed by OEMs. New hardware would have the latest Windows version pre-installed. Downgrading would be extremely difficult if not impossible.

Have to partially disagree here. Remember Windows XP? Do you want to go back to that after having used W10? In W10 everything just...works. Think about how much time you spent fucking around with drivers or registry settings or TCP/IP settings or whatever to get things to work in XP, all of that is gone in W10. I can do a fresh install in 2 hrs and the computer is back to "like new" and not have to spend an additional 4 hours on drivers and updates and configuration. For me, OS updates have been nothing but a positive (lets set security/privacy aside).

Can you expand on this? I can't remember ever having a registry problem caused by XP itself, nor any issues with TCP/IP. Drivers are a fair call, though.

Nothing caused by XP itself, mostly issues which come up that seemed (at least to me - as a non-SW guy) to be connected with the immaturity of XP. Its been some years but I remember often playing around in the TCP/IP panel to fix internet issues when setting up new wifi networks - this seems to just work in W10. I don't mean special networks with static IPs or some special configurations, I mean just moms network at home. Today its very plug and play. Concerning registry it was the same - no issues concerning XP specifically but I remember having to change a lot of things in there to get things to work how I wanted them. Seems these settings are just in a menu now in W10. Its more a user experience thing rather than specific bugs or issues.

"Do you want to go back to that after having used W10?"

I have seen this type of reply repeatedly in response to any comment that some software or the web was a better experience in the past. In this case, it ignores the point being made which is not that the past was better, it is that upgrading hardware while not upgrading software is a much nicer user experience than upgrading software without upgrading hardware, or upgrading both at the same time (buying a new computer). The former was and still is stymied by companies like Microsoft and now Apple. Plus we have to contend with "business strategies" like planned obsolesence and "automatic upgrades". Arguably W10 was a "forced" upgrade, minimising if not eliminating any user choice. IMHO, we as users miss out on the full enjoyment of improvements in hardware because developers usurp those improvements for themselves. The user's computer resources are donated to the OS developer, without any prior permission from the user. That is the price of having the OS pre-installed,

You make a slightly different point, perhaps I missed the original point of the comment. I agree with you that upgrading HW without SW is much nicer than SW without HW. No argument there.

> I can do a fresh install in 2 hrs

I can do a fresh install of OpenBSD in 5 minutes.

However I won't have to, because unlike Windows 10, the system doesn't gradually rot over time.

I often do want to go back to XP, yes. My experience is approximately the inverse of yours. W10 is better for included drivers for sure. I've had to do many more registry and group policy changes on W10 than I ever needed in XP. Sometimes it feels like the GUI is lying to me about how the system can be configured. The most obvious example is that from the Windows Update GUI is appears updates can only be delayed temporarily, and must be completed before another temporary delay. This isn't the case; they've broken the connection between GUI and the settings, then lied about the existence of the setting. This isn't entirely new (95/98/XP had TweakUI), but it feels more deceptive or controlling now vs. just not exposing a feature. The cumulative updates are a huge improvement.

The situation with Windows is nothing like this. When I upgraded my shitty netbook from XP to 7, magically my audio started working again (and I didn't have to touch a single driver) and it actually ran faster, even compared to a clean install of XP. The driver situation was huge and 7/10 perform very well. OS X on the other hand, I have no idea what they are doing that slows older computers so much while adding very little value.

Microsoft actually has a performance and user experience incentive to make their OS work well on older hardware. With Apple they can just force you to upgrade, consequences be damned.

Yeah I'm over macOS, since 10.12, having used Apple OS's since System 6, sufferung years of not ready for prime time OSX but settled into that regime for almost 20 years. And now its Fedora Linux #1, Windows a distant #2, and then macOS.

The churn in macOS is annoying. A few year old version can't run the latest TeamViewer, I'm running into more of that now where on Windows 10 that's not even a thing (yet, maybe there will be a breakthrough with Windows 11).

shrug

Sounds like a TeamViewer problem.

> When I upgraded my 2015 to Big Sur last year, it essentially became unusable because it ran so slowly.

Thank you for this. I haven't upgraded to Big Sur and now I never will.

This sucks. From the original release of MacOS 10 until 10.6 or so, every version felt faster to me than the previous version. I looked forward to the next release. It felt like getting a new computer.

There must be something else going wrong with your MBP. You might want to wipe it and reset things up.

I’m running a 2014 MBP with Big Sur and it is no slower than on Catalina.

It's absolutely ridiculous that Macs don't come with a 3 year warranty by default.

I've bought maybe a dozen macs in the last 15 years (for myself and the family) and while some have lasted many years without issues, some have died on me on the second or third year.

Because the initial investment is so high you're practically forced to add extra Apple Care to protect it because there's a 20-30% chance you will have problems during those first years.

And don't get me started on design issues and recalls which take years. When my 2011 MBP died because of Radeongate it took Apple 2 years to start a recall and replace the GPU. The honest thing to do would have been to take the machine and offer 60% of its value in credit towards a new Mac. Instead, Apple replaced the GPU on a machine that was already a couple of gens behind and I couldn't sell without practically giving it away because (rightfully) nobody wanted the 15'' 2011 models. That MBP was probably the worst investment of my life.

In the EU, there's a _seller_ obligation for 2 years for items in the same class as laptop to ensure they are free from defects and fit for purpose. It won't help you if _you_ break your laptop, and after 6 months the burden of proof in the event of a dispute switches from the seller to the buyer, but I feel like pretty much all the issues the OP encountered would be covered under this.

A lot of add on warranties don't cover much more than this anyway, which makes them much harder to justify here.

My macbook air died one month out of the yearlong warranty. In their troubleshooting at the apple store they managed to wipe the device and still couldn't breath life into it or figure out what happened. >$400 flat rate repair and they didn't even offer me a loaner in the mean time while the computer was mailed off. I would think apple could compete on customer service with the shade tree mechanic and their loaner car but I guess not.

I had the opposite experience. My macbook air battery was dying, so I paid the $129 to replace it. When I got the computer back, it wouldn't charge. So, they replaced the motherboard. I got it back and it still wouldn't charge - so they handed me a brand-new next-gen macbook air. Inconvenient, sure, but exceeded my expectations. I've found they've been generous with battery replacements.

I've found the opposite. Before that computer bricked itself I noticed capacity was fading fast. Apparently apples threshold was if you are under 85% within a year of ownership you have a defective battery, according to the customer service agent I was chatting with. So they had me open up system profiler and we confirmed my battery was well within threshold for replacement, and they set me up with an appointment. I took it to the apple store and told them what the Apple customer service representative told me about the battery being defective. They ended up running a battery test using their internal tooling and surprise surprise, it turned out a different capacity number than system profiler said I had, and it happened to be just above the threshold for replacement. 1 year of use for full time work should not mean losing 15% of your battery capacity, but evidently according to apple this was in spec.

This is why I either buy Applecare or equivalent (depending on product) if it's mission critical, or buy using a card that extends the warranty by at least one year, such as the Chase Sapphire cards.

They have a 14 day return on all laptops, you can pick your own loaner off the shelf.

I'll have to keep in mind the $1200 deposit for loaner computers next time I am in need of a critical repair

Charge it to a credit card and then the charge will get reversed when you return the item, and you won't have to worry about it. Just providing a solution here that works easily (not that the problem and solution need to exist).

Credit cards should be 30 days to invoice you, will be returned before that

And if 14 days isn't enough, it's 30 days when ordered online depending on the country.

My experience with Dell laptops seems to match up with your experience on the MBP. If something is going to fail, it will usually fail immediately or last the "lifetime" of the device. Batteries being the main exception as those age out fast ..

I'm actually becoming a fan of factory refurbished for these same reasons. I'd rather have something that's been shaken down, repaired for the problems that appeared, recertified, and shipped back out.

Depends on the manufacturer. I've had good luck with Dell's refurbs and outlet store over the years.

On the other hand I bought a refurb projector from BenQ and it was straight up junk. The focusing mechanism breaks easily. It's quite clear this is a design flaw, I assume a gear that's weak plastic that should be something more durable instead. I've sent it back twice now to have it fixed, paying shipping each time under their terms. The last time I got it back it died with just 15 hours of use. It's clear they knew this thing was a straight up lemon and just used their refurb program to dump the product. It certainly means I'll never touch another BenQ product so long as I live.

+1 from me for Dell's refurbs (from their outlet).

The one thing I really miss about my Dell laptop is being able to call support and having them overnight ship replacement parts so the tech can come over to my place the next afternoon and fix it. The next available service appointment for someone at the Apple Store to take a look at my MacBook Pro’s malfunctioning keyboard won’t be until 4:20PM next week.

> Because the initial investment is so high you're practically forced to add extra Apple Care to protect it because there's a 20-30% chance you will have problems during those first years.

Here's the inverse argument: it's absolutely ridiculous I have to pay 20-30% extra for my Macbook even though I don't care about the mandatory 3-year warranty. They should let me opt out for a discount!

Well, they do.

> you're practically forced to add extra Apple Care

Are you really pro-freedom (see argument above), or just anti-Apple?

Or, you know, it's absolutely ridiculous that they sell broken stuff and then want to charge you more for you to receive a working product that you paid for in the first place. Maybe they should try to engineer things so that they don't break within a reasonable time frame under normal wear&tear. Would save money for both themselves and the customer in the end.

> Maybe they should try to engineer things so that they don't break within a reasonable time frame under normal wear&tear. Would save money for both themselves and the customer in the end.

You sound pretty confident, but just think about this: do you really know more about how Apple should be run than all of their executives combined, or is there a false assumption here?

If you make them guarantee it for three years (or perhaps five) you give them a stronger incentive to build it to last, and you can be sure it’s going to last that long. There’s a strong environmental (public good) aspect to this, so no, you should not be able to opt out.

I find it even more ridiculous that big items like fridges, ovens, and washing machines are also often only guaranteed one year. I think a ten year minimum would be reasonable for white goods.

Why stop at 10? Is there some mechanical threshold we can't design around at that point? I'd propose 20 years should be the minimum.. unless you hate the environment.

The irony in these 'demands' is that this would simply serve to further entrench Apple in its market position, since if you legislated for increasing the cost of doing business tenfold like this, you'd shut out any competitor that wasn't flush with the cash to make it happen.

Of course, legislators know this and that's why it won't happen unless it becomes much more economically feasible than it is today.

I don’t think it would increase Apple’s cost of doing business anything like tenfold, partly because my experience is that Apple’s products usually last.

It might increase costs more for cheap and shoddy vendors, which is kind of the point — you want to rule out making cheap crap that breaks as a point of competition — but again I’d be surprised if the increase was anything like as big as that.

I’d much rather save $$$ than to pay everyone else’s repair bills.

That said - its just ridiculous how much Apple charges for individual a-la-carte repairs. Or rather lack thereof - they’d just say replace the entire motherboard or display.

I'm not anti Apple at all. I'm using an iMac right now and I also use an iPad Pro daily.

What I'm saying is, Macs should include 3 years of warranty at current prices. If Macs had the reliability of iPads and iPhones it would make more sense to not get the extended warranty.

> If Macs had the reliability of iPads and iPhones it would make more sense to not get the extended warranty.

They do. People who don't have problems don't complain so you have to be careful basing your impression on what people feel motivated to mention.

it's true, ggp's claim of "20-30% chance you will have problems during those first years." is not based in data. if that was the rate, the cost of the extended warranty (apple care) would be much higher.

and further OP would never have been able to squeeze $10k of repairs/replacements out of an original $3k? outlay.

Obviously that was my personal anecdotal experience. Apple doesn't publish this data.

It was probably worse than 30% for the 2016 MBP models considering the keyboard issues though.

>It's absolutely ridiculous that Macs don't come with a 3 year warranty by default.

Government should mandate that, as in does in other countries.

But many american consumers don't believe in government rules about consumer protection, lest some of this "innovation" we've witnessed is discouraged...

I doubt everyone would want to pay the extra 20-30% more that Apple would charge to cover this.

Apple charges more like 15% for extended warranty.

OP seem to pay this premium indirectly anyway. So I guess people would pay that premium. Like they pay premium for mac's anyway. The regulation for warranty just means sellers need to actually provide the quality the brand induces

Thats why apple would eat most or all of the cost without passing it on to consumers or would make more reliable laptops. The laptops are already priced at what the market would bear and apple makes huge profits.

Nah. You're forgetting that that this is Apple. There would be an announcement that for new Macs you will be required to purchase 3 years of AppleCare+ to have the best possible experience. People will bitch for a few months but eventually it'll die down and Apple will get to market the current price as the base price while charing 30% more.

Hard to say. Apple is often able to release new products at insane price points, but to reprice existing products is more dicey, especially when laptops are one of their most expensive products on offer. I think you have something of a point: Apple products are mostly aimed at people with lots of disposable income, but raising the price still reduces the total addressable market size. The only way to know is to run the experiment.

What Apple does is they make a new model or add a big feature to the latest model and drastically increase the price. You can see that with the iPhone X, the iPad Pro, and with the introduction of the retina macbook pro's, or even with the touchbars. Apple knows how to increase prices and keep the vast majority of their customer base.

You're right, but the iPhone X is well below the price point of their Macbook Pros (closer to Macbook Airs though). Their flexibility is reduced the higher the absolute price point goes. At a certain point, people really can't spend that money.

Over here we have a 2 years mandatory warranty, and most if not all of the price difference can be explained by the displayed prices including VAT and dollar -> euro conversion.

Now, it only covers defects, but that’s what most warranties do.

They do offer 2 years in the EU (iirc 3 in the UK) and the prices for most of their products are pretty close to the ones in US (if you subtract VAT)

This is done for all items sold to consumers in New Zealand. A base MacBook is US $999 in the US and NZ $1749 in New Zealand, which is approximately US $1200. Your maths checks out. The tiny market, currency fluctuations and long shipping route probably factor in the price too, but our legislation is surely the prime reason for the cost.

I absolutely love the consumer guarantees act we have here, and the protection it gives.

Edit: NZ has 15% sales tax and this is missing from the above equation. It accounts for most the difference.

I think you're forgetting VAT, which in NZ, I think, is 13%. Not sure if there are import tariffs/duties to account for too.

Considering all these other costs, I reckon a 20% markup is great value for a 3-year warranty.

Like others though, I really all Apple products globally should come with a 3-year warranty - you pay over the odds for Apple hardware, and should get high-quality, reliable kit in return.

I have missed tax differences.

In New Zealand you are getting a 3 year warranty and getting something guaranteed in return - and the extra price appears minimal once tax differences are included.

You're forgetting about the high sales tax of 15% in NZ. That explains the vast majority of the price difference.

No, that explains precisely $150 in price increase. We can do math: $1000 base price + 15% sales tax = $1150.

How is that vast majority of price increase?

"...which is approximately US $1200"

There is zero sales tax on US Apple store sales? Where is tax paid?

I certainly have missed that.

Sales tax can vary depending on state (among other things), see for example Oregon where it's 0%, vs Washington, where it's 6.5% (and my jurisdiction adds additional couple percent for a total of ~10%).

I don't think the odds of a replacement or repair are that high. 20% means one-in-five chance of total replacement.

That can easily be fixed if they're also kept on a watch by legislators and consumer rights groups for pulling such shit up (as opposed to sucking up the cost)...

In the EU, where a longer guarantee is mandaded, state tax aside, the prices aren't that different. MacBook Air $999 US (849 €) vs 1129 € France. Of that 188 € is the state tax (VAT), which means the price difference as far as Apple pockets is 1129-188 - 849 = $92 or $108 dollars.

So that $999 would be say $1109, a 11% increase, hardly 20-30%.

(And that's not even counting the higher cost of business in Europe aside the VAT, which also factors in that 1129-188 price).

Apple are already making higher margin on M1 Mac than on Intel Mac. Did you notice the higher discount rate running on all M1 product compared to old Intel Mac?

Those extra margin could have been repurposed to Service Revenue, getting Apple Care+ by default. ( May be having one accidental damage instead of two ). Just like how the Mac is putting money into services revenue for MacOS, iCloud, Map and Siris.

The consequence of that is instead of a possible lower cost Mac lineup with M1, you now have the same cost but longer warranty. Apple now also has an incentive to make the Mac last longer to minimise any AppleCare cost they get within three years.

Companies exist to maximize profit. The only thing that matters in pricing is supply, demand, and perhaps goodwill/brand power. Apple's already positioned itself as a luxury brand, so they would have no problem raising prices in the face of a supply shock.

Which is a good reason why everything in US is cheaper. Sure, you get more service and better guarantee is you pay for it, there is no reason to force it.

Note that apparent cost and actual cost are not the same thing.

The purchase price is lower without a warranty, but the actual incurred risk cost is higher.

Absent a warranty, that's not only a risk shift from the manufacturer to the consumer, but a real cost shift, as steps which might increase reliability are not taken and the consequences of those decisions (made by the manufaucturer) accrue to the purchaser.

There is also the incidnece cost and the cost of liquidity or credit required to front a repair bill in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Given that much of the US cannot meet an unexpected $400 expense in a month, this is a significant consideration. MacBook owners may represent a more affluent portion of the population, but a $10k repair bill over four years remains significant. That's a constant $208/mo reliability tax on that particular unit, for this owner.

Note that in this case, Apple did eat the cost as the repairs were covered under the AppleCare Protection Plan.

Which is probably negates by all the legal and lawsuit costs...

AFAIK It's mostly cheaper due to lower sales tax (aka VAT/GST which is ~10% vs 18-27% in Europe) and no China import duty. Finally being local currency helps somewhat because of currency stability I'd guess.

Yes that makes a difference too but its also stuff like house prices and food which have no sales tax.

Is it really? People still buy them in droves. As much as I hate devices I can't fix (and this makes the short warranty times problem even worse), many people don't seem to care.

Why did you keep buying macs then?

It took a long time for me to understand all this. I bought my last Mac 3 years ago. I'm still using an iMac which I'm really happy with, but I will most likely not buy another Mac again.

My machine for gaming and other hobbies is an AMD with Windows, and once this iMac dies I will probably switch to Linux for my work machine.

6 years in the UK.

Not quite - I'm from the UK too and I believe we have 6 years to file a claim that shows that the item was defective when we received it, not that it developed a defect.

Before 6 months it is assumed that if a defect develops, it was there when it was delivered.

After 6 months the onus is on the person who brought it to show that the defect was there when it was delivered.

Importantly - there is no expectation in law that the item has to last 6 years.

This. I have a 4 year old MBP with a screen issue that's obviously not my fault. Apple refuses to fix it.

The most relesellers in my country give 3-5 years of warranty for MacBooks. I guess things are good here.

My significant other owned a 2011 MBP and experienced the same thing... She didn't know about the recall and I didn't get a chance to investigate and find out until after the recall window was closed. I can't really avoid using a Mac for work, but for personal use it has definitely trained me to avoid Apple products when at all possible. She would concur with you that her 2011 MBP was a terrible investment.

> a 3 year warranty by default

come to australia, consumer guarantees give you a 3 year warranty. In fact my MacBook Pro gave up the ghost a few weeks after the 3 years had expired, Apple replaced the bits under warranty.

Yep and they still try to push applecare+ onto customers.

IIRC you can now buy AppleCare as a subscription which you could possibly try gamle - buy only after something breaks..? Or just buy 1 year a piece.

It's just anecdata, but I've been using Mac laptops since the mid 90s, have never bought AppleCare, and have never regretted that. I've never had an out of warranty repair. On a couple I have replaced the battery myself after several years, at a cost much lower than what AppleCare would have been on that one machine. Yes, it's possible that some day I will end up with a lemon that needs a ton of work. But I think that over 20 years of savings on not buying AppleCare more than covers it (I would have bought a new machine before sinking in anywhere near $10k in repairs).

> As much as I don’t want to buy another Mac in the future, I have a feeling that I probably will.

If my laptop has 13 repairs over the first 2 years of use (and under "very well treatment"), I would consider the laptop a scam and never buy from that manufacturer. But since the machine got an Apple logo on it, somehow all the problems become material for praising their repair services. If this is not symptom of Stockholm (wink to author) syndrome, I don't know what is.

I still have my 2010 ThinkPad from Lenovo, which, besides of a broken audio jack and completely drained battery, is completely fine. Everything else works as 10 years ago. Of course this is anecdotal, but wouldn't any of you prefer a laptop without issue to worry about than one with tons of issues but getting free and fast repairs? Good repair service shouldn't be excuse to shitty quality of the hardware and software.

The only thing keeping me on a Mac is some of my work which is iOS/macOS development. Unfortunately I haven't found a good workaround for this.

Simple: work in Android/PC development instead.

I think hardware quality is overall good with Apple, but sometimes there are rough patches over years where widespread problems are neither acknowledged nor solved. One such patch, which I fortunately managed to avoid, was from 2016 or so till now. It remains to be seen how good the Apple Silicon Macs work over the next several years.

I have a 7-year old Asus laptop, the lowest price/performance I could find in 2014. Same experience. It has one faulty USB port, and the battery is getting weak.

Over its lifetime I did watch the temperature, and clean it about once every two years.

Other than that, it is only due to software slowing down that I bought a beefier desktop for work.

No returns or repairs needed. I also think Apple hardware is a joke. Check out Louis Rossmann on YouTube. I am linking one of his videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8

Empirically, the 2016–2020 MacBook Pros seem to be relatively unreliable. My 2016 would frequently have wake-from-sleep problems, occasional kernel panics, and fried its logic board with a pop after about 3 years. My 2019 thermal-throttles every day, kernel panics a few times a month, and has a battery that just gives up under load.

Meanwhile my 2019 Mac Pro (tower) is probably the most rock-solid reliable computer I've ever used. Months of uptime, never has sleep/wake problems, and only one kernel panic in the 1.5 years I've had it.

I agree, though i've had some minor issues with big sur and third party (OWC) SSD PCIE devices on my mac pro. Once I removed the cards things were solid. Prior to big sur no issues were abound. Once I upgraded i found sleep didn't work appropriately and bootcamp was a non-starter as well.

My MBP Retina 2013 has been going strong in various environments, not babied at all.

Same here. It's what I'm typing this on. The only thing I've done is replace the battery about a year ago. 7 years was a good run. Works 100% as well as the day I bought it and the last Apple product I've purchased. Took 10 minutes from walk-in to walk-out at a non-Apple branded Mac repair store for 70% of the price using the identical official replacement battery. No appointment.

Yeah, I have a 2013 MBP as well, and it has been problem-free. The battery still lasts hours! I think it's because I almost always used it plugged-in, so the battery has a very very low cycle count. I am SUPER impressed with how well the machine has lasted, considering my heavy usage of it!

I, too, have a late 2013 MBP, and just today replaced the battery a second time due to swelling; first time was mid-2018. I also leave my MBP plugged into power all the time, and rarely use it as a laptop apart from my desk, and suspect this may be contributing to lowered battery lifetime. However, 4.5+ years on the factory installed one, and 3 years on the first replacement seemed OK, given the machine has given me no other issues at all in the 8 years I've had it. Both battery repairs were done myself using the excellent iFixit replacement kit and instructions. While I know I have to replace this MBP eventually I'd rather wait until the post-M1 availability shakes out, and I feel confident a replacement MBP won't have the issues that have plagued each years' models from 2015 onward.

Yea, my 2012 is going strong.

I've been meaning to put a ssd in it, but procrastinating.

Love the screws Apple.

I strongly recommend this if you can install it. I did it for my tech-illiterate partner for his 2014ish MBP, installed 1/2 TB SDD. It is snappy than before and the FaceTime finally works on his MBP. Before then, his MBP will not get the FT call notification until the last ringing and then it will send the notification but it is too late. I am not sure how spinning rust have a impact on FT from loading. He is not screen recording or anything, it just will struggle so hard to load FT and often failed on spinning rust. Now on SDD, it load normally without issue. Strange behavior. I tried to find info about this but I couldn't find any information about this. Looks like it is one-off deal thing.

SSDs are relatively cheap right now. I upgraded my 2009 mbp with one and it was definitely worth it.

Can't run newer releases of osx (err macOS) anymore, though, right? Only a matter of time before there's no more updates to an unsupported platform.

My 2011 MBA needed a new battery a few years ago, but still works amazingly well as a daily-driver computer for my wife

Regarding the Mac Pro. I think the addon cards are a taste of things to come. They remind me of the old Acorn Archimedes slices on the RISC PC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc_PC - you could add CPUs (ARM - this is where ARM started!, x86 and DSPs).

They definitely took inspiration from that, and I think they’re going to reveal a game changer with the next Mac Pro. I suspect it’ll be similar. Imagine being able to add loads of M-spec CPU daughterboards & a few AMD ryzen ones for your virtualisation antics?

Agreed... 2019 MBP here and the touchbar went toast in less than a year. At this point I'll never purchase an Apple product for personal use unless my hands are tied.

Exactly the same. My Mac Pro literally hasn't crashed one time I think. I have it loaded up with the 2 HDD mount, 1 NVME SSD for scratch, a capture card, W5700X MPX, and a Wacom attached. No issues in Blender, Clip Studio, nothing. I thought I'd regret the purchase but it's probably my favorite computer ever (makes a good footrest too)

Nice! I got my MP to replace my 2016 as my personal computer after the latter died, but that was a few months before the W5700X was available. I kinda wish I waited to get that; oh well.

It is a good size for being a footrest! IMO the aluminum and sharp edges don't make it a particularly comfortable footrest though haha

I think the obession with 'thin' laptop that crept in towards 2015 onwards has something to do with it

My pet theory is that the thinner 2016 chassis (and/or hotter chips around that time) crossed some thermal/entropy threshold and the heat is causing a lot of the software flakiness … although I have no way to prove that

I work on a 2019 16" MBP and have had no issues other than the space gray finish wearing off of the hand rest on the keyboard. The CPU definitely runs warmer than my 2015 MBP retina, though. I'm looking forward to a worth M1X/M2 16inch to run a lot cooler.

My mid-2015 Macbook Pro that I use extensively has only had to replace the battery this year.

Other than that I had never had to repair anything for it. It still runs very well.

In terms of value for money I'd say that's pretty good.

I have a gripe with every Macbook Pro I've owned, and I've owned 4 of them over the last 10 years.

They all lag when I type. I hit a key, and it takes a while before it shows up on screen. The effect is at its worst in Safari, but it shows up most everywhere else as well.

Sometimes, I'll type a few letters or even words before they start showing up. Doesn't matter if I wipe the machine and reinstall, and Apple has never been able to resolve it for any of their machines I've owned.

I do type faster than average, but I don't think it is humanly possible to type fast enough to make a proper computer lag. This has never been an issue on any of my concurrently owned Windows/Linux machines. Only on Mac, and on every single Mac.

The only thing that lags from time to time on my M1 is opening a Safari tab. Recently did a clean install to get rid of some 10 year Time Machine backup cruft I accrued and it's gone. I've owned 3 in the past 10 years and none of them lag when pressing a key not even my wife's white MacBook with a HD.

Safari became unusable to me I might be a tab hoarder but I can’t be the only one. Sometimes it takes a minute to come to foreground again.

Switch to firefox, there are extensions to put tabs in the background so it feels lightweight whether you have 1 tab or 1001. All of apples reported efficiencies with safari just wash away when you compare it to the performance of firefox with tab suspension and ublock origin considering the modern web.

I just wish there was some interoperability with the tab syncing and password management features in Safari. I know that isn’t on Mozilla, but having to migrate the massive iCloud database of all my passwords and give up tab syncing to my phone makes switching to Firefox a hard sell.

What I did was switch to firefox on my phone as well. No issues with passwords in my experiences really.

Just put you tabs into bookmark folders for later use. For dev work I understand how one could need a lot of tabs but I just bookmark them into a folder.

Doesn’t always happen to me but under load yes. Also: letters appearing out of the order I typed them.

If you type on a Mac on display in an Apple Store, does it behave the same way?

The M1 Macs I tried at the store are the first ones where I'm not sure if there is a lag or not. I'm planning on upgrading once the M-series Macs have at least 32gb of ram, so I'll see at that point.

I've noticed this too: at first on my friend's hackintosh, which I just chalked up to a bad kext or something. I was pretty surprised to find that the used MBP I bought also exhibited the behavior. Touch-typing on it feels like I'm fat fingering a Nokia keypad, with how frequently I need to delete and try again.

I have a strange lag problem too.

My CapsLock key (mapped to Esc because I am a Doom Emacs User) gets really slow over days. Like in ~4 seconds to register. A reboot fixed the delay. But it degrades again.

Happened twice. Thankfully, after the last reboot, it seems to be holding.

Last year MBP running Big Sur.

Coincidentally, my lag issues got a lot worse since upgrading to Big Sur. As did my thermal throttling.

I map it the same way to caps lock and experience exactly the same you describe. I noticed after the last patch a few weeks ago it went away for now. Been driving me nuts until.

Have you applied the 11.5.2 update? The Caps Lock slowness/beach ball issue seems to be related to the high WindowServer CPU issue and has gone away for me since I applied 11.5.2.

Huh. Me too. It's like it switches between two modes: typing, or emacs-keys-movement. And sometimes gets so bad it takes almost a second between them.

Resetting my bluetooth module and factory resetting all connected bluetooth peripherals helps usually. But it's a pain.

I was running an MBP for work and running Doom Emacs got me the exact same issue, that would spread to everything. Luckily I was up for a new machine before things got to bad and on the new Dell Percision I haven't had any issues (after I installed Ubuntu on it)

For me it's the '0' key on my numpad on an external keyboard. Takes up to 500ms to be scanned. All other keys have input lag, but are scanned instantly. Keyboard works flawless on Linux. Really weird. Wondering if the '0'key is somehow scanned in software on Mac.

Hmmm.. FWIW, I type at like 130wpm (I have won typing competitions), and have never experienced frequent text-input latency on my Macs (I've used Macs since the mid-80's). Only intermittent due to obvious things like CPU-intensive operations in progress.

Did you see it happening on really "simple" applications like Terminal? What's crazy to me is how you saw it happening on a fresh OS install... had you installed any other software? Or any kind of customization to settings, locale, stuff like that? Curious how that could be happening!

Fresh is "fresh but with IntelliJ and a large project open", but without all the background NGINX etc installed.

Once one app starts lagging, they all lag. Terminal, TextEdit, Safari, Notes, IntelliJ, everything.

I'm well north of 130wpm, but I don't think that matters for the issues that my Macs have had to deal with, as I used to be well below 130wpm and still experienced such issues.

How did you increase your typing speed so much? I’m sitting at around 70ish wpm and would like to increase it

Lots of slowly accumulated, deliberate practice here and there over many years. monkeytype.com is probably the best site for typing right now. And I just destroyed so many of bits of anonymity haha.

For me, chatting online for hours on end since ~1997. My impatience to get a message out naturally resulted in typing faster.. I also played piano since childhood which I'm sure helped.

I've got the same issue, I'm a relatively slow typer (90WPM) but every now and then the Mac just becomes so slow and typing everywhere is lagged. It usually happens when I'm working on the frontend of our app which has a javascript 3D engine in it, and the editor is visual studio code, so I was just assuming it was some weird Blink engine problem.

IntelliJ: Thats your problem.

Everytime i tried to run their IDE's on mac os i gave up because the abysmal typing/scroll performance.

I think textmate broke my brain back in the day, can't stand any editor that can't run at 60fps. (unless it's vim/nano on ssh)

Hmmm.. I run IntellJ IDEA on my 2013 MBP and I don't experience system-wide text-entry latency. Though, to be fair my version of IDEA is pretty old (2016.2)

We have hundreds of engineers at work who all use the same apps on latest MacBook Pros.

There have been zero reports of widespread lagging which clearly indicates that there is some problem with your setup. IntelliJ is the likely candidate especially if you are doing Scala or Kotlin development.

Wow. Full time Mac user with a very, very high typing speed (consistently tested at 90+ WPM), and I have never had a keyboard lag issue with a Mac. Sure, I've had piggy apps -- usually web apps -- create lags, but that's happened on lots of systems, not just Macs.

If my Macs couldn't keep up with my typing, I'd have kicked them to the curb a LONG LONG LONG time ago.

I am quite a bit above 90 wpm. Almost exactly double for sustained (1 min+), and more than that for burst.

My theory is that the Intel macs generate too much heat for the chassis to handle (I'm currently on a 16" 2019), especially when being used by IntelliJ in projects with many files, having additional dev stuff running in the background, and with an external monitor connected.

Additionally, I perceive more lag on the Mac itself than on the external monitor, so I think there is a component that is due to the slow speed of the Macbook Pro display.

My theory is that you generate too much heat by typing that fast :)

No, seriously, what’s the secret?

Lots and lots of practice during moments of downtime. Those small moments add up over the years.

Back when I got my first Mac (2012) I was plateaued at 80-100 wpm. From there, it was an accumulation of intentional practice for fun and enjoyment.

WPM in the 90s is above average, but not "very, very high"! But I can see that you are a really really really big fan of adverbs...!

Wow, it's pretty interesting that you took the time to challenge the statement without actually verifying that you are correct.

You are, of course, wrong. Cursory googling will show average typing speed to be about half the figure I noted. I've never worked with anyone who typed as quickly as I can, and I've been working quite a while.

But hey, at least you got to drop a dig in about adverbs, so you've got that going for you.

I don't see any adverbs in the post being referred to, making it even more pointless. "Speed" is a noun, not a verb. "Time" is also a noun, so in both cases we're looking at adjectives.

> You are, of course, wrong.

I'm rolling

I recommend expanding your web search just a little farther... 90 WPM is not considered "very, very high"!

90 WPM is ok, certainly above average. But please don't take it personally, I was just scrolling through the comments and saw what I thought was a typo, and if not, thought I'd share my perspective. 120WPM can be considered "fast".

If 90 WPM is "very, very fast" then what about those at 120 or 150?

Keep digging!

I don’t understand - why the childish behaviour and wilful ignorance? If the facts don’t matter to you, that’s fine. All the best.

I've noticed the same thing on my 2019 16". In my case, at least, it seems to happen only when the integrated GPU is in use. If I force the discrete GPU to be used, it doesn't happen. I've been able to reproduce this on fresh installs with no third party apps installed or running.

It's incredibly frustrating, and just one more thing to add to the pile of annoyances that I have with Apple products lately.

This exact issue shows up when I type in Terminal, and it makes me annoyed every time.

I used to have this on my work computer, and through some debugging tools that are not available publically or on macOS, I was able to track it down to my shell spawning a git process very frequently; until you mentioned this I suspected that this was the case on my MBP as well.

Could it be that this is just generally true? I don't remember this on my 2014 MBP, just my new 2019 16" MBP. Supposedly the latter is a more powerful machine.

It's gotten so bad that I frequently consider wiping my computer and seeing whether it'll be fixed with a new environment.

Same problem and on Safari as well.

But I do think the problem is fairly recent as in the last 4- 5 years after certain macOS update.

It works when you have little to no CPU usage, but even at 20-40% CPU typing speed lag start to show.

I wonder if it could be the hardware acceleration? Hardware acceleration can be weird at times and cause strange behaviors. They are not always consistent across all computers. I couldn't find the information if there is a way to disable the hardware acceleration in Safari.

FWIW, I've had poorly behaved USB devices cause lags, spinning beachballs, zombie hangs.

After AppleCare expires Apple caps the user cost of hardware repairs per visit to some number they look up in a per-model table that presumably varies over time.

It appears the author doesn’t know this as they seem quite nervous about losing coverage.

In my case I got a keyboard / top cover, logic board, and battery all replaced for $400 and change, on a 6.5 year old machine well out of AppleCare. They only do this while the model is not considered obsolete, and they have more discretion to do things in your favor if your initial purchase was made directly through Apple, and if you previously had AppleCare on the device, even if it is expired.

In the US, after five years they declare your device obsolete. Or after seven years in some states in the US (edit: in cases where it is required to be that long by state law). Then after that, your only repair options are DIY or third party.

Also if there is a repair done by Apple at any time, in or out of AppleCare, that repair itself is warrantied for 90 days. And if an issue was put on the record in Apple’s support system for your device before AppleCare expired, it can still be covered even if it is brought in for repair after AppleCare expired.

Interesting. Indeed, I wasn't aware of that. But I wonder if the capped repair cost is only available in the US, or if it's a global thing. There seem to be some differences between US and ex-US when it comes to Apple support.

Yes I would not be surprised if it is US only.

WTF. I've owned dozens of Apple computers over the years, starting with an Apple II and then a IIgs, on through many generations of Macs: LC, iMacs, powermacs, powerbook, Macbook Airs and Pros. I've recommended Mac laptops to at least a dozen family members. In all this time, I can think of three failures:

- An iMac that had a bad GPU. Known issue.

- Ditto with an MBP.

- Recently, an MBA that had the system board go bad such that it would throttle the CPU to 100%.

That's it. Apple took care of two of those via warranty. The third, the iMac was way out of warranty but my dad fixed it himself by reflowing the graphics board in an oven.

I've also replaced a few batteries, but those are consumables and they didn't fail prematurely.

I looked at this person's homepage: https://pqvst.com/

Looks like they use their Mac a lot judging by all the projects they're working on.

I have a strategy that is common to all hackers / nerds / technophiles and that is: having multiple devices for different things.

It's common to see in hacker circles: This laptop is for gaming. This other laptop is for freelancing & business. My other laptop is for toying / tinkering etc

You can extend that list to probably 10 devices if you're serious enough about compartmenting your digital life. I have long since used a single device for everything that I work on.

Most devs with a computer use their device 8-10 hours per day, don't you think?

I have a gaming desktop, personal laptop(which I almost never use), and a work laptop. Why would anyone have 10 devices? That is craziness.

Do you have a machine for SQL? Machine for mobile? Machine for web?

I have:

* Personal workstation/gaming machine

* Employer provided work laptop (MBP)

* Surface Go Tablet used for reading around the house, light travel, etc.

* Personal Dell laptop used for longer travel

* Old desktop converted to a server for running services I always need up.

* A rpi 3b used for running services I want to physically separate from the internet accessible main server.

I've considered repurposing some old hardware I have laying around into a htpc type thing for gaming/emulation on my TV, but that's on hold right now due to GPU pricing.

So I'm not far off 7. Other tech-heavy users may have seperate devices for their spouse/kids, or dedicated devices for specific OSes (my main workstation is a dual boot, my laptop is linux only and the tablet is windows only). So I can see a path to 10 for others.

Similar here- work provides MB Pro and Dell Laptop and workstation and iPhone/iPad. Personal iPhone/iPad Pro, self built gaming PC, Linux Xeon lab server, a couple Pis, M1 and Intel Mac Minis, random assortment of laptop/iMacs/iPads/self built PCs for other family member use.

I don't want to yuck anyone's yum but the thought of maintaining, keeping charged, finding room for and managing data on so many computers sounds like a nightmare to me.

the most I manage for machines right now is:

1 work-provided laptop

1 personal laptop

1 gaming desktop

1 backup laptop (old, like 10 years old)

1 closet server desktop (also old, but runs terraria servers just fine)

On my desk, I use 2 HDMI switches and a USB 3.0 switch to use the same peripherals and monitors for both my work laptop and gaming desktop. At the end of the day, I just hit the buttons on the switches to toggle to my desktop.

I have a USB-C dock that the work laptop plugs into. If i ever want to do work for my side project, I can unplug my work-provided laptop and plug in my personal laptop, and have the same setup as before -- just with a different machine.

It's very interesting to read about other setups and how people use them. For me, it's simply a MBA and logitech mx master 3 mouse.

I love /r/battlestations and /r/averagebattlestations for exactly that reason. Really cool to see what other people have for a setup.

Even just keeping software updates, backups, and your personal data up to date on both a laptop and a desktop can be frustrating. Two Macs could be doable because of the level of syncing that iCloud provides, but I'd probably still need Screen Sharing every once in a while!

I've used a single MacBook Pro for all my work for the last 10 or so years with no problems. I highly doubt this is the reason. Plus, if you have 3 devices and extend their lifetime by 3x, it's the same as having 1 device which gets replaced more often ;)

Yes. My laptop is where I do all my work. Since I work remote a lot, I try to stick to as few devices as possible. Having a MacBook where I can also run Windows and Linux as VMs when I need to, has been a huge benefit.

https://pqvst.com/2021/08/24/my-macbook-pro/#2019-03-23---ex...

Were you using an Apple adapter when this happened?

Ah, the Mythical Macbook Month.

> You can extend that list to probably 10 devices if you're serious enough about compartmenting your digital life.

If you're actually serious about it, consider Qubes OS [0]. This should be much more secure and convenient than handling ten devices.

[0] https://qubes-os.org

I would rather do everything on a remote server, really, with a different environment for each project.

But that starts breaking down when working on mobile or hardware projects.

Yeah, you described my computing approach. Including a couple tiny PCs like Raspberry Pi, etc. there are currently 12 computers in the room I'm sitting in (only 3 are powered on), and this is just my "office" -- not the "computer museum" I have in another room which probably has 30+ computers of varying sorts. Each has a different purpose, different OS, different architecture, made in a different decade, etc. :)

> I have a strategy [...]: having multiple devices for different things.

> I have long since used a single device [...]

I'm not sure which you're suggesting then?

I understand the desire to compartmentalise... I just think real life's too blurry, and then it gets annoying at the edges - oh I had this problem on my other one, how did I solve it again? etc.

I definitely agree with this strategy, but try to limit it to mainly 2 primary systems, and maybe a couple older repurposed systems. Basically I have one for my professional life, one for my personal life, and an old laptop dedicated as a tv streamer.

But I don't travel much, and if I did I would probably only have one primary system.

>having multiple devices for different things.

That's my take, although I don't own $1000 worth of computers all added together.

I'm always surprised when people use laptops for professional work as I've always had great honkin' company-supplied desktop machines. Generally, if something breaks (which is super rare) the main cost is the time to rebuild an environment.

Do you... regularly carry around like six laptops, then? Even carrying two sounds like a hassle, my husband had to do that for a while due to a single stupid time clock app installed on a corporate laptop that was too locked down to get the rest of his work done on.

I use multiple devices, mostly desktops with varying specs. They run off the same Ubuntu master image, primarily use network storage, and are managed with Landscape for updates and so forth. Now there are times when I will need to use my GPU workstation, and others times where an old C2Q would suffice for web browsing. In general though, I can sit down on any machine and start working right away in a consistent enviroment.

Those machines are getting old, and I've been considering upgrading my server and using a VDI solution instead. Or maybe it's time to switch to a more mobile option...

Honestly, I suspect that lot of the slowdowns that people see in ~4+ year old Macs, iPads, or iPhones is in large part due to degradation in flash storage, especially in ca. 2013 MacBook Pros where the flash modules were still kind of shitty. This is all the more reason why Pro-level Macs should not have soldered on SSDs.

The original poster switched to a MacBook Pro at a bad time. The 2016/2017 machines were lousy. The 2019 models are better, but still not as good as the 2015. I think with the addition of the T1/T2 chip and BridgeOS, the machines got too complicated. Add in the poor thermals of the overly thin case, and the relatively high TDP of the discrete GPUs, and it is a recipe for un-reliability. I hope that the new AppleSilicon-based MacBook Pros will solve all of these problems. (and it will be a bonus of they back away from the USB-C only cliff.)

> There are some other interesting options out there, like the Framework Laptop or System76. I do also like the look of a Dell XPS or Thinkpad, but I don’t trust those companies to provide global support.

I will say, Lenovo for one is really good at global support if you get their better plans. That said of those choices I'd definitely lean towards the System76. They are solid as hell. Been using mine for the last year.

>>Swedish customer support they informed me there was no way to get a repair outside of Sweden, since that’s where I had bought the laptop.

That's odd, I've had my UK-bought XPS repaired in Poland without any issue, just rang dell customer service and a local engineer came over the next day and replaced the motherboard on the living room table. It wasn't ever questioned that the laptop wasn't bought in Poland.

It was quite a few years ago now, so I don't remember the details exactly. It might have been something specific about it being a battery issue. In any case, I remembering spoking to both customer support in Sweden and Japan and was informed that I couldn't get it repaired in Japan.

It's entirely possible that the issue wasn't being out of Sweden, it was being out of Europe. I think Dell warranties are region specific.

I was going to write exactly this! Bought XPS in UK in 2017 and repaired in Poland in 2018.

Apple is basically the BMW of computers at this point.

it's a shame, it would be nice to go back to a point where there was more quality/durability inherent in the product.

2012 macbook pro is basically like an e30 series bmw. Completely workable with common tools. I've gone into this computer for repairs or hardware upgrades over the years a dozen times by now and thanks to its repairability and performance with updated components I am still using it today.

Interesting.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+D...

"MacBook Pro with Retina Display 15" Mid 2012 Repairability Score: 1 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)"

Mine is the 2012 model before the retina display. Phillips head screws everywhere instead of the pentalobe. Open the case and you have access to everything. Battery can be replaced in 2 minutes. Hard drive in 1 minute. RAM in 30 seconds. Trackpad another 2 minutes after pulling battery. I even took out my optical drive and installed another hard drive in the bay since its SATAIII on that model. Then they came out with the retina mac and glued and soldered almost all of the above.

Gotcha. That one did do significantly better.

It's interesting to compare that machine to today's. 5.6lbs vs today's 16" at 4.3lbs. 2012 is 0.93" thick and today's is 0.64". I suppose, based on this datapoint, we can say there is something like a ~25% mechanical overhead for "repairability" then.

"MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Mid 2012 Repairability Score: 7 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)."

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Unibody+...

The old macbook airs of that era were still light and just as repairable too.

On that ifixit disagrees. 4 is not a 1, but not a 7 either.

"MacBook Air 13" Mid 2012 Repairability Score: 4 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)."

"All the components—including RAM and SSD—are proprietary." Although I suppose there are probably 3rd party options by now.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Mid+2012...

> Apple is basically the BMW of computers at this point.

> it's a shame, it would be nice to go back to a point where there was more quality/durability inherent in the product. reply

Apple has always had hardware reliability issues.

The unibodies had suicidal GPUs (pretty much every dGPU model between the 2007 and 2013 had a service program at one point or another) as well as battery issues, the retinas had delaminating antiglare coating, the polycarbonate unibody macbooks had cracking issues through the entire case, …

It's possible that the pre-Intel models had less issues (that's when I switched) but I doubt it, I was always told to avoid first gens of new design like the plague (not that taking later revisions was a sure bet, but the first gens have always been full of flaws).

68k macs were pretty solid though.

My parents still have the Mac LC that boots fine although I think the 40MB HDD is starting to have issues.

The hardest part is getting data off of the machine since all of the I/O options are obsolete. I had to use floppy disks last time.

I don't know about always. Apple has been around a long time and apparently the MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Mid 2012 was a decent machine for repairability, according to asdff and ifixit anyway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28305508

The older macbooks were definitely pretty good at repairability (though iirc you had to take the G4s apart completely to access anything, but the unibodies had easy access to most things, on the whitebooks I think the battery was even removable and that gave you access to the ram and hdd slots), but I was talking about the reliability (durability) not the repairability.

Yes, I missed the distinction. On the other hand, we're talking about repairing a laptop which is nearly 10 years old and still having it be useful, so there must be some durability there.

> ... though iirc you had to take the G4s apart completely to access anything ...

Powerbook G4s (at least, the titanium one I used for about 10 years) had a keyboard you could lift off to access some of the guts. I found it quite nice.

I have a 2015 Macbook Pro 15. I had a swelling battery issue twice. My Macbook wasn't part of the battery recall but it had the exact same issue detailed in the recall. The first time I had to call the customer service and in the end they let me be part of the program and replaced it for the 1st time.

The replacement also included a screen replacement that cost $400+. The total cost was ~$600.

However, after exactly 12 months, the battery was swelling again and it wasn't covered any longer because it has passed a few days when I called in.

Then I recently I have both of the Macbook speakers broke and made lots of static sound. It would cost ~$300 to replace them. I'm debating whether I should just buy a new M1 or wait for another M1X coming.

Having & maintaining a Macbook is costly over years. It does break just as often or even more often than my Dell Latitude. And the cost to fix is often in the 5x-10x range.

I would not buy a Macbook under no circumstance until apple changes the requirement of needing to connect it to their proprietary configuration system to verify the repair and parts have been setup in their internal service repair portal.

Dell on the other hand can be fixed, all on your own, with no support from dell. Other then the disassembly instructions that they will gladly give you in the owners manual. Try to get disassembly instructions from apple as a consumer. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Don't know what they're like these days but my 2011 Lenovo Thinkpad works great! Solid laptop, replaced the keyboard once aside from that still going strong.

Maybe it has something to do with the year 2011. My 2011 Macbook Pro 13" is still alive and kicking. With max 16GB RAM and replacing the spinning rust with an SSD, it's remarkably nimble as well. It's done a lot of travelling, and I've replaced the battery 3 times due to battery life going down too far.

I finally upgraded to an M1 Macbook Air, which is also really nice, but the number of miles on that old axe was impressive. I still have it, and the kids use it for various school things. My only complaint is it is now at EOL for OS updates.

That's great, think my next move will be the M1 MacBook. Perhaps cliché but may be worth trying Linux on there now, elementary OS or something, everyone mostly just use the browser anyway.

Same MacBook, same SSD upgrade. I haven't replaced the battery, I tend to stay near an outlet anyway. Debian and Ubuntu work great on it, so I moved off OSX.

My company provides either MacBook or Lenovo (I have a t480s and just received a t14s). I have yet to hear someone having an issue with their Lenovo (most run Fedora). Not sure about MacBooks reliability. The weak point of Lenovo seem to be the thunderbolt docking stations. Mine worked perfectly on the t480s but is unreliable with the t14s and IT support told me they are overwhelmed with docking station issues.

The 2016 - 2020 Macbook Pros have been lemons, especially the 2016 - 2019 years

My 2018 had:

1) Catastrophic hardrive failure, just one month after the 1 year warranty. I lost everything (I had some back ups somewhere). This was a common issue with their controller, that failed, yet I still had to pay for it (later it was recalled).

2. Keyboard starting failing, with one shift key coming out completely, and some keys with registering repetitive/duplicate keystrokes and key fading. I had to buy an external keyboard to use with it, and carry i with me.

3. The battery completely failed. To the point that can't hold on more than 1min without shutting down without power, turning basically into a desktop. I bought an external battery (Anker), which is the only way I can use it outside.

I don't want to send my laptop to fix these issues, as they will take a week or two, and I need my computer for work.

I am waiting for the new redesigned macbook pro coming out, and I will buy that, and send this for repairs. (the keyboard had a recall, and a free repair).

I thinking with the m1 laptops Apple is turning the corner, but it is risking to become like Alfa Romeo, or Land Rover brand. Building beautiful machines, and with poor reliability and that break down randomly and expensive to maintain.

I bought a new high end thinkpad (i forget, it was a few years ago). The display was clearly defective, serious dark spots. Lenovo held a firm line that I would have to send it in and wait 3 weeks for a replacement. New out of the box.

They tried to change their tune when I asked for a refund but I was finished dealing with their support "quality" - imagine the level of support that would happen if something broke outside of the return period!

Anyways, I bought a Razer blade, and got some of the worst support in my life. I actually got accused of lying on the phone by the support agent!

My next laptop will probably be a dell or surface - their in house repair service is supposedly extremely good.

> At first, Apple informed me that they couldn’t replace the unit and would instead offer to repair it. However, considering I had almost just received it, and experienced issues from day one, I was able to convince them to give me a brand new unit instead.

Interesting, i've always had the experience with Apple that if it was within the 2 week or 30 day(im too lazy to go check) period of having received the device, if there was any issue at all, they'd basically just give you a new one on the spot / take a refund and just buy the exact same model. Edit: YMMV, i might just have been lucky and been dealt with by a very kind apple employee

Damn, and I thought I've had to take my 13" 2016 Pro in for a lot of repairs. There's a design flaw that makes it chew through batteries every 8-16 months and I just had to have a week-long involuntary vacation while they shipped it off to a repair center in another case, where the entire top half of the case got replaced for the third time.

This is the most expensive Mac I've owned in like 18y of using the things, even before I count the fact that only one of those battery replacements happened before the extended warranty ran out, and estimate the cost of several unplanned vacations.

My next machine will probably be a 2022 Air; I had a succession of Intel Airs that gave me very little trouble before this battery-devouring Pro. I'm hoping their solidity has survived the transition to Apple silicon.

I think its absurd that apple stopped doing a lot of repairs in store, but still doesn't offer you a loaner computer imaged from yours. Clearly, people are using these computers for work.

Charging the battery over 80% produces more heat and degradesvits lifetime, did you ran it plugged in all the time? My phones manufacturer stops at 90 but i installed an alarm to pull the plug earlier.

I ran it exactly the same way I ran the several Mac laptops that preceded it: unplugged in cafes, unplugged in parks, and closed while plugged into the external monitor on my desk. It’s rare for it to spend more than a couple days plugged in, even during the pandemic. The exact same usage pattern that produced a slow, multi-year decline in battery capacity in every other machine resulted in the 2016 Pro suddenly starting to shut down completely while it thought 20-60% of the battery capacity remained. SMC/PRAM resets did nothing, “recalibration” did nothing.

2016 Pros eat batteries, and while Apple acknowledged this enough to pay for one battery replacement, they’ve still hit me for an annoyingly large amount of repair cost, plus downtime, plus the annoyance of work lost due to unexpected shutdowns before I say “oh god it’s doing this again” and start getting insanely aggressive about saving.

My comment my have been read like trying to blaming it on you, that was the opposite of my intention.

I think all computers with Li-Ion batteries should have user accessible charging limits, like Tuxedo and Thinkpads have.

For now we have to help ourselves with software, i use BatteryBot Pro from f-droid on my Android devices.

(edit) formatting

I can believe it. Our company has to replace multiple MacBook pros per week due to butterfly keyboard or battery bulge issues. How the mighty have fallen.

The 2016 MBPs (Touch Bar, butterfly keyboard, Intel) are bad, but I hope they were an aberration. The M1 MBA is fantastic.

VERY misleading headline. The article makes clear all the costs were covered by AppleCare, so the story here is (a) he got a lemon, which happens in literally every product category and (b) the vendor stood behind the product and took care of him.

So I'm honestly not sure what the point of this post is. The only laptops I've had that have handled the high-travel workload I traditionally subjected mine to remotely as well as Apple were pre-Lenovo ThinkPads. The keyboard thing was distressing, but it happened entirely between purchases for me so I didn't directly experience it; however, a good chunk of the outrage over it was precisely because of how rock-solid the products had traditionally been.

I wasn't mislead, his story is pretty much what I thought it would be -- I didn't think that someone would pay out of his own pocket repair costs that are 3X what the laptop cost to buy new.

I'm kind of surprised at the number of problems he's had, my 2018 MPB has has zero issues, despite a lot of travel in addition to bouncing around my bike's pannier on the way to work. The battery life is getting pretty short, but since I've been WFH for the past 18 months, staying close to a charger isn't an issue, no need to go to crowded meeting rooms where I can't plug in.

My take is that the article is about this person's reliability issues with their MBP. Regardless of which party actually paid for the repairs, the fact that so many repairs/replacements were required doesn't speak well for Apple.

Well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. Literally every manufacturer of anything complex is going to have customers whose whole experience goes sideways for whatever reason. You can't take away from this story that "gee, Apple has a quality problem" if the broad market doesn't experience the same kinds of failures. Honestly, with this sequence of events one wonders if there's just something about this GUY.

My experience is that Apple makes the best laptops I've ever used short of glory-days-of-IBM Thinkpads. Observed reliability in our org is that they perform DRASTICALLY better than equivalently high-end Dells or whatever.

Well, at least Apple took care of that person.

That is a way better experience than many of us who had the infamous early-2011 15" MBP with overheating issues had.

I downvoted you because it was clearly not a single lemon. There were two entire computer replacements, both of which also had issues.

> so the story here is (a) he got a lemon

Well isn't that misleading too?

The OP's experience includes two replacement computers, and the original "lemon" was replaced a little after two months after purchase.

Depending on how you want to look at the replacements, OP got a total of two, or maybe even three lemons, since the second replacement computer appears to have had its share of issues too.

Looking at the OP's issue history in the post, that seems to be a LOT of issues to have in that time span, no matter how good the AppleCare service is.

Several of the issues were with the keyboard, which on this model was the infamous butterfly model that has well documented reliability issues.

Apple sacrificed durability for thinness and it came back to bite them in the ass with many many AppleCare claims. On the plus side it probably didn't cost Apple a full $400 each time they had to replace a keyboard.

This is why I've always been so reluctant to drop big money on a Macbook. I feel like I'm chained to that AppleCare, whereas on a PC I can probably try to service it myself

I had a macbook pro 2013 which has never had any issue and still going strong as my primary jenkins worker node. the controller node is in cloud.

After that I had 3 macbook pro 2017-2018 all with keyboard, screen and power issue. I went on a M1 and it has been great so far.

I see no reason to use a Mac unless I have to do iOS/Mac OS works. I hope for day where we can do Mac dev on Linux at that point I don't have to deal with this whole Mac fiesta anymore

I'm curious why anyone would buy an Apple laptop with all the stories about unreliability in this thread...

I've had 2 laptops in the last ~11 or so years. A ThinkPad (trucked along worry-free for years) and a relatively cheap Acer Swift 3 (AMD Ryzen APU) which I still use to this day, worry-free. I don't think I've ever actually taken any device in for repair, ever, yet somehow in this thread there's a ton of anecdotes.

shhh... this is a thread for b*tching about problems, not actually doing anything about them ;)

don't Lenovo and Dell have global support / repair plans at additional cost ?

I'm not sure to be honest. I was not aware of that as an option when I bought my previous Dell XPS around 5 years ago. Maybe things have improved now though.

Yes, the higher support levels have international options, although the details depend on where you are. (although afaik the apple-like case of "bring to service partner, have them handle it" is covered very widely, but .e.g you won't get on-site support everywhere. But well, with Apple you can't even get that in your home area, so yeah...)

If you pay enough (I only checked commercial ProSupport Plus[2]) you get service and support anywhere where Dell is selling that product [1], as long as you travel less than 6 Months.

1: https://www.dell.com/support/contents/en-us/article/contact-...

2: https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/Legal_Docs/en/us/dell-p...

Yes. I have had next-day on-site support for Thinkpads in Europa, South Africa and the US. For devices not necessarily purchased in that country. The only question I got was with a German Thinkpad in the US when the power brick failed: "Do you want the replacement with the European plug or the US plug?". Everything else was fixed promptly without any questions or issues with warranty status. And no Thinkpads don't fail that often, I just have used them for more than 20 years.

I've had several Apple laptops, and mostly just normal wear issues:

- iBook - hard drive failure

- White plastic Macbooks - only issue is case cracking

- Late 2011? Macbook Pro - Dedicated GPU failure around the time macOS support ended, a widespread issue at the time

- Retina Macbook Pro - No issues

- M1 Macbook Air - No issues

Keyboard issues are really common with that generation of Mac Laptops, and the screen issue is something I've heard of.

All those issues together, though...that's a load of lemons.

You can now renew your AppleCare+ on eligible iPhones, iPads and Macs at a monthly/yearly rate after the 2-3 year coverage period expires as long as you do it within 30 days of expiration: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210580

Would highly recommend extending for a laptop needing this many repairs.

Only in the US afaik...

Honestly I have a 2015 MacBook Pro and it’s still working very well. Previously I had a 2012 or 2013 (I forget) and it worked well up until a couple years ago.

I also have a 2012 iMac which i think still works ok, but i replaced the hard drive with an SSD. When it still had an HDD it was incredibly slow, like it took over 10min to start up and 1min to do simple things, I thought it was broken.

I bought an iMac from their store for $1400 (15 years ago). Invested big in their software. The HD was unreliable from day 1. Three months after their warranty expired, the screen started crapping out. Hundreds of people complained of it on their forums; the response was erasing the complaints. Two years later they admitted the problem.

I have a 2018 Macbook Pro that had 1" of the touchbar stop working. I was quoted 1500 to replace it(did not have apple care as the 4 previous macbook pros never needed it) So I instead bought a new macbook pro and gave this one to my son. 6 months later the touchbar magically fixed itself... I really really really hate the touchbar.

It sounds like Apple's poor build quality directly netted them an extra sale. Why build better hardware when they can cultivate brand loyalty?

If my touchbar stopped working, I don’t think I’d notice within three months. (I have a physical esc key.)

That is generally my experience except when coding, I need the F keys for that.

Same, with roughly the same ridiculous quote. 2019 MBP touchbar died just a week out of warranty. Had it have completely died I would have been happier than the persistent flickering it now does. In spite of thousands of such reported problems, my understanding is that Apple refuses to acknowledge it as a defect.

I've never quite seen a repair history like this! Does your MacBook get crushed inside of bag/backpack often? Subject to unusually high temperatures, cold, or sunlight? Any weird power issues at your home? Very curious :D

Thule's Gauntlet cases are great but in your case, maybe a Pelican laptop box could work too.

Haha, nope. It's perfectly fine and undamaged. I work remote a lot, coffee shops, cafes, coworking spaces, airplanes. So it moves a lot. No unusually high temperatures.

I always use a soft case when I put it in my backpack for extra protection. Heat might be an issue though, especially if the laptop is hot and goes into my backpack directly.

Maybe I should consider a Pelican case now that my APP has expired... and maybe install some fans as well...

> especially if the laptop is hot and goes into my backpack directly.

I'd found MANY times that simply closing one of the more recent MacBooks (2019?) would not actually put it to sleep. I would close it, put it in my bag, then... hours later, find it was overly hot, still running, perhaps with 10% battery left. 2008 MB, 2012 MBP, 2015 MBP - never ever had this problem. I'm sure I overheated my 2019 MBP far more often than it was designed for.

Back in the day, when I was working at a PC repair shop, you'd see every kind of laptop come in. People would bring in Mac laptops, and then just open the lid up on the service desk and it would wake up immediately like it was still running! After all my experience with Windows PCs, I would be shocked that people would just shut the lid and put them away.

We all knew that you'd never just suspend or sleep a PC laptop and put it in your bag. It would always wake up, or not go completely to sleep, and you'd end up with a toasted laptop.

Meanwhile, every single Mac brought in had no trouble sleeping. They never overheated in a bag. The Mac owners never powered them off, always just shut the lid and put them in the bag. I'd never seen one overheat in a bag. Tons of Macs would come across the service desk, and never one overheated. Nobody ever shut them down to transport them either. They would reliably suspend / sleep every time you shut the lid.

Lately though, and I don't even work in a repair shop, I see Macs overheating in in other people's bags. I hear the fans soaring on them constantly. Mine doesn't suspend / resume properly either. They really aren't built as well as they used to be, IMO. I don't trust it to just sleep properly when I shut the lid, so it always gets powered off before it gets put away in a bag.

I think one thing I did sometimes would precede the 'no sleep Mac' thing. I'd have an external monitor connected, then disconnect it. Looking back, I did notice that often disconnecting a monitor would mean... it might take 20+ seconds for the OS to be 'normal' again. If I waited for a minute after removing a monitor, the sleep would seem to work. Disconnecting at office and putting in the bag... it never really went back to 'one screen' mode, and I presume continued to think an external monitor was connected.

I can't say that's behind all the events, but thinking back on it more, I know that was a repeating scenario.

I have had this issue on my previous 2015 MBP, and haven't had it on the 2018 device I now use, for what it's worth. The 2015 would also wake up from sleep (presumably for updates?) while in my laptop bag, so I resorted to doing a full shut down at the end of a work day.

Do you use one of those apps that keeps your screen open? Caffeine.app and the like? Some of those used to be notorious for keeping the laptop awake when the lid was closed.

If you do move it around a lot it could be repeated flex stress? You would not even see it unless you got the thing under microscope. Even then it may be fine but one small part in the middle of board may cause other issues that cascade?

Airplanes man… my 15” MBP 2015 would always make this case cracking sound when the plane reached a specific altitude. It had some battery swell, not noticeable.

Scared the shit out of me, every time.

My personal MBP is a 2015 that I bought that summer. I had to have the screen replaced that fall and last summer I had the battery replaced for $200. I have a keyboard cover and a plastic case around the laptop to keep it safe. No problems. It basically just sits around my house.

I got a 2016 MBP for work back in 2018 and that one also had a keyboard cover and a plastic shell around it. This one I schlepped all over the Chicago area to and from work. I used to use the keyboard on it all day, then switched to an external keyboard. That one was basically plugged into thunderbolt dock all day long. That one worked fine, up until last winter when the battery would not take a charge. I was given a 2018 MBP and that one works just fine. Sits on my desk with attached to a thunderbolt dock.

I'm still holding on to my 15-inch 2014 MBP. I've been using it for work daily going on 7 years now. Never taken it into service. It just keeps going...

Fingers crossed for the new MBPs this year. I'm planning on finally retiring this beautiful machine if the new MBP looks good.

What might be interesting to consider is quality control in the various eras of Apple (e.g. 70/80s Steve Jobs, 80/90s Sculley, 2010s Cook).

Of course, keeping in mind that Cook-era Apple is operating on a more massive scale (product shipped, wider distribution, more product lines).

> After speaking to a friend, they told me I had probably received a “lemon” unit (i.e. faulty from the beginning). To be honest, I’m not quite sure where the term comes from.

The term comes from the automobile industry, where a "lemon" is a new car that has some kind of issue so severe that it cannot be reasonably repaired under warranty and the buyer can try to seek a refund or replacement vehicle.

Wikipedia says that the term originally comes from early 20th century slang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(automobile)

https://www.etymonline.com/word/lemon

lemon (n.2)

"worthless thing, disappointment, booby prize," 1909, American English slang; from lemon (n.1), perhaps via a criminal slang sense of "a person who is a loser, a simpleton," perhaps an image of someone a sharper can "suck the juice out of." A pool hall hustle was called a lemon game (1908); while to hand someone a lemon was British slang (1906) for "to pass off a sub-standard article as a good one." Or it simply may be a metaphor for something which leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. Specific sense of "second-hand car in poor condition" is by 1931.

"You won't get a lemon… from Toyota of Orange." :-D

Posts like these make me afraid of upgrading my macbook. Every time apple released a new macbook, I would wait to see how reliable it is, and eventually got discouraged when I see a lot of people complains about various issues. I ended up still using my 2012 macbook due to this, though with upgraded ram, ssd and battery replacement.

The M1 has significantly less people complaining about hardware issue, so maybe it's finally the time to upgrade as my 2012 no longer receive major macos updates anymore.

At least Macbook Air M1 does not have a fan, so you would not need a fan replacement in any case.

My experience: Apple has been amazing. I bought a previous gen mbp from bhphoto that was heavily discounted. It arrived and was DoA. I brought it into an Apple store and they gave me the latest gen and discounted the money I paid bhphoto and split the difference with me. To top it off, I got an extra charger. A year and a month later, the logic board needed replaced, they did that too. Another year later the battery was swollen, and they replaced that for free also.

I must have gotten lucky, or this thread is a concentration of the unlucky.

Used my 2004 12” PPC until 2013. My 2010 mini is still the brain of my recording studio. The 2018 MBP is use for work is fine. I’ve yet to take a machine into an apple store.

Part of why I’ve used apples for audio work is I get so many years out of them. The first studio I worked in had a 9 year old G3 in the B room.

I use Linux for recreational software development, so I wonder if dev work on a mac correlates with more issues.

I am still using a MacBook Pro from 2013. The battery doesn't hold charge as well anymore (down to ~2-3 hours), and I had to replace the rubber feet at the bottom of the case, but other than that the laptop has been rock solid. I've never had any serious problems with it.

I am somewhat surprised there are so many people reporting issues with the newer models. I plan to upgrade to a new MacBook soon, and this gives me pause.

Since 2016 I've gone through:

1 Macbook Air (stopped booting one day...) 1 iMac (Became unusably slow) 2 Macbook Pros (One stopped booting, one had keyboard issues and a swollen battery preventing the lid from closing)

and am on my 3rd Macbook Pro now which is plagued with the keyboard issues...

Meanwhile I have an E500 Thinkpad from 2011 that still runs like a champ and has been abused more than any of the Macbooks.

I'm not buy any more Macbooks to say the least...

I've had a Lenovo X1 Carbon for the past 3 years, and it's been the best computer I've ever used. It's ridiculously light, rock solid physically, and still performs fast enough to handle most of the work I throw at it.

I am getting a MBP, and while I'm looking forward to the change, I plan to hold onto my Lenovo.

Meanwhile my MacBook Pro from Touch wood - 2013 is still chugging along with the only issue a slightly reduced battery capacity.

They don’t build ‘em like they used to.

I just replaced the battery myself in my 2012 macbook pro and I'm so happy with my battery life now, the replacement had a higher capacity than even the OEM (that apple no longer sells). A full charge with a top off during lunch lasts me a full day now. I've never seen this computer run for longer than three and a half hours, now it goes for double that.

2012 MacBook Pro with retina screen here too. I've replaced the battery twice, and I've had 2 SSDs going dead, but other than that it's still going strong. I love the screen, I love the keyboard, I just wish I didn't cheap out on 8MB of RAM when I bought it.

Ahh I had the nonretina screen, which is even more repairable and I was able to upgrade the 4gb of RAM it came with to 16gb down the road.

My 2011 was still in service too until a year or so ago, but I lent it to someone and they didn’t notice the battery swelling. It popped the track pad right out and must have damaged something else in the process because even with trackpad and battery replaced (by me with a quick YouTube tutorial, probably the last ever time I’ll ever fix an apple product myself) it still won’t turn on. RIP. You did your time.

One option I my take advantage of when my current Apple Care plan expires is to switch it to a monthly plan. You can then get indefinite support, for a cost of course. But at least accidental damage would be covered as well, so it's a sort of insurance policy.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210580

Unfortunately this is only available in a very small subset of countries.

I started on Mac in 2007, in 3 years I had 4 logic boards and hard drive failures. It was a White Macbook plastic edition. I was so impressed with the warranty in spite of the crappy heating issues, I later bought a Macbook Pro all metal edition. I got the 3 year warranty then and used it once when my logic board overheated. After that I held it for nearly 10 years until I replaced it last year.

I had a 2016 that got the keyboard replaced 7 times before they upgraded me to a 2017 on which I replaced the keyboard 5 more times before I gave up and sold it.

Each time they replaced the top-case which includes the entire battery assembly, touchbar, speakers. Valued at $800 just for the parts each time. That's $9600 for everyone keeping score.

I called Apple's bluff on saying their keyboards are reliable.

I have a 2015 mbp and it’s required one major repair, the SDD going belly up. I’ve been very happy with it and dread when I will eventually have to replace it for something faster. My work machine is a 2019 and I’ve had nothing but trouble with those units (this is my 3rd one in three years).

I don’t know what’s happened with these things. They used to be bullet proof. I can’t say the same anymore.

Interesting. I've owned macbooks since 2010 non stop and each one has last 4-5yrs, upgraded only because I wanted something faster (ending in M1 which is incredibly solid).

You may be triggering some hardware failure vector given the frequent pressurization/depressurization associated with travel (particularly if you don't check in the laptop?).

3 years old HP OMEN 15 gaming laptop, 9 years old ASUS G75VW gaming laptop - zero problems and zero repairs. On G75 I've upgraded hard drives to SSDs and installed 32GB RAM instead of original 16. But nothing ever broke.

My even older ASUS G73 is still being used by my friend (I gave it to him few years ago).

I guess the author of the article attracts bad luck somehow.

"2 complete laptop replacements"

"Factoring in the cost of the complete replacements, it would be closer to 10,000 USD!"

I'm not sure how this $10,000 sum works unless you're saying you still have all three MacBook Pros rather than returning the first two.

I would assume the first two were returned to Apple and refurbished, not just immediately destroyed?

It's the equivalent cost of purchasing that same laptop I guess? The old one is probably broken and written off.

Right, but the idea is that Apple has lost ~$10,000 to support his MacBook Pro. That doesn't seem to add up to me.

Anecdote: I bought my MBP 2015 model 15 inch in 2016. It’s my only laptop and still works like the first time (battery cycle: around 600/1000). Zero problems. Still on Catalina, though. I removed like half of the stock software that came with it (e.g., Garage band).

Having said this, I’m looking forward to the new MBP model coming this year.

More than the support, what's impressive is that what is considered a high-end product needs so much assistance in 4 years. I have changed 3 MacBook pros in the past 5 years, all broken beyond the possibility of use, and because of defects. In contrast, the cheapest laptop I have bought, an EeePC lasted more than 10 years.

I'm surprised anyone has a good repair experience. I've had a hilarious amount repairs and complete replacements over the last 6 years (before then, not much), and now most Apple stores need to ship the mac away for at least 7 days to get it inspected. Fuck. That.

It was the case even in LA when I was stopping through on a road trip.

I want an electrician to inspect the circuits you’re plugging into. Sometimes it’s not the electronics.

The USB port fried while I was staying at a hotel. Might have been something fishy there...

If the author has kept the same power supply/charger this whole time, it's certainly possible that that could be a lemon too.

Interesting take at the end, I wouldn't necessarily call it a Win about AppleCare coverage, it only highlights all sorts of issues which are becoming increasingly common on Macs. Logic board and full unit replacements should not be commonplace.

In defense of apple, i have an 8 year old Mac tower and a 2 year old laptop, neither had a single issue besides the occasional memory limit spinner. I used both extensively for work.

Can't say the same for my windows machines and I am a bit of a windows fan.

My macbook from 2011 had recently a fan replaced, it cost me £10 on ebay. My ASUS and Dell (each for ~£350) from 2009 are still running, have only upgraded RAM and SSD. It's your fault for buying new Macbooks.

I'm back to my 2012 now. After the battery was on its last legs I upgraded last year to a 2020 air, figuring 8 years was a pretty good run. The air bricked itself just out of warrenty, and I'm back to the 2012 with a fresh battery (since you could still replace it yourself on these macs). Its honestly just as performant as that 2020 air since I gave it an SSD and 16gb RAM a few years ago. Not sure why I even upgraded, I'm planning on just shelling out for the repair bill then giving the 2020 laptop to my parents who are on 2006 era hand me downs still.

These models were problematic but I have a hunch with this many issues there may be a separate variable like problems w the power supply or the power itself (spikes, dips, etc). Bad power can wreck electronics.

I had the same machine but with 1tb ssd. I also had to replace top case, logic board, battery, motherboard etc… all paid by apple care.

Since then it was fine for a year until I finally sold it on eBay last month.

I always get AppleCare. I treat my computers well, but ride them hard. They are running hot, maybe 14-16 hours a day.

They earn their keep.

I’ll be getting an M1X/M2, when those come out.

Guess we’re sharing how our Macbooks do

I got a rMBP 2012, used it daily for work for 7 years - never had any issues.

Got a MBP 15” 2019, used it for 2 years so far - no issues.

Got a MBA M1 day 1 - no issues so far.

Well, mine had 0$ in repairs for 4 years I've had it. So it looks like YMMV.

Poster had "2 complete replacements" (so 3 laptops in total) and they still had problems?

What happened to Mac build quality? Still using my 2015 MacBook Pro with only one repair (swelling battery). The cost was ~300€ if I remember correctly.

regarding “lemon” unit (i.e. faulty from the beginning). To be honest, I’m not quite sure where the term comes from. - It's origins are pretty interesting: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2016/12/02/origin-of-lemo...

Hah, thanks!

I repair thede devices for a living. They all have the same funny issues. But fanboys gonna fanboy. Won't complain, more work for me.

> During a longer trip to Japan my battery started to swell, significantly. ... once I returned to Sweden

He took a swollen battery on an aircraft?!

Sounds like a defective machine. I'm surprised Apple didn't just give them a new one after the 2nd or 3rd repair.

That said, looking at the keyboard condition makes me think it was in some pretty harsh conditions. My 2012 17" keys still look almost new.

I've only had a single experience where I had to repair my Mac in ~8 laptops, which was my Apple M1 aAr that died from plugging in a third party USB-C adapter (multiple reports of this happening).

They did. I had 2 complete replacements. I'm on the third one now. It's all logged in the blog post.

They did replace it. Twice. You should read the post.

>After speaking to a friend, they told me I had probably received a “lemon” unit

I like the fact that Citroën means lemon in Dutch.

Headline is a bit misleading, in that it was Apple who payed for all those repairs minus the AppleCare fee.

2017-06-07 - Purchased my First MacBook Pro

a1706? Terrible model.

Your MBP had 10K USD in repairs. Your point?

My 2017 MBP with Touchbar had keyboard issues (some keys popped out; replaced the whole keyboard), battery problems (it expanded and I replaced it, but it is expanding again), and screen issues (pretty sure is a thermal issue; after some hours of use the bottom of the screen started to went black to the point of being impossible to use and I had to stop using it and wait some hours to the black bars disappear). Pretty sure this is my last MBP.

Edit: typo

Buy a ThinkPad. Problem solved.

Trigger's Broom?

That’s the most extreme repair run I’ve seen. Like some others have said, there could be something that’s damaging them.

I know exactly what damaged my battery so that now it recommends battery service: Overheating using An external monitor and chrome tabs. The thermal management at higher cpu of this 3 year old MacBook Pro is bad but browsers are needlessly resource intensive.

After about six months of ignoring how hot it was getting the battery notice started. A while later it would shut off at around 40% battery. But I still put off replacing the battery and magically after an OS update it no longer shuts off at 40%, and goes all the way down as it should. I assume the update included some throttling if the battery isn’t providing adequate current.

tldr: My Mac has battery issues and I know the exact cause. There string of defects you’ve had seem statistically unlikely as pure random ones while not impossible. There may be something causing them.

>2017-06-07 - Purchased my First MacBook Pro

>2017-07-31 - Lemon Unit >Unfortunately, since day one, my laptop was randomly freezing and getting random kernel panics.

Memory issues? Welcome to onboard memory.

>2017-08-19 - First Complete Replacement >I was able to convince them to give me a brand new unit instead. Phew!

Only because the author bought Apple Care. Without it the standard procedure were to fix it.

>2017-10-12 - Enter Key Stopped Working

Key stopped working? Oh people have been complaining since 2016. And Macrumors and 9to5Mac Apple apologist still to this day call it a minor issue that blown out of proportion. And the whole issue only got noticed once a writer wrote a hit piece and YouTuber reporting similar issues which their video and clips going in total 20M+ views. i.e Apple only acted when the PR was bad enough. Sounds familiar?

>2017-11-23 - Sleep Issues and Crashes >2018-01-13 - Overheating and Pink Screen

Quite common if you watch Louis Rossmann Channel. And the Screen was the cable being too short an inflexible.

>2018-02-14 - Logic Board Replacement

>2018-04-27 - Broken Speaker

Again, a well known problem on MacBook since even before the 2016 MacBook. A blown speaker. What is strange is that Logic Board replacement usually replace the speaker as well.

>2018-06-11 - Fan and Top-Case Replacement

And the Fan and Top Case replacement dont actually replace the speaker. ( In the usual sense )

>2018-08-02 - Second Complete Replacement

Again thanks to Apple Care.

>2018-09-20 - Migrating my AppleCare Protection Plan

>However, Apple said that I could instead buy a new plan on the new laptop, and get a refund for my unused period on my old laptop.

That is because you now get to buy an additional two year Apple Care. Welcome to Services Revenue era.

>2019-03-23 - Exploded USB Ports

Exploded USB-C / Thunderbolt Ports? Hello? This was so common I would even consider it a flaw in design. Compared to Magsafe which has 0.00000001% of this happening, HN still prefer to use USB-C. But every time I mentioned this on HN I got downvoted into oblivion. As if it didn't happen.

>2019-08-19 - Sticky Keys

That was actually under the Apple Keyboard replacement programme. Not Apple Care.

>2021-08-19 - AppleCare Protection Plan Expired!

Imagine if you didn't have Apple Care?

>As much as I don’t want to buy another Mac in the future, I have a feeling that I probably will. I’m eager to try out the 2nd generation M1 macs when they eventually get released.

There simply isn't another company competing with Apple. So despite all of its flaws, Apple is still one of the best if not the best. That is the sad state we are in inside the PC industry.

This honestly seems like a terrible machine.

I own an XPS and had in-home service. I called dell and we agreed my keyboard needs to be replaced. A few days later a guy shows up at my door and replaces the keyboard. I never had to go anywhere. Obviously, the mileage might vary if you travel outside of the us.

But......again....that many repairs are downright scary.

There is also one anecdotal fact I want to add about apple. I have been told that apple is so amazing because they build hardware/software. I was tired of samsung bloat and only 2 years of OS updates. So, I switched.......I am having many weird bugs with the apple watch not syncing properly. Safari freezing on some sites, and some of these issues are quite widespread.

I just hate people who drink the koolaid, there is a similar problem when it comes to seeking opinion about cars. Some people just become part of the cult and will go above and beyond to justify buying a certain product.

I miss the old days of online nerds before "marketing" teams realized they can really advertise through social media and now you can't even tell what is real.

> A few days later

A few days?! Is this not a major problem for you? The author is right - a great thing about Apple is I can pop into a store in many cities around the world and just get things sorted. In some random city in another country with a conference the next day? No problem.

No, I can just use an external keyboard. The service was normally the next day but they didn't have a keyboard for my machine available, so it needed to be shipped. No problem for me.

I had a US keyboard fixed in London same day (3 hours), no charge. I didn't even have AppleCare. I was a bit surprised, although... London ... big international city - having US keyboards probably isn't out of the realm of possibility. This was... 2009(?) - things may have changed a bit over the years, but that was one of those things that stuck with me.

Dell, as well as the other OEMs, do offer better warranty SLAs for replacement hardware. I've had techs show up with replacement hardware within 18 hours of contacting support.

When I had to have my MBP fixed under warranty, I brought it into a genius bar and they took nearly a week as they had to order in a part.

YMMV

I had to wait for parts as well. For example, Taiwan and Japan didn't have a Swedish top-case so they had to order one. It took about a week. But I could keep the laptop while they were waiting for the part to arrive. Once it arrived I went back and they fixed it within 24 hours.

I had Apple replace the battery in my Macbook about 6 months ago and it took two days. There was a minimum 24 hour time frame for them to just diagnose that in fact, they needed to replace the battery.

I went to an Apple authorised service centre in India to repair an iPad screen that was not broken but was not displaying properly. I was told that Apple in India doesn't repair iPad at all. If it is under warranty, they just replace it. Otherwise you are out of luck as no replacement parts are available! Obviously, I wasn't impressed at all.

On the other hand, Intel once replaced a CPU for me (out of warranty) for free (they shipped it from Singapore to India). It was an old CPU (5+ years) and I never thought they would respond to my complain about it.

When one of my Western Digital HDD conked out under warranty, Western Digital asked me if I wanted the replacement drive shipped from the US (as I had purchased it there, and they had a newer model which they offered) or from India (where I was at that time, and had the same model in stock).

I think Apple are coasting on the brand perception that they built from back in the day. 10 years ago, Apple was genuinely ahead of competition in terms of reliability but today other software and hardware manufacturers have caught up or surpassed them.

At this point, the OS is the only thing I'm really hooked on.

And ElementaryOS has been coming along fairly well, so I'm hopeful than in ~5 years they'll have something I can fully switch over to for my work computer. Right now, I just use it for my gaming/media pc.

Not just surpassed them, but when you compare Apples to apples, their professional hardware today is utter dogshit.

The most glaring example I can think of is that the Mac Pro isn't built seemingly for anyone. For $6000 you can build a VFX workstation with an overpriced(!) top-of-the-line threadripper and RTX 3090 and 1TB Samsung SSD which performs more than 4 times faster than their $13,000 highest-end CPU configuration. So what has ended up happening? A lot of studios are simply buying high-end PC prebuilts or the studios are building their own systems now for desktop-side compute.

For that price you get 256 GB and some AMD $150 equivalent graphics card, which is worse than what you'd get off some random laptop today.

You're right, it wasn't built for everyone. and the kind of people it WAS designed for don't even blink at $10k

Even studios have budgets. I don't care about spending $6-15k for business hardware per inventory unit, plus you're not purchasing it frequently or in mass orders.

The problem I and a lot of other firms have is the value you're getting for it. It's utter garbage, and has been all over the press for years now, so it's not exactly news.

When big studios and little firms alike are complaining and asking, "Who exactly is this for?" It's clear they don't care about mass professional market consumption. And I'm talking about businesses that are going to spend over $6000 per desktop-compute unit.

The organizations that I have seen are the only relevant customers are the ones who have deep Apple-centric workflows, and they're not buying a lot of the hardware. They might have under 10 units in the office at most.

If the prices were more inline with what the rest of the hardware market looked like, I'd provide Mac Pros to each staff member because it would be a no-brainer.

I'm not really disagreeing with you on the value here.

Just saying the target market is the kind of people who can just drop 10k+ and not care. 6k isn't realistically in the same price category.

For our business, there isn't a difference in between $6 or $15k, but most businesses aren't spending more than $15k per desktop-side compute station even when we max out specs from our partner suppliers, because for that type of budget you can work with very large amounts of data that hit RAM limits on workstation motherboards, versus just large amounts of RAM on consumer motherboards.

Apple's software quality has absolutely tanked over the past 4 years or so. I've gone from 100% Apple devices (starting with a G3 in 1997) to zero as of about 2019 as I got sick of dealing with all the bugs.

> This honestly seems like a terrible machine.

It does, doesn't it?

My company has thousands of Macbooks. I've never heard of anything remotely similar.

My current laptop is a 2016 model. No repairs needed, ever. Only now the battery is complaining. Not even the butterfly keyboard gave me any issues. It's likely the only repair it will ever need is the battery. Or maybe not even that, it's overdue for a replacement due to age. But works just fine.

I also have a 2015 model. Also fine. Dropped it in concrete. A small dent. Totally fine.

Unless quality has significantly degraded, this sounds like a bad unit/batch.

same experience in India FYI. Dell XPS support is unparalleled.

Well FWIW, I have a Retina MBP that's close to ten years old. It's been on 24 hours a day, almost everyday since the day I bought it. It's travelled with me to different countries, endured extreme humidity in some areas of the world, and is still running reasonably well today. I've had a lot of computers over the past few decades and it's IMO the best computer I've owned. I skipped out a few generations of MBP's because I didn't feel the need to upgrade.

A few years ago, I bought an XPS because I wanted a PC and it was underwhelming considering I treated it with a lot of extra care. I experienced various bugs running simple games. The fans would go into overdrive despite keeping the drivers up-to-date, raising the laptop to give good airflow, and no graphic intensive program running.

Ultimately, I think it's a bit of a luck of the draw. I don't doubt there are people who have horrible experiences with any brand.

Funny you write that because OP had a bad experience with their Dell XPS and is thankful for Apple’s service

I know, which is why I felt compelled to comment. Most business class dell machines and XPS can be purchased with next day in-home service. This beats going to a apple store for me.

Like I said in the post, Dell refused to offer any sort of service while I wasn't in the country I had purchased my laptop. I don't know if that's changed, but that was a complete deal breaker for me back then.

I thought it was funny that being unable to replace Dell battery while traveling in Japan is seen worse than having crashing and overheating macbook for 2.5 months + all the other problems.

Honestly the swollen battery made me fear for my life any time I used it. On planes it would swell so much (even when turned off) that the keyboard almost popped out.

This is…unwise.

I would never use a machine with a swollen battery, much less fly with one.

Indeed. But I had to take it back to Sweden somehow to get it repaired lol

I mean any manufacturer will have some unlucky streaks. i've had a few macbooks and all of them are going strong still. some are 15 years old. slower than they were but hopefully they last a while longer.

> I miss the old days of online nerds before "marketing" teams realized they can really advertise through social media and now you can't even tell what is real.

Yeah, true. When I was new to HN, I had a minor altercation with some mod here because I posted a reply to a particular comment that the poster seemed to be doing paid marketing / shilling for Apple. My comment was deleted and I was reminded that as per HN community rules, I cannot accuse anyone of such things. Annoyed, I replied to the mod that it seemed obvious that the post was paid social media marketing. Someone (I don't remember if it was the mod or another fellow member of HN) pointed out that if the same logic was applied to my critical and negative posts about Apple, someone could make an argument that too was paid social media marketing by Apple's competitors. I was honestly stumped for a moment because negative campaigns are a fact too (e.g. politicians do a lot of negative campaigning through social media; the Chinese are aggressively known to do such kind of negative campaigning by posting negative reviews of their competitors product on Amazon).

That said, it does happen on HN too. It would be unreasonable to expect otherwise - the kind of high net worth / IT influential crowd that comes to HN is the very market that Apple (and others) target.

You have a lemon and should've thrown it under a bus a long time ago.

Jesus, that sounds terrible! I feel lucky my own MBP 2015 has fared without much problems although I did drop it once it which caused the bottom cover's screws pop out one by one in half a year. Bottom cover replacement + replacing a swollen battery (which naturally requires replacing the keyboard) have been the only repairs I've had to do. And charger. I feel the charger wires could be a lot sturdier.

But I hope I'll get at least 5 years more out of it. Although buying a new cool M2 MBP sounds tempting I feel for me there is no particular reason to do so. If I can run an editor, Chrome, some Docker containers and the laptop works well, I feel work-wise I'm pretty much set.

Certainly the OS updates will stop at some point which conveniently will then phase out my MBP. Oh well.

The 2015 MacBook Pro was an absolute tank for me. I recently replaced it with an M1 Air, which so far has been incredible. Dare I say the best laptop I have ever used. The keyboard is great, even better than the 2015 pro and Touch ID is great to have as well.

I think Apple has learned some lessons, they fixed the keyboards, they added a physical Touch ID button, and it seems like the divisive Touch Bar is probably going to fade away, or at least be optional.

I think OSX could use an update that focuses on power users and the finder, but other than that I am pretty happy with the current state of the Mac.

Agreed - I've used virtually all the variants starting back with Powerbooks. I think the 2015 MBP Retina was the most durable, reliable machine I've personally used.

My only complaint is non-upgradable RAM - if it had upgradable RAM, I'd keep using mine well into the future.

MacBooks are great machines, but once you need repairs for a fairly new one, you'd better hope you sprung for Apple Care.

I recently had a MacBook that wouldn't start. I'm decent with computer repair and have a modest background in it, but let the safety screws dissuade me from opening it.

I brought it to a repair store where they said it had water damage, which was what I anticipated. I'm guessing they saw that the humidity dots had been triggered, which were probably due to my laptop being in humid conditions at some point beforehand, as I think the water just barely got into a port via condensation from a nearby object.

They called back saying that the water damage repair would come to $850 level, as they observed "significant corrosion" inside the chassis. That's maybe just under a third of what the machine costs retail, but there's not really another option at this point.

Then I got it back, with all of my data in place, which struck me as odd - anything of value is soldered onto the mainboard. If there were "significant corrosion", everything would have been trashed, and the repair probably would have been much more expensive. They definitely weren't going to migrate data from the old mainboard to a new one for free, as that's a whole other racket that's enabled through these monolithically architectured machines.

At the end of the day, I felt kind of ripped off and knew that if something like this were to happen again, I had no other recourse other than to give it a shot on my own. Given how clumsy I tend to be, that'll probably happen sooner rather than later, so I kind of see my machine as a liability at this point.

I think I'm going to give the Framework laptop a shot, though I'll miss MacOS.

PS: Had a really good time repairing a friend's 2012 MBP recently, though. With a replacement SSD, new battery, and another stick of ram, it feels like a capable machine without too much time or money sunk into it.

I know you used to be able to buy apple care after the fact at any point it would still be in effect

Reply on news.ycombinator.com