Some firm already filed a class action complaint, and I submitted my details: https://classlawdc.com/2021/08/04/m1-macbook-screen-crack-in...
But $800 for a replacement one? I’d rather sell the MBP for parts on eBay and buy a new one if must then pay that much. Like you would get more for that with a broken screen for sure, some people would fix it on their own or use it as a desktop computer.
But I don’t have a SV engineer salary so what do I know
Most people is a sketchy expression, but I would venture a guess that "most people" buy cheap laptops because they don't really care, they don't know how to adequately judge which ones are worth more, and they also just don't want to spend much on a computer.
It's hard to imagine, but "most people" actually care little about computers.
In all it's just a beautiful thing I'm very, very happy with.
Use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_T_series
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_X1_series
& Ebay. But it's also a very reasonable & justifiable decision to buy a new thinkpad imho. When it's a couple of years old the hardware support is usually perfect on first install - but I guess I don't use garbage like fingerprint readers so ymmv on that kind of silliness.
Thinkpads, T-Series, X1 carbon are the best laptops on the market by a good margin and have been there in that spot consistently for a long time. Buy apple if you really want/need to run apple software. I'd say just about /any/ distro will place nicely with the kernel-hackers laptop of choice. I'd bet fedora, rhel/centos, debian, arch would all be just terrific if you prefer one of those (and why not?)
(And, on your "kernel-hackers laptop of choice comment," it's curious that Linus released the last kernel from a MacBook device)
Gnome vs kde (and there's /plenty/ of other options) is a choice, make it. Done. No further issues. And as a happy gnome guy I'm very sure KDE is excellent and will serve well.
deb vs rpm. That choice is made when you choose your distro, never to be revisited or cared about again. Likewise pulseaudio, systemd are chosen when you chose your desktop and distro respectively and you don't have to think about them on your laptop again. X vs Wayland - whatever comes with your distro you use if you're even aware of it.
But yes you can complicate it all as much as suits you if you have the need or want to do so which you basically can't with apple, so... And your knowledge then translates to the pi or other SBC so that's pretty cool too. And to your servers or ones you work with for money. This is not a negative imho.
Go to any kernel conference and you'll see all kinds of laptops for sure, some hilariously eccentric. Linus used a mac 15 years ago too (powerpc iirc). Yet you'll see Thinkpads are always, clearly and obviously the most commonly used by a large margin unless things have changed dramatically during pandemic times, which I kind of doubt.
Anyway I bought a T480s second hand for peanuts, dumped ubu on it and have been contemplating its beauty and utility since. Apple gear is a _much_ bigger sysadmin headache for me (and it isn't close) but might be less so for you if that's what you know and understand. This is /my/ experience of it.
Linux on the laptop in 2022 is flipping great. Shhhhh, don't tell.
I can vouch for Linux in laptops, I've been running Debian+xfce (recently switched to Debian+lxde, for maybe slightly less ram usage) on my Acer Aspire One for probably more then 10 years now! It's my go-to machine whenever any hardware needs testing, be it networking or just a printer.
systemd vs $INITSYSTEM is also temporary, though on a longer timescale. We need the old generation to die before systemd is accepted by everyone.
I don't mean to shit on your argument, but most things are either just preferences or progress that isn't done yet.
I'm about as bleeding-edge as can be (always latest stable kernel with xanmod patches) from NixOS, using Wayland and PipeWire.
The move to PipeWire made literally everything better for me (just works TM). While Wayland isn't perfect yet.
Gnome or KDE is a preference, it doesn't matter much and they're cooperating on many Wayland extensions.
systemd hate is either because you love the drama or you like bash scripts.
I don't particularly like either, so I like systemd.
A good thing people often forget with Wayland, PipeWire and systemd is that they are making our ecosystem a bit less fragmented, which I see as a great win, especially since I'm a NixOS user, my system relies heavily on systemd being declarative. My distro of choice wouldn't work as well (at all) without all "standards" (both real and implementation) that systemd and freedesktop puts forward.
Back on topic, the Linux desktop is honestly quite great if you constrain yourself a bit (Run a stable distro with boring tech, no Nvidia) or live on the bleeding edge where things also work well but might require more maintenance.
Lets be honest though, if I wasn't running NixOS I would probably run Ubuntu with whatever display and audio server they decided for me. And the package manager would be apt, brew, nix or flatpak depending on application. (Now it's Nix and Flatpak only).
For PipeWire I'd say we're already there, it just works better than pulse when doing pulse things, and they also implement JACK and ALSA if you need them.
Regarding Wayland, yes a lot of old DE's and WM's will die, but that's just the way of nature, there are still many great options for people to use, we must deprecate things eventually.
Wayland impressions so far: Annoying that windows can't take focus, annoying that electron doesn't default to it yet, TouchPad input works better, scaling works better. Some apps (vscode) shows a generic icon in Wayland rather than vscode.
Remember that you can run XWayland on Wayland. XWayland will keep most X11 apps working just the same, and X11 really needs depreciation. I'm almost most excited about "Waypipe". When it's mature enough it'll run circles around X11 forwarding while being performant and secure!
I mean I realize how I've turned into one of those "you just have to do these easy things to make it work" kind of people, but for "dumb usersč on "good hardware" (Linux compatible) it's really quite nice, my father had less issues on Linux Mint than Windows.
The year of the Linux desktop is here, it's just wrapped into a VM (crosvm) or a gaming console (SteamDeck/SteamOS).
Honestly with a bit more customization options, and no tracking I would probably get a Chromebook as the next machine (They run Android and "Linux" apps now)
With Waydroid or Anbox you can run Android apps on Linux too, but last I tried wasn't great.
Progress is being made on the shittiest of fronts too! NVIDIA moving code from the driver into firmware is "great" from a usability perspective, I don't really care enough about FLOSS to demand my GPU implementation details being open, as long as compatibility is good.
Something like this (fedora, debian are fine, I've heard arch is fine, no doubt others also) is the /only/ fair approach in comparison it to an apple or windows laptop. It's the only approach _possible_ with microsoft & apple.
Doing fun stuff like re-writing the default kernel scheduler and putting a bug in there on linux is really just not a point against linux in any way when you can (a) choose not to do that and (b) can't choose that at all with windows. Apple? Does anyone compile their own laptop kernel on apple? Common enough on linux because you can make your use as complicated as suits you in all the ways you can't on windows and apple...
It is true that apple sysadmin gets super complicated and hard with the answer usually boiling down to something not far away from: "you can't do what you want even if it used to work fine and you paid apple for the privilege. But you can pay apple an ever bigger subscription to do something related the way they want and stop complaining, apple is so user-friendly! Apple knows best. Freedom is tyranny."
I mourn the death of the Nokia N900. I hope for the oncoming pine phone & pine time revolution because Apple really are every bit as foul as Google. These things aren't yet easy the way laptops really are now.
Thanks again!
Previous Mac was a 13" Macbook Pro if anyone is keeping score. Loved it, but just didn't want or need something that expensive.
It serves all their use cases, and most of them are still working fine with no real repair need.
The apple branch of the family though (my in-laws) have been having hardware failures almost consistently during that time.
Makes the apple gear look and behave like flowers.
As for Apple reliability, I set my grandfather up with an iMac 11 years ago. It was still functional when I replaced it with a Chrome desktop machine last year. (Of course it was no longer supported for OS upgrades, so that was the final reason to replace it). Likewise, my girlfriend daily drives my 2014 MBP which I used and abused around the world for years. I did an Apple service center battery replacement, and otherwise it performs as new. 8 years with a laptop is pretty great, especially considering it still does everything it's supposed to.
Oh, the wifi at my grandfather's house is still the original Airport I setup 11 years ago. It still does its job, without fail. I think I had to provide tech support (unplug, wait, replug) once.
For low-tech family, I now recommend Chrome devices. They are about the easiest things to support, and they are fairly low priced.
A macbook would be like buying a top spec Mercedes when all they need is a no frills base model Ford.
In addition, when a vehicle reaches the point where any common repair costs more than it's current market value, it's basically considered worthless and only desperate people buy them. How long does it take an apple product to reach that point? A year?
For traditional cars, as long as it's not a completely blown motor or transmission or a extensive front end collision, it's always economically viable to repair them.
It would be but it's also kind of overkill based on the specs you can get nowadays for general computer usage.
I recently picked up a $399 15.6" Lenovo laptop new on Amazon for a family member. It has all of the important stats for a regular user. A 1080p display, fairly light, 11th gen Intel CPU (i3), 8gb of memory and most importantly an SSD. It's lightning fast for browsing the web, working with Excel and playing browser games.
If you did care more about development they have a 20gb of memory version with a 512 GB SSD for $540 and a 36gb of memory version with a 1 TB SSD for $630.
We have a bunch of $400 Lenovos at work and their trackpads are absolutely atrocious. When someone is using one of those, they almost always use an external mouse with them, because otherwise, mouse cursor handling is just too frustrating.
I can't speak for the trackpad. When setting up the laptop I found it to be ok but I only have 2 occasions of using it for 20 minutes (2 different laptops) which isn't enough time to really evaluate it since so many things can be hit or miss with trackpads. The people who use it do use an external mouse, mainly because using a trackpad is too foreign to them.
Both Lenovos are IdeaPads that were purchased a few years apart. The latest one wasn't to replace the first one, it was for someone else. The first one is still going strong. I had forgotten I even picked a Lenovo the first time around and ended up picking the same brand / model when researching "what is a really good budget'ish laptop for general computer use".
Phone's are not heavily discounted with 2 year contracts, definitely not here in Australia anyway. Carriers are going down the route of customers paying the standard device repayment per month (equalling the RRP). The days of device subsidies by taking a plan are fading.
Plans from mobile carriers are becoming suped up pre-paid plans with a device payment tacked on.
Almost yearly she'd buy some $150-$200 Dell clunker, all plastic, atrociously low resolution, loaded with bloatware.
For years I told her if she'd just buy one "overpriced" Macbook she'd save money in the long run, since despite some hiccups over the years, Macbooks are not particularly unreliable.
-
Eventually I took it upon myself to give her my old Surface since she didn't want to learn OSX.
A machine I optioned out to nearly 1k, for someone who only checks emails and writes word docs... yet 4 years later and she hasn't needed a new one.
She's easily saved her money's worth if she had bought it new herself simply from not dealing with the hassle of needing a new machine every 12-24 months.
I got this from my brother, so it's really not that far away from us.
yeah we buy 500$ (150$ in my case) laptops over apple products precisely because we can judge which ones are worth more
There is a noticeable loss in human productivity by not having a separate large monitor (and sometimes also a nice external keyboard+mouse). However, I find that the small screen constraint can be beneficial sometimes as it forces me to approach my work a bit differently. I would say it's a bit like how changing my scenery or routine temporarily can recharge me.
Work-wise, the only thing I like about laptops is the ability to quite literally change my scenery (going in a café or in nature for an afternoon). But it's always with the intent of doing the few things I can do on that sort of device : reading or writing some doc and doing some surface level diagnostics through SSH (my job is a mix of Kubernetes administration and miscellaneous production tasks).
It's nice to have, but it also can't be the tool of my trade. Putting any significant money into a machine that'll end up 70% of the time as a self-standing Netflix screen in bed isn't worth it.
I know a few people who can work exclusively on their laptop, but they also use no UI scaling and have much better eyesight :)
People buy expensive laptops because they don't know how to adequately judge which ones ain’t worth more. Not just on HN, I’m observing same behavior among friends and co-workers.
People buy ultra-thin laptops because marketing sells them as high-end. It’s often impossible to upgrade them to good specs like 32-64 GB RAM and fast 2TB+ SSD. And even CPU performance ain’t great because thermal throttling, hard to dissipate heat from an ultra-thin computer.
Similarly, people who never play videogames buy laptops with discrete GPUs like nVidia 3070, paying money, weight, and even battery life for something they don’t need.
The trackpad works better than any windows laptop I've used.
Also hoping we'll see them execute on some additional keyboard layouts (or someone will) - avoiding Mac-like keyboards is one of my primary desires laptop wise.
The other comment is entirely right. The fact that Apple can sell a first-party service entirely dedicated to replacing broken iDevices is evidence enough that it's a racket.
Doesn't feel like a racket to me. Rather, if you buy an expensive device, and you cannot easily afford a replacement if it breaks, get an insurance. That's Apple Care (plus). It is an easy enough to understand concept.
Interesting that you compare Apple with Ford: https://fee.org/articles/how-henry-ford-zapped-a-licensing-m...
Like Ford, Apple wants to be free to innovate. If you don't like the quality of their products, don't buy them. There are plenty of other great choices out there. Oops, maybe not so much for the M1 MacBook Air.
"If you don't like the country you live in, just move!"
Seems pretty asinine now that the shoe is on the other foot. Here's the problem: I bought the iPhone X. I have the Macbook Pro. None of them do anything for me. Sometimes I boot up the Macbook to test a Darwin build once in a blue moon, but MacOS isn't even on my radar of daily-driver OSes right now. The BSD compatibility layer is festering, and Apple's refusal to implement modern APIs like Vulkan is childish. MacOS has been heading downhill for the better half of a decade, and Linux support on M1 is barely existent.
So, I think I'm perfectly contented to call Apple out for poor innovation. I paid their price-of-admission, now I get to leave a bad review. If you don't like the content of my feedback, don't take it personally. There are plenty of other great comments out there. Oops, maybe not so much from the technocrat-apologist crowd on Hacker News.
Done that.
> Apple's refusal to implement modern APIs like Vulkan is childish
No, it makes perfect sense. Metal is a nice, compact, and easy API. This is one of the reasons that allowed them to get out the M1 in the first place, because they could reuse all the work on Metal for iOS. Why would they try to accommodate the shit show that is Vulkan? And why would they try to appease people who really want Linux, not macOS?
Personally though, I am turning away from Apple when it comes to programming. It is just becoming too insular. It is great if you want to only reach people in Apple land, the tools (like Swift and Metal) are pretty nice. But in the end, web tools are also very nice these days, and your reach is just so much bigger. It is great to see your software running on a £150 Chromebook!
Indeed you are free to sue a wide variety of criminals, but ususally we don't refer to them with reverence and respect
>can't risk paying for it yourself.
is intended to mean
>can’t afford for themselves.
At a bigger scale than product warrantees, Health and Life insurance are both profitable but also often worth purchasing to protect you or your family as it’s the ultimate case of hedging against bad luck. You’re trading reasonable, predictable costs against actuarial events with huge (potentially bankrupting) costs. Some folks that didn’t need it, they spent a reasonable an amount of money and still got value out if it: risk coverage and piece of mind.
You have been gaslit by Apple.
You know when it's your fault... but with Apple, you can never be sure.
disclaimer: I have applecare+ on an m1 pro
How about your body? Medical and life insurance are nearly universal.
You should not pay insurance for all the tech crap we buy. You're just losing money on average. Only way to win with this type of insurance is to be unlucky.
Much history of costs/return in various domains show the power of ex ante investments vs ex post restitution.
If I spend $1200 on a high end phone, and it costs $300 to replace a screen, or $30 with insurance, after a $200 one time premium for 2 years… it depends how often you break your screen on average. If it’s at least once every 2 years, then yes, it’s worth it. And then that’s not even counting other things that may go wrong.
Same logic for extended car warranties. Sometimes they pay for themselves quickly, sometimes not.
Dell is the same. IIRC, HP was too. There's nothing to see here.
Though after the first year the onus is on the consumer to prove a manufacturing defect. During that first year the manufacturer has to prove it wasn't broken by the customer. That makes the discussion a bit harder after the first year. Also, these protections only apply to consumers. Businesses have to fend for themselves and that includes -employed when buying as such (and thus avoiding VAT)
AppleCare+ is $70/year for M1 MacBook Air and covers damages. It also covers accidents such as coffee spills or drops.
I have 3 year AppleCare+ for 16" MacBook Pro.
You're going to be out an additional $99 if you only damaged the display or only damaged the top case. But if you had a liquid spill or significant drop, you're likely going to be out the $299 (for damaging both, or for damaging the logic board/anything else internal at all).
It's a decent deal if you've got a high end machine, but it doesn't as much sense IMO if you bought something like an Air or a Base 13".
--------
In contrast, ~$160 on a $1.5k Dell Latitude will get 3 years of warranty + accidental damage coverage with no deductible.
It's why you buy $500 laptops. You can't extrapolate that to most people.
Another reason is that they only have $500 and are buying whatever is available in that price range.
It's also worth pointing out that the $500 laptop will probably last a lot longer than the most expensive Macbook. All plastic, they use a lot of older/reliable technology, they don't get used as rough - the most common failure mode is they get too old/slow for the user.
When averaged out to cost per year, in my experience, Apple is way cheaper.
I also think that people don't necessarily appreciate how much quality improvements have been made in the last 5-7 years in consumer laptops. Optical drives are gone, everything has an SSD, performance has plateaued and AMD is good again.
Someone walking into Best Buy today and dropping $500 on a laptop will be getting a much more robust machine than when I did the same back in college.
I can attest that recently, the average laptop is way better. My machines were a toshiba, surface (2nd gen), and think pads (during their dark ages), dell XPS.
I've got a 2014 15" MBP. It's had the screen replacement (free), and a bulging battery got me a new lower case & battery for $200. Still my daily driver.
OTOH, my wife has a 2017 MacBook which is on its third keyboard/lower case. Both the replacements were free, but it's a PITA to have to take it to the store and be without it for a few days while they swap in the new one.
Either way, my experiences have been uniformly positive with Apple's service, and whatever issues exist with the underlying hardware, if they're Apple's fault, I've had no trouble getting replacements for free.
All anecdata, I acknowledge.
My MacBook Air M1 had that very screen defect thing happen for no reason after... 10 months.
So, basically: ten years vs ten months.
Many people are reporting this issue: Apple fucked up big times and it's time to stop apologizing.
I don't care how genius the Apple geniuses are and I don't care that my 10 years old MacBook are still working: what I do care about is that my 10 months old M1 Air died on me out of nowhere.
Currently, I still have faith in Apple, despite their lemons only because other companies laptops sucked more.
But that does not mean your point in invalid, at all. I just hope that this is an isolated incident to a particular generation vs a broad company trend.
> I probably use my laptops harder than most people
Yeah, I didn't. This was basically a sedentary laptop, 95% of the time sitting on a desk connected to external screens / kb / mouse in an AC office, never in the sun. The other 5% I'd carry it around to meetings in the same building.
Since I was using it so little as a portable, it actually outlasted my colleagues' ones by two generations! So, it wasn't just my particular one that was a piece of junk.
It blows all the “premium” work laptops out of the water.
I disagree. I loved my Thinkpad T450s so much I bought an identical used machine when I quit the job. Since then it's been stepped on, dropped onto concrete multiple times, had beer and wine spilled on the keyboard.
It cost me $250 + $100 for a battery replacement + $34 for a new keyboard (when the wine spilled on it, it still worked but the keys were sticky) + $150 to upgrade the RAM.
It's currently running Visual Studio Code, Photoshop, and prepping to run a pub trivia event later.
But this is all a digression - my larger point is that a $500 laptop bought today is going to have a lot more longevity than people will give it credit for.
But my current Dell Precision from work is a spectacular nightmare POS.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hvb60f/thinkpad_t...
and https://twitter.com/jacobgorm/status/1496099294159544321 for an acceptable workaround using Sugru.
Im unsure about the 2012 MBP (not having had one), but if its an internal battery, battery death usually means user unfixable, for most users.
I love that the older macbooks can be opened up and fixed if needed. I had to replace the HD connector a couple times (and learnt to add some electrical tape to stop the issue), and I recently cleaned the old CPU adhesive off and added some new (old macbooks can start to smell like Body odour!).
With 16GB of RAM the macbook performance is still decent, able to run docker and run modern IDEs.
It's a great machine. The only downside is that you can no longer update to the most recent OS versions.
If you want to do more than rehash 4 decades of “PC/Macs suck” forum posts, try finding some hard stats on resell value or enterprise fleet longevity.
Computers are harder to get that for, especially when you have to correct for things like whether different classes of buyer have notably different habits.
But I have a hunch Apple will make good on this.
My T440s is still going strong, and that was second hand back in 2016 (I did upgrade to an FHD matte screen).
They're not quite as good as they used to be though, the T580 definitely feels like a step down in build quality.
I may consider a Framework next go-around but for now, that's my strategy.
2009 (macbook display): https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/222100056/ju...
2012 (Iphone display): https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/judge-tosses-lawsuit...
2013 (macbook motherboard): https://www.law360.com/commercialcontracts/articles/485286/a...
2015 (macbook motherboard): https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/09/judge-dismisses-l...
2017 (using refurbished parts): https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-kills-apple-warranty-cl...
2019 (butterfly keyboard): https://www.girardsharp.com/newsroom-news-apple-keyboard-ord...
All of them are dismissed. The last one got settled for $50 million, which is peanuts.
Edit: looks like the judge already dismissed this new one too...
https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri...
(technically a different class action lawsuit, but it alleges the same facts)
As should every company, because it is. Not saying Apple SHOULDN'T make decent equipment, but nothing is perfect so these things just have to be part of the accounting/business plan. They clearly are relying on their customers' brand loyalty as part of that calculation, and that + cheaping out or whatever else is causing these bi-annual issues is clearly more profit than fixing them.
I was quoted, for the MacBook Air screen repair (it died overnight), 490 EUR VAT included in Belgium. Paid the M1 MacBook Air 1020 EUR or so 10 months ago.
In addition to the price being ludicrous, I've got an interest close to zero in owning a laptop which can suddenly stop working for no reason.
Serious build quality issues: I think it's simply a piece of shit and has to be called for what it is, regardless of whether replacement parts are highway robbery (which they are) or not.
Apple Technicians have access to a document that provides instruction on how to classify (in warranty / out of warranty) display cracks. There are actually plenty of display issues that look like the result of physical damage, but are instead categorized as 'in-warranty' by Apple's documentation.
Reach out to me at my username at gmail.com, I can maybe help you if you have a photo of the screen before it was replaced.
Be curious about your circumstances whether it was repaired at an Apple Store and when this happened.
Perhaps there is a policy that isn't being disseminated around properly.
Perhaps they were intending on keeping that a customer responsibility for the comment above yours.
If there are multiple cracks, chips, or a POI on the outside of the glass. It's clear as day what happened to the screen.
I can't count on my hands or toes how many people will say they don't know what happened to the physically damaged machine. Maybe someone else broke it and they didn't know. But I can tell you that we fix more physically damaged machines than we do single hairline cracks. So I would say this isn't a huge issue that people make it out to be.
I think it's more plausible that people are surprise that their really expensive super thin and sleek computer breaks when it's physically damaged.
Without taking one apart to confirm it for myself, going off past patterns I would guess Apple have thinned the lid and the display past its limits under every day use (not lab conditions). Pair that with People having got used to using a single hand to open/close their screen, heck even Apples marketing pushed one finger lid openning/closing. So people are not closing their screens "carefully" from both sides with two hands any more (and haven't been doing so for many years, as its easier to close a laptop lid than open it).
But with thinness comes lack of rigidity, so closing the screen with a single hand unless you do it smack bang in the middle I would guess is putting more strain on one side of the lid leading to a premeture screen failure.
Basically "Bendgate" all over again.
But its not the first time we seen screen issues on macbooks come to light once the devices where in the hands of real world people. Look at the stage light defect which for the longest time Apple denied as a fault https://support.apple.com/en-gb/13-inch-macbook-pro-display-... which turned out to be that the flex cable was just a smidge too short and repeated normal use damaged the flex cable.
I'm not saying the customers are not at fault. <edit>Heck I've seen plently of dropped devices and the customer swears on their first born they didn't do nothing. Until you point out the impact damage and suddenly it all comes flooding back to them.</edit> I just see a repeating pattern and would like to dig into it more before I dismiss the customer saying they don't know what happened.
Anything in there, even being closed gently and you notice at the first sign of resistance and correct it - has probably cracked the screen.
Charger/cable/pen tip is common, but even a paper clip could be enough. There's no audible crack and you think nothing of it until the next time you take it out of your bag and the display is broken. That said, this sort of thing will typically have a point of impact/multiple cracks, not just one straight line.
Plastic webcam covers will also do this, just less consistently - they hold the display open a bit and concentrate all the force of the closed lid there.
Oh common: I've got four laptops here. They all work fine, including two ten years old MacBook Air (non M1): mine and the wife's.
I know how to take care of a laptop. Our M1 MacBook Air screen died overnight. Oh: and it had a protective cover.
[0]https://theoutline.com/post/2402/the-new-macbook-keyboard-is...
Another big impact: your purchase history. If you’ve owned every iPhone for the last decade and purchase it as soon as it comes out they will be much more lenient when you tell them it was cracked in box than if you have a single second hand iPhone SE that is cracked and the crack “totally happened on its own”. They want to protect their valuable customers.
But also as other commenters have said, it’s possible that apple knows this is a real issue and is addressing it differently now.
Think of it like this:- You have 2 clients you sold widgets too that have come in for repair. Both widgets are beat the hell up like they were using them to hammer in nails and are both clearly out of warranty repairs.
One customer as other than this widget has 0 purchase history with 5 followers on twitter and the other has been buying goods since you were a start up and has a million followers.
Who would you be more inclined to make sure they are happy and who would you say "yeah I'll fix it, but its gonna cost you" to?
(For examples of something like this, see examples of people going virial on social media because something broke / got banned, timed it right, and suddenly it was magically fixed, within 24 hours, but your avg joe is stuck speaking to a chat bot for months on end).
You would have issues if your warranty said "we will cover you for (random thing plucked out of the air) battery replacements for the first 2 years" but would only replace batteries for your whales as you are in breach of contract with your non-whales.
You have to stick to what you agreed to with your customer in your warranty terms, but you are free to go beyond those terms at your own cost as you wish as customers were aware of your terms at time of purchase.
If there is one continuous crack with no point of impact or other obvious damage, it will generally be covered under warranty (assuming you are under warranty) and not considered accidental damage. That was policy in the past and I doubt it's changed.
If there is more than one, in any way - not covered unless someone's being nice to you.
Especially when as soon as the computer fails to boot or stops working, you have lost all data on the computer as the data cannot be recovered.
Sounds like a total scam. Glad I never bought one on launch day.
This 1 year old M1 Air with 16GB RAM is twice as fast as my colleagues' Intel MBPs (comparing same year devices), and it's _silent_. It rarely even gets warm, even with Docker, several containers, JetBrains IDEs, Spotify, Firefox with a million tabs, etc. all going.
> the data cannot be recovered
For most HN readers, not having an adequate active backup/cloud sync system is difficult to imagine. When you can transfer about 1GB/s to a modern fast solid state external drive, plus we mostly have fast internet, it's easy to have live and periodic physical and remote backups.
If there's a scam to be found, it's that Apple has a real problem affecting more than a few users, but they are denying it. The scam is not in the computer but in the warranty/repair practices.
> This 1 year old M1 Air with 16GB RAM is twice as fast as my colleagues' Intel MBPs (comparing same year devices), and it's _silent_.
According to the comments in the apple forum thread, this bug affects people with older Intel-based MBPs as well.
Taking the thread at face value, if this is a super common issue, then your coworkers should also have observed significant numbers of "random failures" on their legacy Intel MBPs because those laptops too are cited in that "50 page thread" as being subject to this supposed failure mode. Do you find that to match your experience?
It is, of course, unclear whether this is an actual issue, or just a catch-all for people who damaged their screens (micro-fracture) from various drops/impacts, and then over time the micro-fracture eventually worked and became a macro-fracture. They do that - glass can be damaged without actually being visibly damaged until you put it under a microscope, and then some later much smaller stress (even just thermal stress) causes it to fracture along the weak spot.
50 pages of people sounds like a lot, but Macs are the most popular single-series laptop in production (other laptops have more in total, but it's fractured over many manufacturers and series) and if that translates to 500 posts / 200 unique users who broke their screen, across 10 years of usage... that's not actually all that much, or that surprising.
Once it hits the internet it gets blown all out of proportion... remember when RX 480s were "killing motherboards", or NVIDIA GPUs killing themselves due to "bad drivers", or EVGA 1080s were "dying en-masse" due to bad VRMs? Remember POSCAP vs MLCC on Ampere GPUs? Once a social-media pitchfork mob gets started, it becomes basically impossible to measure because all kinds of random failures get attributed to The Current Thing and people trumpet every random failure as being evidence of it.
I'd believe there are some amount of "childhood mortality" in a screen - the person in this thread whose screen delaminated right in the middle after a couple weeks isn't the only person to have a bad screen. But it's very difficult to distinguish which users have that, and which users just dropped it and then later had a crack start working at that fracture point. And once it becomes public that there's "an issue" (regardless of if a significant issue actually exists) there is a huge amount of piling-in where everyone whose screen ever micro-fractured from a previous bump will pop up and tell you about their screen that "randomly shattered".
Genuine question but how is a manufacturer supposed to handle that? Let's say Framework puts out a glass screen model. Do you just give everyone who says their screen shattered a replacement screen? So you're providing unlimited warranty screens for customers who aren't being careful but know to say "it did that by itself"? Do you limit it to one freebie per customer? What if that one also shatters? Do you just do it for the first 3 months, and what happens when someone says theirs shattered after 4 months? And any customers you let fall through the cracks will post a thread like this one about how you've wronged them...
Worst of all Apple is involved here, and that just sets people off like crazy. I know I'm going to get various un-civil responses for all this. There’s no question that the design of the screen is certainly worryingly fragile, but, I really don’t think that all of these are truly manufacturing faults, they’re people bumping an overly fragile design and then later having a micro-fractured screen start working on them.
If I look at a review comparing the Intel based Mac webcam and the 14 inch Macbook pro webcam you see how insanely better it is: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/macbook-pro-2021-14-inch
My conclusion:
- the only good camera is the front facing camera of the cheap android phone
- the 2015 MBP camera has low resolution and lots of noise, but the image at least looks natural
- the images from the M1 Macs look very similar. They added extreme smoothing to hide the noise. The result is that there is no details at all in the images. Skin looks unnaturally smooth and facial hair is a blurry mess. When you move your head, there are weird artefacts near the eyes.
- comparing M1 Macbook Air 2020 and M1 Macbook Pro 2021 looks similar, except the smoothing seems even stronger on the 2021 Macbook Pro
- even in perfect lighting the resolution of the camera is very low. There is no way this is actually a 1080p camera. The 720p image of the 2015 Macbook Pro has more detail than the cameras in the new Macs.
- the only good thing about the cameras in the M1 Macs is the low light performance. The algorithm is pretty good at producing a usable image even in very low light.
It's really not a good camera. It really sucks. Everything else about this laptop is perfect: The display, the speakers, the keyboard -- everything is wonderful, apart from the fact that whenever I facetime with someone I look like a blurry mess.
My custom Ryzen 7/RX 570 Linux PC built from parts cost less than this, so a repair of this magnitude just boggles my mind. At that point just buy yourself a new computer.
If it breaks, you plug in a new one at 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of the laptop repair with the only downtime being how long it takes to drive to the store.
> Ryzen 7/RX 570
At this point just buy yourself a couple of used computers.
Now, if only they could also fix the audio crackling issue that me and many other users are experiencing... (https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/s4r1m5/macbook_...)
Edit: parent was made to pay 800 dollars for a screen breaking which wasn't his or her fault, but still goes on to say "they said they might refund it later" and "the repair was quick". The rationalisation is painful to read.
While apart from the cracked screen issue the hardware is amazing in my opinion, the overall software issues make using macOS painful sometimes (processes running at high CPU -- now mostly offloaded to the efficiency cores, WebKit views having issues loading, anything syncing to iCloud sometimes not working, sometimes working on the 2nd try, Messages/Apple Mail search only finding some of the messages, audio crackling issues with wired headphones/AirPods/built-in speaker, etc.)
But the whole point is that it's Apple's fault that these screens are breaking, not the users'.
The laptop cost me around 1200 Euro in total.
On my flight yesterday, when I pulled out my full tower Ryzen with 2x 3090 GPUs, I got told that the power outlet on the plane seat shouldn't be used for my 1200W power supply.
And yet, the same flight attendant said nothing to the macbook user a few rows over who was clearly plugged in. Frankly, it's appalling how few people understand that a cheaper desktop is comparable to a laptop.
For me personally, 99.9% of my work is done at my desk (1), so why not have a more powerful, upgradeable, repairable computer to work with?
(1) I'm not hip enough to work from coffee shops
Contrary to popular myth, not all of us live and work in a basement. Myself and many people I know, my non-technical girlfriend included, use our laptops all around the country and in multiple other countries.
I do agree about upgradeable and repairable, which is why the Framework laptop is getting pretty attractive. But there's still nothing that compares in performance and portability to my M1 Air.
Like you, I am also an outlier, using my MacbBok all over Hades.
Heck, even before COVID, my previous company only gave out laptops. Those things would get moved all around the office - from desk to desk, to multiple conference and meeting rooms, home, etc. This has been the norm for at least 5 years in my experience.
Basically all developers I know have "hybrid work arrangement", working some days from home/travels and some from office. They all remotely connect to their workstation at work either from their home computer of from laptop when traveling.
Maybe it depends on type of development or age of developers, but I'm not 20 anymore and laptop is an ergonomic nightmare. If you want to use it for a longer period of time and avoid health issues you should get an external keyboard/mouse/screens anyway. Which means you just recreated workstation, but it costs more money, has worse performance and all kinds of issues while connecting so much stuff to it.
Now what I really would like is a high quality, low latency complete remote system. I got pretty close to this with a recent experiment, but it took a good bit of effort (and I still had some weird issues). It was great in that I could go to any computer with enough power to drive a browser, remote into my server "desktop", and continue right where I left off.
If that could get perfected, I would probably switch to an iPad Pro with optional keyboard.
a) You don't know what most people do.
b) I would add that those of us that are in a hybrid mode e.g. working equally from home and work are given laptops specifically because we are expected to use the same computer in both environments.
b. Sure, but again, that's a minority of even the professional demographic. Now, if you're thinking the developer demographic, sure I might agree with you, but that's not what OP said.
Because in Australia at least that is not what is happening at all.
Occupancy levels in the CBDs of our major cities are still well below pre-COVID averages.
I have two data points for you:
The company I work for does little dev work. 99% of the people have laptops. They don't travel cross-country, mostly work in the office. But they also need to move to conference rooms, work from home, etc. We only have to handle one PC per person this way, instead of figuring how to handle their own personal PC when at home, etc. These are mostly "non IT people". Sure, you can argue they don't need the power of a desktop anyway. Which is absolutely correct.
I have a friend who does "actual dev work" working for an "actual software company". Java and C++, so they actually require powerful machines to compile (at least more than my company), etc. They used to have big-ass Xeon workstations. Those were replaced with some kind of Dell laptop [*] with a bunch of cores and RAM. He also basically never travels for work, but can now easily work from home without installing the company crap on his own PC. My friend is much happier with this arrangement.
Both companies provide multi-monitor setups with external keyboards and mice, so the comfort part of a desktop is still present when they're sitting at their desks.
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[0] They look like the XPS line, but seem somewhat thicker and don't have the XPS logo.
It's amazing how much shit you get on HN of all places for sitting at your desk programming.
But I really don't get your point about form factor. Using, external monitors and adding a keyboard and mouse to a laptop is a non-issue.
I have a desktop, and a laptop used as a thin client. The laptop can be inexpensive or have nice features (like a touchscreen), while the real power, storage, etc, is on the desktop.
This isn't even an argument, the decades of the laptops continued popularity say enough.
My desktop is just a host for several VMs. If I actually need to travel with one of those "computers", I just shut down the VM and copy it's image from my NAS to my laptop.
If you are still buying a laptop for your stated reason, then you haven't embraced virtualization as a developer.
Making a VM copy from a NAS every time I decided to step outside and work say on the back deck in a different environment with trees and some sun is anything but convenient.
There seems to be a perpetuation falsehood in these discussions that the only time you would need to use a laptop is when travelling a substantial distance from home, which can not be anymore further from the truth than is possible.
Lastly, laptops are not the sole domain of developers and you don’t need to ‘embrace virtualization’ simply because it exists.
I'm not arguing against desktops for people who like them but this "I don't understand laptops" stuff (several posts, not just this one) is bizarre.
Would it also surprise you that people would prefer a device that they can be used anywhere, rather than a fixed location.
The only way you could not get this transition is if you've never had to go anywhere outside your home.
After working with large monitors, I don't know how anyone gets serious work done on a laptop screen.
I do have a laptop, but it is relatively inexpensive and used mostly as a thin client to my desktop (as others have mentioned).
Edit: I will also add, I like having a dedicated space for work. This prevents work from creeping into my life everywhere in my house. I can't be on the couch, watching a movie, and have the urge to work - I'm not in my work space!
But it depends on the task I do. For example, I quite enjoy working from my parents' garden when it's nice outside and if I do some focused work. Like reading some "long-form documentation" (where I don't need to follow it along as I apply it) or when I do some routine sysadmin work.
I have a big monitor (don't like having multiple monitors) at my parents' house, with a dedicated desk in a "work area". I also have this at home. And I also have this at the office. It's much more comfortable to move around these locations with a laptop than it would be to haul around a desktop, or have multiple desktops and having to keep them in sync. When I need actual horsepower, I have a Xeon workstation at my house, and my work allows me to leverage it remotely if needed. Guess what? I basically only turn it on for games.
And for many of us their computer is not used exclusively at a desk.
It's also used at work, on a couch, on a plane, in bed etc.
I don't have a Mac though... Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu works great for me. Never had an issue with the three I've had over the years.
And at that point I'd imagine it's way easier to optimize for mobility, for a vast majority of people - unless they're working entirely in virtual workspaces/the cloud - in which case a laptop is perfectly fine anyway.
The more expensive something is the higher the ongoing costs to maintain it. It's the same case with cars where more expensive ones are also more costly to maintain and fix.
When people buy a more luxury item, it's because there is something about the item that they value where no cheaper equivalent exists. MacBooks certainly have several such features: quality of display, ecosystem integration, form factor, battery life, speakers, aesthetics... These things might not be the same things you value, but for those who care it's just as important. This is also why some people buy luxury cars and others just get the cheapest whatever that gets them from A to B.
FWIW, I run an HP Ryzen laptop that cost me just $350. But I do so because the 2h battery, non-HDR (and probably not even 100% sRGB) 1080p screen, lackluster speaker, and "borderline serviceable" trackpad don't bother me at all. I would not buy a MacBook as it offers no features I care about at a significantly higher price, but I respect people who do buy MacBooks because they fit their needs.
I’m not sure this compares to luxury cars, since MacBooks more than ever are more like appliances. So it’s arguable that paying more should get you a more durable product.
I mean there’s loads of people who have pre-shitty keyboard MacBooks that have lasted years. I have a great 2012 MBA that still works great and I paid a premium for it then. I’d be happy to pay a premium again for a similarly long lasting computer. You’re also paying the apple premium so that if something goes wrong, they fix it with little fuss. Something I have also used over the years.
If you really want to compare, if I got a similar spec-ed MacBook to what I need, I'd have to spend easily $4k+. That means I can outright write off my current cheapish laptop 10+ times over the entire lifetime of an equivalent Macbook and I'd still be in the green.
Premium products are premium because you need them to do something that no other device can. Durability _could_ be a premium selling point for some stuff (tools for example), but for electronics and cars it almost never is. OTOH, I'd happily concede if someone wants to spend $3k+ just to get the better monitor or better battery life on the Macbook.