In my mind, when we pay that ridiculous Apple premium on RAM and storage, we pay for excellent quality in SW/HW. They also need to deliver that quality.
Of course they do. They’re just secretive in general, and keep communications edited. Compared to the word salad of modern companies on social media, I find it refreshing. Just fix the problem, issue replacements for those affected and move on quietly.
Where? Do you have any examples?
The whole battery gate saga. Touch Bar. The 2013 Mac Pro [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...
But they never have the common sense to release statements like "hey, the latest MacOS update might brick some systems so we're pulling the updated until we can do further testing and patching, if you've been affected by the bug already go to a Apple store and have it fixed for free".
I suppose I'm failing to see the need for a public statement if you've fixed the problem and provide service to those affected. Nobody can pull the faulty update anymore. And it's not like someone with a bricked device is more likely to see a PR statement than seek out support.
[1] https://osxdaily.com/2023/07/11/apple-pulls-rapid-response-u...
Hiding entails ignoring the problem. They're not doing that. Their track record is to fix it. Not every action needs an accompanying tweet and blog post.
These days it's just a bunch of wannabes trying too hard to be him.
I've run into such horrific bugs during pretty normal use that I don't think this anymore.
(I think it is ridiculous that the system works in that way, especially for a company that hasn’t needed investors in over a decade, but it is what it is.)
It's not possible (well, it's very difficult) to do this on an Apple Silicon Mac; once there's an update you can always apply it from another Mac, like the steps on this page do, and your data is still there. With Intel Macs it's possible.
The definition of "bricked" is not set in stone; a lot of what a normal person would consider "bricked" (doesn't turn on, or turns on to an unresponsive black screen, and no magic sequence of button presses can reset it to working order) could be fixed by a power user with the right equipment, software, and knowledge.
In this case, it requires fairly expensive equipment (another $2.5-10k device), somewhat easy to acquire software, and the appropriate set of instructions, to overwrite the device's broken firmware with a working copy; you don't have to open up the device and plug a JTAG adapter, but using the DFU protocol is very similar to that, since in both cases you're writing directly to the firmware under control of an external device. This is not like "BIOS FlashBack" and similar on non-Apple PCs, in which the device can rewrite its firmware by itself from a common USB stick.
(Also, about data loss: a device with removable storage could get bricked without any data loss, and fixed also without any data loss, simply because the data storage is separated from the firmware and from most of the hardware. It's Apple's insistence on non-removable storage which risks losing data when something else makes the device fail to boot.)
A few minutes of access to one, not ownership of it, and hardly any system requirements on it.
> It's Apple's insistence on non-removable storage which risks losing data when something else makes the device fail to boot.
That's actually not the reason. All storage is removable if you just desolder it. It's because the storage is encrypted and you can't extract the keys.