Comment by gouranga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gouranga | Hacker News Reader

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Having had piles of apple kit over the years, I can assure you that the quality is an illusion generated by the high price.

Here's what has died on me just outside a year since 2006 MacBook pro (logic board failure), iMac (won't boot), a MacBook (won't charge), just about every damn usb cable they've ever given me (broken at type a connector), airport express (melted). A friend of mine's MacBook pro caught fire. I won't even bother to catalogue the 22 dead iPhones my company has...

My iPod nano and a 2009 macbook are still fine.

conversely, my circa 2007 Lenovo t61 cost around $100 2 years ago and has been dropped, yanked off tables and has a couple of drinks in it and it just stares at you and takes it. It had a new battery last year and a new power connector (self installed) with no problems as they have full service manuals available.

That's engineering and service.

(I am a qualified EE so will not comment on the initial article as it makes me squirm a bit)

You clearly have a large pool of hardware. Your numbers mean nothing without knowing the hardware that DIDN'T fail.

To give a more useful metric, for the last 4 years I have maintained a company have about 150 machines. 50% are Macbook Pros. 50% are Lenovos. I saw, on average, 5-6 Lenovos have some sort of hardware failure per year. The Macbook Pros would see 1-2 hardware failures per year. The Macbook Pros were also giving about 6-12 months of extra life before needing to be replaced. The external packaging of the Lenovos would produce MUCH more wear year over year than the aluminum Macbook Pro.

I believe the Lenovo is just a terrible hardware producer. I got a T410S when I started at my new company. It was brand new. 3 months later the screen had a 1" thick white line on the monitor. I treated the thing like royalty. A few months later the plastic casing started to crack despite the lack of obvious impacts. 6 months later, a fan error prevented it from booting. I bought a mac book air at the same time, and it's still looks/works like the day I bought it!

I have a Lenovo-built T60p, built in 2006, I own it since 2008, works like new and looks much better than you'd expect a six-year-old laptop. Anecdata!

And I assume those 50% Lenovos were in the MacBook Pro price range? Meaning, just the Xs?

I listed all the hardware I personally owned. It is all caveated on IMHO.

Lucky you :)

My experience is the same. I recently pulled my x220 off the table onto a hard floor. My first thought was, "what an idiot!" My second thought was, "oh, it's a Thinkpad, nevermind". The laptop is obviously undamaged. (I will admit the display is rather flexible, but so are all Apple laptops. Gone are the days when you could run over your laptop with a car, sadly. I guess being so cheap that you can replace them without caring is better peace of mind than any magnesium roll cage.)

I am a qualified EE so will not comment on the initial article as it makes me squirm a bit.

I'm not, though I did take a lot of EE classes in college, and I think the article is fine. He took the thing apart and noted which components Apple used. He's not telling anyone how to engineer their own power supply.

I wouldn't say those days are gone. A buddy of mine accidentally ran over his MacBook pro a few years ago. Granted, it was in his backpack at the time, but still... that sucker just kept on trekking. Looked awful though. Bent the whole thing into a slight curve, pulled apart some of the seams, etc, but it still worked.

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There is no single fault that can cause short between primary side of transformer and the output connector casing, so it's OK. Also, isolation distances on orders of millimeters are relevant for open air or PCB breakdown (with PCB-air interface having lower breakdown voltage than air or PCB alone due to possible water condensation) and not for isolated wiring inside transformer. It's pretty hard to imagine any failure mode that would cause short between connector casing without also causing breakdown between transformer windings. The whole thing looks slightly over-engineered (L6565 seems to me as a bit of overkill for this application), but safe.

It's interesting to note that most cheap replacement chargers don't have significant safety issues but produce harmful EMI, on the other hand it's not too hard to find name brand power supply which have significant safety issues (eg. low impedance connection between otherwise unconnected ground of EMI filter on primary side and output ground), often caused by combination of safety, EMC and design/size requirements and weird interactions between them and between requirements of different jurisdictions (EMC, ESD and safety requirements of EU sometimes tend to be contradictory).

Note that many of the pictures don't include all the insulation. (I mention this in Footnote 5, so it's easy to miss.) In particular, there was a black plastic insulator over the USB output plug that only appears in the first picture. And there are several layers of insulating tape around the transformer. This should meet the safety standards; if it didn't, they wouldn't approve it after all.

UL didn't seem to mind. There is a lot of insulation between the primary and the USB socket: tape, plastic, the secondary winding, more tape, and so on. I can't imagine a failure mode for this system that would occur in normal use.

Tape melts, emits gas which is poisonous and is more conductive than the plain air gap. There's your failure mode.

Bear in mind my Airport express melted and blew my circuit breakers so shorts are definitely a possibility.

It also fails if subjected to a large amount of shrapnel!

USB cable ends fraying has nearly always been undue strain or user error, in my experience.

I've seen literally thousands of Apple USB cables in my work, and, while they probably won't hold up against heavy abuse as well as a rubbery booted end, they tend to either be totally fine or fraying at the ends.

The funny thing is that people with fraying ends tend to have all their cables fraying, whereas those with undamaged cables tend to have all undamaged cables.

There's something about use case here where Apple's cables just don't hold up to common (mis?)use case by a subset of their users.

Undue stain? If they're fraying then it's bad engineering plain and simple.

A $5 set of Sony earphones goes through several orders of magnitude more shearing, twisting and pulling and last years. Why can't apple do that?

Because it looks pretty before it has sound engineering.

Apple builds bulletproof, toughly built stuff when they need to - for example the "pulling out the prongs" example in the discussion root article, or devices like the original "toilet seat" iBook models.

Apple doesn't do it for everything for mainly aesthetic and packaging reasons - iOS 30 pin cables are much smaller than they used to be before the iPhone came out, to fit in even smaller packaging.

I'm sure there would be complaints about the "big, ugly cable" if Apple beefed up their cables ends, especially if the only benefit would be to the 20-30% of the population that is hard on their gear, and even in that case the enhanced durability would only increase the cable's lifespan slightly.

Please feel free to send me comments on the parts that make you squirm; I would be happy to update it and learn what I got wrong.

It's just the gushing over the thing that does me in. It's pretty standard for a vendor shipped item and TBH the only reason it's like it is, is due to the fact the last one they shipped was a pile of shite.

In the EU we have quite hefty electrical safety laws and I doubt it could be CE marked or approved in the UK at least based on the line voltage isolation.

I've gone through my fair share of Apple HW. I'll agree it's not without its failures. Broke a Powerbook G4 logic board, a MBP screen and one old iPod (abt 30% of what I've owned of Apple HW). What I've found which makes me happy though is they've always fixed it without charge and with no AppleCare, at least so far. I'll admit to only owning my own custom built PCs (and Nokia & SE phones) before that, at least for 10 years prior so I've nothing to compare with.

(Also an EE by education if not by trade, though that doesn't really count here)

I will say that they replace earphones readily. Unfortunately my dead MBP resulted in me being pretty much told to F Off depsite being literally 2 days out of warranty.

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