I completely agree with you on this. I've had to send my 1st gen retina macbook pro back to the service depot literally 5 times. The first hard drive was apparently defective, as were the first and second logic boards. And twice I had defective parts replaced with identical defective parts.

And whenever anything is sent to the service depot, they wipe the goddamn hard drive. No matter what. And you guys know the pain of re-downloading XCode, re-installing everything with homebrew, re-cloning all of your git repos, re-configuring all of your git-remotes, re-installing virtual machines for IE8, etc. It takes like 2-3 days. And it's not an issue that employers with deadlines are sympathetic about.

The stupid thing is that every time I get it back I think, "everything will be different this time". It's like a sick abusive relationship.

I just got it back like 4 days ago from the latest trip to the depot, and now there's a harsh buzzing sound that I've never heard before. So now I have to weigh the severity of this stupid issue against the headache of re-installing everything again and rolling the dice with another trip to the depot.

I guess what I'm saying is that you really should beware of 1st gen apple hardware.