I’m glad it was just a software bug. It still seems like Apple’s quality control has gone way done over the last few years. My hypothesis is that there has been a change in culture as the company gets bigger with less emphasis on rigorous testing of the code?
It would be interesting to get some perspective from a longtime Apple employee on this.
It still seems like Apple’s quality control has gone way done over the last few years.
I doubt it. They've had problems for years... bulging batteries, bad solder, bendy iPhones, etc.
But, is the quality really going down, or is Apple just an easy target? I tend to think it's more of the later. I've had Lenovos and Dells for work and they've not been perfect.
That’s a good point, for me it’s more that I perceive that the quality of Apple quality control used to be very high, and now it’s coming down to earth. It’s this shift that has people upset I think not the fact that Apple products have more issues than those of other vendors.
A friend had one of those white G3 iBooks. It got replaced about five times, and I think they eventually gave him a successor G4 one. Apple's never been perfect.
My mom had one too. They put the GPU right under the wristrest, so that you'd crack the solder just by typing. Eventually they added a plastic collar around it but that only moved the stress to the motherboard.
I doubt QA percentage failures are going down, but rather volume is going up. A failure rate of 0.1% of 100,000 is 100, but for 100,000,000, then it's 100,000, which would increase the publicity of failures significantly.
The alternative is this issue came up, and they had a trade off to make with heat + noise vs cooler + quieter, and out of the gate they bet on cooler and quieter; with the backlash, they’re realizing it was the wrong bet, and fixing a “bug.” I have to imagine that basic stress testing would have caught this somewhere.
That’s true, but it seems like this issue doesn’t affect all MacBooks? And looking at the reddit thread someone posted here it does look like the behavior wasn’t actually throttling properly.
It would be interesting to get some perspective from a longtime Apple employee on this.