People who insist Apple makes good hardware are falling for marketing. Apple historically has had constant engineering poor choices and bad designs and outright flaws that they just never acknowledge, and for some reason people take that as "good".
Back in the day, Apple laptops used to cook and kill themselves with poor GPU heat management.
Several versions of macbooks shortened a display cable such that it would degrade over time because it simply wasn't up to task, and eventually your screen would be borked and have absolutely ungoogleable issues (this happened to me)
They had an entire run of macbooks with flawed batteries.
The entire keyboard fiasco, all in an effort to bikeshed computer thinness FFS. Meanwhile even before the butterfly tech, macbook keyboards have always been trash. They have un-ergonomic keys and no travel and just seem to prioritize aesthetics over usage.
Internal connectors have 50v backlight pins right next to logic level pins which means instead of a drop of water just killing the backlight power supply, it routes 50v through everything and kills half your mainboard components.
Pre M series macbooks hard thermal throttling issues if you charged them from the ports on one side, but not the other.
Apple laptops have NEVER had good thermal management.
Soldered SSDs that are stupidly tiny, especially in the early M1 machines that had 8gb RAM and bad swap behavior that was actively killing people's SSDs
Apple buys good screens to put in their machines, and the frame is pretty rigid, and THAT'S IT. Nothing else about their machines is a step above other laptop manufacturers hardware wise
I can't comment on the internals (and I actually don't like Apple and their software), but comparing my TP X1 Yoga (basically Lenovo's top of the line) with my partner's new Macbook, the build of the latter is noticeably more tight, with barely noticeable seams where the metal panels come together. The Thinkpad's build is pretty good too and I'm fine with it, but I just can't help noticing the build quality of the Macbook.
> Several versions of macbooks shortened a display cable such that it would degrade over time because it simply wasn't up to task, and eventually your screen would be borked and have absolutely ungoogleable issues (this happened to me)
Had this happen to a 17 inch PPC, red line in the middle of the display then completely dead. Had to be hooked to an ext monitor. Never knew i it was a cable or inverter thing.
Geez, bookmarking this one. I wonder if you've blogged about this anywhere? Would love to read more about the nitty gritty, and I'd love to see it existing concretely (in a general sense).
As I said in another comment, I just bought my third MacBook since 2008. 8.5 years on average so far is what I get out of these laptops.
All of the things you say may be true, but I have never needed to repair one and in that time I travel constantly and generally have beat them to hell with daily use. My milage may vary of course, but what in theory might be poor and bad design decisions didn’t materialize to poor quality in my experience.
Back in the day, Apple laptops used to cook and kill themselves with poor GPU heat management.
Several versions of macbooks shortened a display cable such that it would degrade over time because it simply wasn't up to task, and eventually your screen would be borked and have absolutely ungoogleable issues (this happened to me)
They had an entire run of macbooks with flawed batteries.
The entire keyboard fiasco, all in an effort to bikeshed computer thinness FFS. Meanwhile even before the butterfly tech, macbook keyboards have always been trash. They have un-ergonomic keys and no travel and just seem to prioritize aesthetics over usage.
Internal connectors have 50v backlight pins right next to logic level pins which means instead of a drop of water just killing the backlight power supply, it routes 50v through everything and kills half your mainboard components.
Pre M series macbooks hard thermal throttling issues if you charged them from the ports on one side, but not the other.
Apple laptops have NEVER had good thermal management.
Soldered SSDs that are stupidly tiny, especially in the early M1 machines that had 8gb RAM and bad swap behavior that was actively killing people's SSDs
Apple buys good screens to put in their machines, and the frame is pretty rigid, and THAT'S IT. Nothing else about their machines is a step above other laptop manufacturers hardware wise