[gettingoverit]

Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace.

It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!

The best part is the motherboard produced in a way to fail due to moisture in a couple of years, with all the uncoated copper, with 0.1mm pitch debugging ports that short-circuit due to a single hair, and the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years. How would you otherwise be able to change the whole laptop without all the walls around repair manuals and parts? You just absolutely have to love the fact even transplanting chips from other laptops won't help due to all the overlapping hardware DRMs.

I'll go plug the cable into the bottom of my wireless Apple mouse, and remind myself of all the best times I had with Apple's hardware. It really rocks.

[combyn8tor]

> the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years

Apple have a couple of extra mechanisms in place to remind us to buy a new device:

- On iOS the updates are so large it doesn't fit on the device. This is because they purposely put a small hard drive i. It serves a second purpose - people will buy Apple cloud storage because nothing fits locally.

- No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine. Then forcing the app developer ecosystem to target the newer iOS version and not support the older versions. But it's not planned obsolescence when it's Apple, because they're the good guys, right? They did that 1984 ad. Right guys?

[rgovostes]

> No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine.

This is a weird one to complain about because Apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates. iOS 26 supports devices back to 2019. And they just released a security update for the iPhone 6S, a model released a full decade ago, last month.

The oldest Samsung flagship you can get Android 16 for is their 2023 model (Galaxy S23), and for Google the oldest is the 2021 model (Pixel 6).

[skeaker]

The part that really gets me is that the price per GB to go from a 256 to a 512 GB iPhone is $2.54 (since the next storage option up costs $200 total). Two and a half dollars!!! A 512 GB micro SD would run you $0.10/GB. They have been charging 25x the market rate for storage on a device with no expandable storage at all for years. Baffling that they aren't called on it more. It should be criminal.

[MaysonL]

I recently found my ipad mini 2 (released in 2013) that had been boxed up when I moved a few years ago. After charging up the battery and booting it up, I checked for system updates. The latest system available for it was ios 12.5.7, released in 2023. It loaded fine, and I’ve been using the mini as an ereader ever since – the screen is fine, and wifi works.

[tavavex]

A Macbook is the only Apple device I have in my entire array of computers and computer-related stuff, so I've got plenty of points of comparison. While Apple's hardware design isn't perfect, all of what you bring up seems wildly blown out of proportion to me. I can say I've never seen anyone with molten keyboards and displays. I've used the charger cable on my main charging brick for about five years now, and it's still going strong, despite being used for charging everything everywhere. And while Apple has committed many sins in terms of doing their absolute best at preventing anyone from touching their sacred hardware (we just need DRMed cables and enclosures to complete the set), this only affects repair. In terms of planned obsolescence, Macbooks statistically don't seem much less reliable than any other laptops on the market. They make up a majority of the used laptop market where I am.

And of course, just had to bring up the whole mouse charger thing. Back when Apple updated their mouse once and replaced the AA compartment with a battery+port block in the same spot to reuse the old housing, and a decade later people still go on about the evil Apple designers personally spitting in your face for whatever reason sounds the most outrageous.

[stevage]

Apple produced at least three mice that were very different and terrible in different ways. Their laptops are good, but don't waste your time defending their other peripherals.

[theodric]

There was a third-party battery module[1] for the original AA Magic Mouse that would allow it to charge wirelessly, a feature that Apple somehow still has not managed to steal!

[1] https://techpp.com/2011/04/19/mobee-magic-charger-for-magic-...

[WWLink]

> How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line!

???? ctrl+a and ctrl+e? That works on most Linux setups, too. Only Microsoft screws that up. I love how in Mac Office apps, Microsoft also makes ctrl+a and ctrl+e do what they do in windows lol.

[raydev]

Can you be specific about your bad experiences with Apple hardware? I've gone through 5 MacBook Pros since 2008 and my only complaint was the old Intel models always got too hot. Nothing ever broke on them and I guess I kept them relatively clean?

I also have all of the adapters that came with the MBPs too, all perfectly functioning, the oldest still attached and powering my 2013 model with the dead battery (2008 model was sold, still working). The magsafe cable is pretty yellow now, and maybe a little wonky from the constant travelling, but no fraying/fire hazard yet.

[nativeit]

Was there a Gateway that did better?

[NaomiLehman]

n=4 but my niece spilled a whole cup of milk and a whole cup of matcha on my M2 (twice on 1 device). I just flipped it up, dried it out with a hair dryer (apparently shouldn't do that) and it still works 2 years later.

Can't relate to what you're saying, had 4 MacBooks, and many PCs too.

[anothernewdude]

Also they leak charge onto the case.

[kogir]

Any properly grounded device will do that with specifically incorrect electrical wiring and/or a shoddy charger. Did this happen with a properly wired outlet, and an undamaged Apple charger?

I have doubts that it did, as that would warrant a safety recall.

[heavyset_go]

Found this out one time when I went to touch my MBA and it was like I stuck my finger in a light socket.

[coldtea]

>Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace. It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!

None of the above sound like anybody's actual experience. Which is also they have the biggest resale value retention among PC laptops, and biggest reported user satisfaction.

Now, if you were about the lack of ports (at least for a period) or the crappy "butterfly" keyboard (for a period), you'd have an actual point.

Home/End is just Control-A/E.

Never seen "molten keyboard plastic". I'm sure you can find some person who has that somewhere on the internet. I doubt it's a problem beyond some 0.0001% rare battery failures or something like that.

"yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust". Not sure what this even means. Especially AS Macs don't even get hot. I haven't heard the fan ever, and I use a M1 MBP of 5+ years with vms and heavy audio/video apps.

"when its charger dies in a month" is just bs.

[FireBeyond]

Staingate?

I had a GPU issue (that was the subject of a recall that matched my symptoms precisely (and I could make the MBP core dump on demand in the Genius Bar) but "recall declined, does not fail diagnostics".

Damaged charging circuit on an MBA. Laptop worked perfectly. Battery health check fine. Just could not charge it. "That will be a $900 repair. Maybe we can look at getting you into a new Mac?" (for one brief moment I thought they were going to exchange mine... no, they wanted me to buy one. And of course, my MBA couldn't be traded in because it was damaged...).

I've also had multiple Magsafe connectors fray to the point of becoming like a paper lantern with all the bare wire visible, despite the cable being attached to a desk with cable connectors so there was near zero cable stress (and often only plugged/unplugged once a week).

[gamblor956]

While I was in law school, every student who had an Apple laptop had to get their laptop replaced at least once (some multiple times) over the course of our program. The biggest problem was the bulging keyboard, due to the bulging battery, but their were also numerous issues with displays and with chargers not lasting very long. Most chargers lasted at least a semester, but few of the Apple chargers lasted an entire school year. They simply weren't designed with durability in mind. Quite humorously, after one student's laptop keyboard began bulging during torts, the professor began an impromptu lecture on product liability laws.

The only PC laptops that were replaced were the ones that got damaged in accidents (car accidents, dropped off a balcony, used as a shield in self defense during a robbery, etc.). Dell Latitudes of that era were sturdy, and not noticeably heavier than their fragile Apple counterparts.