If you watch Louis Rossmann's channel, who runs a component-level repair shop in NYC and campaigns/ed for Right to Repair, you'd know modern MacBook Pro's were poorly-designed, designed to wear out, and are expensive and difficult/impossible to repair. Memory: soldered in, SSD: soldered in, battery:
glued-in in several pieces, board diagrams: proprietary, test tools and utilities: proprietary, service knowledge-base and forums: exclusive, genuine parts: exclusive.
Older Macbook Pro were better but still have their issues. I have an A1278 MBP that sleeps spontaneously all the time because, in the palm rest by the HDD bracket, either the Hall effect sensor wore out or the bar above it (ferrous metal or magnet; magnets are around the screen) became too magnetized. Also, the screen hinges must be loosening or self-polishing, so the screen is getting floppier. I'll try tightening the set screws and maybe even Loctite them. https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup
Louis Rossmann spends countless hours talking about what he perceives as "design flaws" with Apple products but never offers anything resembling context. He is looking with a microscope—both literally and metaphorically—at tiny details on a circuit board which don't seem to be a problem for >99% of Apple's customers.
Are these points of failure really any more common on Apple devices than their competitors? Are other major manufacturers' products substantively better in any of these regards? Has he ever spoken to anyone who actually designs laptop circuit boards?
One of the interesting things I've noticed is that Apple product owners have a near-universal expectation of long life and durability, whereas owners of PC laptops are more likely to treat them as unfixable and/or disposable. I think this unspoken bias is playing deeply into the Rossmann perspective.
Now I don't doubt that a lot of what Louis says is technically correct, and if everyone in the independent repair industry was as competent as Louis is in 2019, he would probably have a point. But they're not, so he doesn't. Given the shoddy low standards that dominate the independent Apple device repair industry, it's unsurprising that Apple doesn't do anything to help them.
I'm not sure he would -need- to talk to someone who designs boards to have a valid viewpoint. There's a case in point where the older Macbook display connector had a spare way or two between the high voltage and lower voltage signal connections. This isn't present on newer models, and leads to a connector failure meaning the display controller gets fried. This is simply bad practice. There was a commenter on one such video saying 'well, one guy does the spec for the connections needed, another guy does the connector pin out', but that just shows that people aren't doing their jobs as well as they should be - if you're designing something but ignoring an important part of that design such as physical distance needed to ensure long term reliability, then you're not doing your job well.
There are plenty of reasons that I love my 2017 MBP, but it most certainly isn't a 'Pro' piece of kit. It needs to be handled with kid gloves to avoid it damaging its own screen (which was replaced by Apple TWO DAYS before the warranty expired, thankfully) - if you close it without something between keyboard and screen, the glass gets damaged. I've had cheap laptops which have put up with years of abuse (including being thrown in the back of a rally car and doing an entire International event!) without this sort of damage. The lack of ports is a problem (I don't mind them being USB-C, but two isn't enough), lack of replaceability or upgradability, etc.
I didn't expect it to last forever, but I -did- expect it to last longer than any PC laptop I've bought in the past - the previous record was 5 years out of a fairly run-of-the-mill Acer which got used every day, sometimes for 8-10 hours, and not always by me. I was hoping for about 7 years out of it, which works out to about £250/year. I'll be -very- surprised if it makes it that far, alas.
Any 1000€+ laptop should last at least 3 years. In the EU 2 years warranty against manufacturing defects is standard, in some countries it's even more. This POS breaks after 1 year, and thanks to videos like the one from iFixit it should be easy to prove a manufacturing defect.
Apple got sued by several governments for trying to get out of their obligations under this warranty and instead manipulating customers into buying AppleCare.
Hinges are no. 1 wear sensitive component in flip phones and laptops. They must be properly engineered. Even some cheap flip phones had slip rings for display connection 15 years ago, why Apple can't do the same?
As much as I want to agree with you, those old phones had low resolution, low refresh rate screens. You need a much higher quality connection to push UHD video down, and I doubt you can get a slip-ring to reliably carry signals of that high a frequency. The capacitance and signal reflection issues would be tricky to work around.
I have taken apart my 2018 MacBook Pro and there is no glue and it's no more difficult to repair than any of the other models. Provided you can get the parts of course.
Also the A1278 is at best a 6 year old machine. I would imagine it's pretty normal for there to be some wear/tear issues.
I have an IBM X60 from 2006, and the only problem it's developed despite heavy (mobile) use for the past decade-and-nearly-half is that it's lost some of the paint on the case around the edges and bottom.
A friend's MacBook (the plastic ones of the time) started cracking its case within a year, and shortly after that the HDD failed.
Apple has always presented their products as being premium, and their aesthetic isn't bad, but IMHO they're not really as well-built as they claim to be. They are better built than the cheap HPs and Toshibas, however.
I mean I get it, it's popular to hate on apple because it makes money on youtube with the tech crowd. But what is most of the market facing?
Most of the market isn't upgrading ram. They aren't upgrading SSDs or batteries. They want their apple care to do it for them. I mean how many of these threads that self-select people with problems with their macs do we need? What are the real numbers?
It's not like Apple has a monopoly on laptops. There are plenty of other options. The competition is there. Yet Macbooks seem to be doing quite alright?
It's not about upgrading, it's about repairing when it gets broken. Which no matter how well made SSD, batteries or memory is, it will in a few years (at least on average).
If it's soldered on instead of simply connected, that means repairing it requires much more skill, and can easily result in damage to other parts. What it means really is that fixing a broken macbook costs way more then it should if they just used a normal connector.
In the case of this specific example, the fact that the display cables are part of display itself means that "a 5$ repair by replacing a cable turns into a 500$ replacement of the display". Which basically equates to a 500$ yearly subscription on a 2000$ machine.
Ok, this is what I'm looking for. What statistics back this up in any way?
I have a 2010 macbook pro that is still kicking quite well. No issues at all. I'm sure you have some anecdote about some Dell too. But you say on average, in a few years, all laptops will break. Where is the evidence for this?
Microsoft has a monopoly on game consoles that run Xbox games.
Cisco has a monopoly on networking gear that runs IOS.
LG has a monopoly on TVs that run WebOS.
The world is full of devices that are not open platforms for alternative operating systems. And the world is full of operating systems that are not open to commodity hardware. If you don't like Apple's choice in focusing on their particular solution which involves intimate software-hardware integration, the answer is to buy from a competitor that focuses on commodity products.
Personally I'm pleased that Apple is making their operating system the way they do. If Apple changed to suit your priorities, that would come at the expense of my priorities.
This is exactly the position I take. I love Macbook Pros and I'll buy nothing else as far as laptops go. The integration of MacOS, the hardware, and the rest of the Apple ecosystem is hard to beat in many ways.
I can afford them, they're extremely reliable, high quality and most of the issues people complain about are overblown (I don't mind the Touch Bar at all, and the keyboard is just fine - you get used to it).
I'm actually not against the way Apple is making their operating system. My point is just that it's not so simple to buy an equivalent product from a different manufacturer.
"Poorly-designed" seems to be the sort of thing that is incredibly subjective, and often declared with little objective truth. Even this stage light ribbon thing -- does anyone have any empirical numbers showing it's an actual problem? An anecdote is not data, and for any large scale manufacturing they generally test it for some huge number of activations/swings/opens/whatever before going with a design.
I don't want to be an Apple apologist -- their current laptops, one of which I purchased one week ago well into this stage light fiasco, are grossly overpriced (and AppleCare+ basically seems mandatory, so that was another $400 on my bill) and I wish they were more upgradable, but at the same time as much as we bemoan non-upgradability in practice extraordinarily few ever upgrade anything. At all. They just get their next laptop.
Poorly designed because there were large number of similar problems and they were not fixed in the 2017 and 2018 iteration. It is not subjective, but objective truth. And it isn't just about the hinge.
Prior errors, even if we accept that, doesn't make every incident evidence of poor design.
I'm saying that the evidence of this "flexgate" being a design flaw is incredibly suspect. And it's worth noting that soldered in memory, hard drives, and heavy integration likely improves the long term reliability of those connections, in the same way that a display-connected ribbon cable removes one more point of potential issues (yet another connector interface).
Having said that, I absolutely think that Apple should offer a three year manufacturing defects warranty to all purchases, and their one year warranty (geared to push AppleCare+ which is priced primarily to cover the accidental damage coverage) is ridiculous for a high-end piece of hardware.
Older Macbook Pro were better but still have their issues. I have an A1278 MBP that sleeps spontaneously all the time because, in the palm rest by the HDD bracket, either the Hall effect sensor wore out or the bar above it (ferrous metal or magnet; magnets are around the screen) became too magnetized. Also, the screen hinges must be loosening or self-polishing, so the screen is getting floppier. I'll try tightening the set screws and maybe even Loctite them. https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup