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.
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.