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Comment by tuxone | Hacker News Reader

I know it's just my experience, but it looks like this thread (as the article) is all about personal experiences.

I had four time the same issue with a MBP 2011, the HDD cable was failing again ad again. First time they replaced it, next time they replaced the cable plus the HDD, third time they replaced cable plus logicboard, fourth I got a new MBP 2013. All for free, without Apple Care. Every time I got my laptop back in less than 4 business days (also the replacement unit, I received it at home even before they had picked the old one).

This is true heaven if compared to my nightmarish experiences with DELL, ASUS or ACER (as a private customer, not business).

About the repeated MBP issue, I blamed my way of carrying it around (with a passport bag) and the fact that the cable was directly in close contact with the unibody shell.

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HW design, that fails 3 times in a row in the same place (and ultimately even destroys the logic board - probably because of the short on the exposed cable wiring), and the service that fails to prevent that, I'd hardly call a "true heaven". It's terrible.

Say, they failed to make the cable protected enough in the initial design. During the first service, they should just not replace the cable, they should also add the protection, so that the issue doesn't happen again for that customer.

If you google around, you'll see that this is a known problem and some people were even modding their MBPs proactively, to avoid this specific cable issue, caused by wrong design, to happen at inappropriate time.

Do you know how many Dells, Acers, and Asus laptops have known problems that affect the vast majority of units but will still take shipping your computer on your dime and being without for weeks at a time?

My mother can afford a Macbook, I've told her this, but she insists on buying cheap Dells on sale.

In 3 years she's gone through 3 200-300$ Dells. Every time they break Dell comes back with some untenable repair arrangement and off she goes.

She could have bought a used Macbook Pro 3 years ago, and today it'd be worth more than all of those Dells put together, and odds are it'd be in working condition unlike the 3rd one which she's telling me is picking up a flickering screen issue.

If something broke she could go to the Apple store and get it fixed within a couple of days. Even out of warranty she'd be better off than Dell out of warranty, which is like Apple's out of warranty support... except more expensive and slower.

Are you seriously comparing MBP to a $200-300 laptops?

Expensive laptops have the same exact known issues.

My last windows laptop, the HP Spectre x360, was about as much as a MBP had a track record of failing motherboards.

My old Zenbook, also in MBP pricing range was known to have the hinge fail.

You're making the same mistake that my mother makes, assuming a "dollar's worth" of laptop is fungible.

If you spend 400$ on a laptop, it's not enough that it only be at least 1/3rd as reliable as a 1200$ Macbook Pro. Every time a laptop fails there's a cost outside of just getting a new laptop, like transferring all your stuff, not having a laptop, etc.

Then don’t do that (tm). I wouldn’t go near any Windows manufacturers consumer line of computers. They are full of crap ware and have horrible support.

I have had no problem with Dell’s business laptops. Barring buying from the business line, I buy computers from the Microsoft Store.

Business laptops aren't immune from known issues.

Off the top of my head over the years I remember common LCD issues and GPU failures.

Every manufacturer has these problems, the difference is Dell releases something like 10 new Latitudes all with different model numbers and designations every year, so to find the common issues you search Dell latitude + your specific model.

With Apple there's 2 lines, with similar names. When there's an issue, everyone knows about it, it's easily searched and more importantly, easier to cover in a story. "The Macbook has tons of issues" gets reads. "The Dell Latitude 7490 has tons of LCD issues" gets... people who own Dell Latitude 7490, maybe. The former reads like a major story, the latter reads like a warranty announcement or something.

Every time only the flat cable was faulty (in fact I could always boot the HDD from usb with an adapter). They replaced the other components because they were thinking that those were damaging the cable.

Design flaw happens and Apple relatively quickly sorted it out. On the other hand, I will never forget Acer's screen hinges and how we were supposed to fix them [0]

[0] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Uhe4i2yLFTY/maxresdefault.jpg

I had great experiences with their device support. Replacements, repairs, their folks seem to err on the side of cover the claim rather than deny the claim when the cause of the problem seems ambiguous. I don't have a complaint about support yet, but I can tell my keyboard on my current-gen macbook pro is going to start failing soon (the semicolon key no longer clicks when pressed, the tab key is inconsistent) and from what I've heard from others is that it will require turning my laptop in and waiting days or weeks until it gets fixed. This is a company machine and I can't simply "not work" for 3+ days because I'm waiting on Apple HQ to blow dust out of my keyboard.

Instead of taking it in, I'm looking at usb-c adapters so that I can plug in my external kb and use that instead. The _vast_ majority of engineers at my company uses some kind of external keyboard on these machines.

Your company doesn't have a backup machine you can work on for a few days? Even if you are a one person shop, you should have some sort of plan for hardware failure.

The majority of our company, especially on the engineering side, is remote employees. Honestly not a bad idea to ensure there is an employee hardware failure plan in place.

Hard drive cables are a known issue in 2010/2011 MBPs. They were once acknowledged by Apple and replaced for free, but not anymore...

Luckily they cost $10 on Amazon and can be replaced in 10 minutes with a small phillips screwdriver. I managed my school's computer repair room for IT and replaced at least a hundred of these cables while I was in school.

Nah, it wasn't you. Those cables are a very common failure. We keep them in stock at our (not apple) computer store.

Normally it's just the cable. Sometimes it's the cable and the OS needs a reload (because whatever goes wrong with the cable causes the drive itself to get corrupted, but not actually physically fail).

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