Many people discussed the iPhone 3GS issues when upgraded to iOS 4 - when iOS 4 was NEW. You don't hear about it now, because the 3GS is 2 hardware versions older than the newest 4S and we're at iOS 5. If you don't hear it, I would venture complaining about 3GS phones just isn't interesting anymore, the performance issues have been accepted.

As far as the responses he received to the fan noise - fan noise like he described isn't normal. If the fan is running loud it's because the machine is hot and needs both fans running at high RPM. Something must be causing that because loud fans just aren't part of an Apple product(unless you're talking about a Power Mac G4 with the mirrored driver doors - those were LOUD - like airplane loud - but I digress).

I would characterize that response as normal. Since the machine shouldn't do that - my first question as well would be what are you doing on the machine? When it was pointed out that it was a Google spreadsheet in Safari I would go look at the CPU usage for Safari and see if it's pinned. If it is - it's a software issue. If it's not, it's a hardware issue.

There's no blame to be placed here without that key piece of data - this is standard troubleshooting. Is this blaming the user? No - it's understanding Apple's reputation for building solid products and the experiences of their users that this scenario is not normal, which is leading them to question what is different about the situation.

Overall it really seems like this was a viewpoint in search of a story, rather than an actual insight into something deeper about Apple's products.