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>Even failure within the warranty period is acceptable in the consumer market because integrators have it down to a science exhausting people on the customer support side. Long phone queue times, incompetent support agents who have to transfer you to different agents and likely drop the call entirely, silly policies like requiring a reformat/OS reinstall for everything, and so on.

This is one reason why I believe Apple computers last much longer than Windows computers. With Apple, they only sell a few models in high volume. So if there's an issue, everyone will know about it and Apple will often have to do a mass recall or provide free repairs. And since Apple prices are higher, you'd assume that they use better-grade parts on average.

i only had apple devices fail in my hands. all with video memory corruption. never had a hardware failure when the company used Lenovo (ibm era)

> So if there's an issue, everyone will know about it and Apple will often have to do a mass recall or provide free repairs.

I wouldn't say Apple is any better than anyone else - aging iPhone batteries and butterfly keyboards both had a class action lawsuit settlement, it wasn't out of good PR that these got addressed. I suppose you are right that everyone will know about them, though, given that those were from memory.

>I wouldn't say Apple is any better than anyone else - aging iPhone batteries and butterfly keyboards both had a class action lawsuit settlement, it wasn't out of good PR that these got addressed. I suppose you are right that everyone will know about them, though, given that those were from memory.

That's the point. If 5% of PSUs failed inside a Dell computer just outside of warranty, no one would care except those affected. If the same thing happened on a Mac, you'd get a media storm and a class-action lawsuit and Apple will eventually settle by giving out repairs - even if the failure happened outside of warranty.

I did get a free battery replacement for my iPhone 6S.

Buying from an OEM certainly doesn’t come with any guarantees. It’s a price/quality contract in almost all cases though. The OEM defines an acceptable defectivity rate in their contract (even if allowed DPM if high). This effectively establishes a requirement at the supplier to ensure they will meet it.

For consumer products, you can assume that this added requirement doesn’t exist.

Edit: as another example, it’s well known among hardware suppliers that being a supplier to Apple can be a double edged sword for this reason. They have very high quality expectations and they squeeze extremely hard on price. But for that, they bring high volumes. If your company doesn’t have their stuff together, they can easily get raked over the coals in Apple contracts.

> ...Dell, HP, and the like are under so much pressure to cut margins that they'll go with whoever is cheapest, and customers almost never escalate things to tort.

Can confirm. Have an office supplied HP business desktop. One day noticed that my system is slower than normal. After 5 minutes with smartctl, I found out that the SSD was constantly throttling down SATA link (SATA downshift), was not reading or writing more than ~250 MBps, and had some wonky latency issues.

Got a new SSD, moved the drive with dd, and all my problems are solved. Previous drive was by Samsung, but it was a "value" drive which even Google knew nothing about. It was probably built with bottom of the barrel parts, and something went bad earlier than expected.

> Even failure within the warranty period is acceptable in the consumer market because integrators have it down to a science exhausting people on the customer support side.

This has been true for at least decades. It's why I completely ignore all warranties when I'm deciding what to purchase -- they tend to be essentially worthless, once you factor in the cost of trying to make a warranty claim.