Me too. Only one complaint. After I accidentally spilled a cup of water into it on an airplane, it didn't work.
(However AppleCare fixed it for $300 and I had a very recent backup. :) )
What’s more annoying is that I’d jus to get a new one and recycle this one, but the SSD is soldered on. Good on you for having a backup.
Do not own a Mac unless you bought it used or have AppleCare.
Never had AppleCare or any other extended warranty program.
Did just fine up to now.
As I've noted in a sibling comment, I'll probably stop purchasing mobile Macs until the repair story on Macbooks is improved -- the risk for accidents and repairs is simply much higher on portable machines. That's only going to happen through third-party repair (which I think would simultaneously lead Apple to lower their first-party repair costs, too).
1) a slight overall savings, though I'm not sure about that. 2) a lack of stress when something breaks. Even if there isn't an overall savings, for me it's been worth it because of that.
Certainly, my recent Mac repair would have cost $1500 and I only paid $300, and I think I've had the machine for about 3 years, so there's a savings there but considerably less recent stress. That's similar to the experience I've had all along, although this recent expense would have probably been my most-expensive repair ever.
I’ve underwritten my own Mac ownership since the very first Intel MacBook Pro and just like you I’ve been just fine.
Apple is putting raw NAND chips on the board (and yes soldering them) and the controller for the SSD is part of the M-series chip. Yes, apple could use NVMe here if you ignore the physical constraints and ignore fact that it wouldn't be quite as fast and ignore the fact that it would increase their BOM cost.
I'm not saying Apple is definitively correct here, but, it's good to have choice and Apple is the only company with this kind of deeply integrated design. If you want a fully modular laptop, go buy a framework (they are great too!) and if you want something semi-modular, go buy a ThinkPad (also great!).
I don't truly mind that they solder on the SSD, embed the controller into the processor -- you're right that it's great we have choice here. I mind the exuberant repair cost _on top of_ Apple's war on third party repair. Apple is the one preventing me to have choice here, I have to do the repair through them, or wait until schematics are smuggled out of China and used/broken logic boards are available so that the repair costs what it should: $300 to replace 2 chips on my logic board (still mostly labor, but totally a fair price).
I love Apple for their privacy focus and will continue to support them because I need to do Mac and iOS development, but I will likely stop buying mobile workstations from them for this reason, the risk of repair is simply much higher and not worth this situation.
Day to day I don't mind but when needs change or something breaks it's unfortunate to have to replace the whole machine to fix it.
And yeah, this incident reminded me of why it's important to back up as close to daily as you can, or even more often during periods when you're doing important work and want to be sure you have the intermediate steps.