I've actually heard the same sort of story with my dad, about his Apple products. AppleTV updates and such breaking such-and-such feature that he really likes, just random changes here and there changing the way he likes to do things.

Their quality control has become a little lax (they could improve consistency and testing surely), but I still think this kind of sob story is overblown. They're still better than about 90% of manufacturers out there in terms of usability and quality overall, and I think sometimes we get a little spoiled and forget that.

For example, my D-Link Wi-Fi base station makes me cringe every time I have to go into its configuration menus. It's quite literally their top-of-the-line piece of hardware, but it looks like the configuration was designed by a teenager who just took an HTML class in 1998.

On top of that, it drops the connection constantly and sometimes needs to be restarted just because it stops working entirely. This was a replacement for an Apple AirPort Extreme that my roommate took with him, and I thought "Oh this will be good enough, it's half the price," and surely I've spent more in time and frustration dealing with it than that money was worth to me. I completely took it for granted that the AirPort just worked, for 3 years straight, without me even having to think about it.

Lesson be learned: Apple has us generally spoiled, so that we expect perfection. That's a tough spot to be in if anything goes wrong (and sometimes it does), but let's not forget how good we have it most of the time.