Do you even read what you link? 12 year old laptop is excluded from that study which is BS anyway because of numerous Macbook issues with keyboard, flex cable, backlight, cracked screen, non-working palm rejection, etc.
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Macbook Air M1 logic board failure
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Do you even read what you link? 12 year old laptop is excluded from that study which is BS anyway because of numerous Macbook issues with keyboard, flex cable, backlight, cracked screen, non-working palm rejection, etc.
I most certainly did. That survey compares brands for the overall percentage of laptops that needed repairs, among laptops five years older or less, which *includes* any issues with keyboards, cables, screens, etc. And after accounting for *all* of those, they found Mac and LG laptops have the *lowest* failure rates.
Plus Consumer Reports rejects *all* advertising, to ensure it remains completely independent of all commercial pressures.
So the only thing that is BS here is your heavy-handed attempt to mischaracterize the survey.
And yes, it doesn't compare failure rates for a 12-year period, but if a brand is less likely to make it to 5 years, it's probably also less likely to make it to 12. Besides, 12 years is irrelevant to what's being discussed here, which is a failure at 2 years.
The bottom line is this: All laptops are somewhat unreliable, Apple's included. That's why I urge everyone to get AppleCare+. But, as far as actual failure rates go, Apple and LG are currently the best. When you claim Apple is instead less reliable than other brands, you are doing it both without evidence, and contrary to the evidence that does exist.
As you said:
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BS besides the fact that LG PC is virtually non-existent. 52 pages of M1 MBA cracked screen with class action which is just one of several known issues.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252794122?answerId=255634544022&page=52
https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/16/class-action-lawsuit-screen-cracks/
Useless advice since it doesn't cover this screen defect.
Those types of failures, as with all other reliability problems, are already built into the numbers collected by Consumer Reports! How do you not understand this?
For instance, during the 21-22 NBA regular season, the Phoenix Suns had the highest winning percentage (78%) with 64 wins and 18 losses. It's as if you want to argue against this by saying: No, that can't be the case, because the Suns lost game 1 to Denver, game 3 to Portland, game 4 to Sacramento, game 23 to Golden State, etc., etc.
Yes, the Suns lost all those games. But that doesn't mean the Suns weren't no.1 in regular season winning percentage because, while they did lose 18 games, the other teams lost *an even higher percentage* of games.
Likewise, whatever issues were experienced by Apple laptop owners, the rates at which issues were experienced by owners of other laptop brands were *even higher*.
I don't mind hearing criticism of Apple. I often do it myself, and there are certainly areas in which they deserve it. But how about criticizing them for what they actually are bad at, as opposed to acting in bad faith and routinely criticizing them for entertainment, regardless of whether they deserve it or not, which is what you seem to have been doing consistently on these forums?
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Then why don't you? You've shown absoutely no ability to handle the facts I've presented.
AC+ was mentioned in the context of logic board and SSD failure. It covers that.
Of course Apple is among the most reliable manufacturers of laptops. The issue is with comparing Apple hardware that costs quite much to laptop manufacturers that have a dozen different model from the cheapest Chromebook to consumer series crap like the Inspiron series all the way up to something like a Carbon X1 that can easily compete with Apple.
Apple simply doesn't have any cheap trashy computer hardware that could bog down the overall rating, except for that 12" Macbook. If we just compared reliability of business series like Thinkpads from the T and X series, they should be about as reliable as Apple's hardware.
Comparing Macbooks to the average Windows laptop that starts falling apart after 2-5 years is not a fair comparison (yes 2 years, I think those were Sony Vaios from a decade ago, absolutely trash). It would be more interesting to see how Apple does vs. equally expensive laptops.
Also, what's up with LG being number two? I had no idea they even make laptops, never seen one in the wild either.
And in regard to defects like displays breaking, I have seen Windows laptop issues equally bad. I had a high-end Latitude once that I returned to the seller about half a dozen times for coil while that was so loud you couldn't work without headphones on. Every single brand new unopened unit showed the same issue. Ended up with a Thinkpad then, even though I prefer Latitudes. On my 7250 the palm rest simply broke in half for no reason, it mostly sat on a desk in the office.
I honestly have more faith in the long-term reliability of the soldered-down Macbooks, at least they're built like tanks and while I see some people report their screens breaking for no reason, my Mac is with me daily and suffers quite the abuse and none of my about a dozen Macbooks ever had their screen break or any other issue with the build quality.
Apple simply doesn't have any cheap trashy computer hardware that could bog down the overall rating, except for that 12" Macbook. If we just compared reliability of business series like Thinkpads from the T and X series, they should be about as reliable as Apple's hardware.
Comparing Macbooks to the average Windows laptop that starts falling apart after 2-5 years is not a fair comparison (yes 2 years, I think those were Sony Vaios from a decade ago, absolutely trash). It would be more interesting to see how Apple does vs. equally expensive laptops.
Also, what's up with LG being number two? I had no idea they even make laptops, never seen one in the wild either.
And in regard to defects like displays breaking, I have seen Windows laptop issues equally bad. I had a high-end Latitude once that I returned to the seller about half a dozen times for coil while that was so loud you couldn't work without headphones on. Every single brand new unopened unit showed the same issue. Ended up with a Thinkpad then, even though I prefer Latitudes. On my 7250 the palm rest simply broke in half for no reason, it mostly sat on a desk in the office.
I honestly have more faith in the long-term reliability of the soldered-down Macbooks, at least they're built like tanks and while I see some people report their screens breaking for no reason, my Mac is with me daily and suffers quite the abuse and none of my about a dozen Macbooks ever had their screen break or any other issue with the build quality.
That's an intersting point. But often the fancier stuff isn't necessarily more reliable. For instance, Consumer Reports also ranks car brands for reliability. Out of the 28 in their survey, while Lexus is #1, BMW is 17 and Mercedes is 23. So I don't know how the higher-end laptops from other manufacturers would fare.
Given how unreliable laptops in general are, how expensive Apple laptops are to repair, and how great AppleCare+ is, you should really see the "true" price of an Apple laptop as not what you pay for it, but as that plus AppleCare+.
They're not #2, they're tied with Apple for #1. And LG makes the Gram line of laptops. They can be purchased from Best Buy, but I don't know if they display them at their stores. The 16" is the same price as the 13" M1 Air with same RAM & SSD sizes. Never seen it in person either, but it's super-light (the 16" is about the same weight as the Air), and has great battery life. OTOH, the fan is reportedly loud (not surprising given Intel CPU + thin form factor) and the screen is not as sharp as the Air's (though that matters less with Windows). The CPU performance is lower ST (1520 vs. 1710 on Geekbench) and higher MT (8150 vs. 7240) (vs. the M1 Air). No idea about the feel of the KB or trackpad.
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In reply to a post I made above, leman wrote:
"How is this different from any other computer that uses SSDs? Already with HDDs recovery is practically impossible (unless you are willing to pay a hefty price to a specialist)."
The difference is:
With an m-series Mac, if the internal drive fails, the computer becomes completely unusable.
It can't be booted, even from a "known-bootable" external drive.
With an earlier Mac (may or may not include Intel Macs that use a t2 chip), even if the internal drive fails, you can still connect a bootable EXTERNAL drive and make the computer run.
You can't do that with an m-series Mac. If the internal SSD fails, the computer is absolutely, positively, non-bootable and non-usable until the motherboard is replaced.
"How is this different from any other computer that uses SSDs? Already with HDDs recovery is practically impossible (unless you are willing to pay a hefty price to a specialist)."
The difference is:
With an m-series Mac, if the internal drive fails, the computer becomes completely unusable.
It can't be booted, even from a "known-bootable" external drive.
With an earlier Mac (may or may not include Intel Macs that use a t2 chip), even if the internal drive fails, you can still connect a bootable EXTERNAL drive and make the computer run.
You can't do that with an m-series Mac. If the internal SSD fails, the computer is absolutely, positively, non-bootable and non-usable until the motherboard is replaced.
This is true. Please do note though that I made that comment in the context of data recovery only. I certainly agree that blocking the computer from booting if the internal SSD is non-functional goes a bit too far. Not everyone has a service shop immediately available.
Comparing computers to cars can't be useful, German cars are known to have mediocre motors that fail early, VW Group for example is notorious in that regard. Japan on the other hand is among the more reliable brands. This is all well known and I don't see any parallels between motors and laptop components.
I have had multiple Macbooks with Applecare, yet never had any issue that was even covered by it. From my point of view Applecare+ is nice for the convenience (although with Macs express replacement is off the table, so not that convenient...) and for the insurance if you are prone to damaging your devices. Otherwise all the issues I ever had were either outside the 3 year window, for example I had to replace swelled up batteries a couple times, or were covered by separate repair programs (I had multiple staingate displays).
Yes Applecare is great - for Apple's bottom line. Obviously Apple designs their laptops in a way that most of them will not see a single Applecare hardware defect warranty claim in the first three years. They design the warranty extension in a way where they know for a fact on average they will make a profit. Sure there will be the unlucky customer with a lemon device that breaks multiple times and they vow to never buy from Apple again.
For more expensive Macbook models I certainly agree with you - why anyone spends 3k+ on a decked out 14" or 16" M1 Max and then doesn't have the money for the warranty extension doesn't make sense to me. But when I get a 14" base model for 1599 or what the sale was, the warranty extension alone is about a fifth of the price of the Mac. No thanks...
That can't be right. I did hear of the Gram line before and looked it up now, apparently build quality is mediocre, displays are hit and miss, some have strong glare/reflections, and I probably wouldn't want one even if it was free. I very highly doubt these things can hold a candle to the Thinkpad X-Series (or Macbooks of course) for daily work, and reliability as well.
Apparently the best rated one is the LG Gram 16 where reviews complain about the very glossy screen that's barely usable with 330 nits, the apparently unusual keyboard layout that needs getting used to, as well as the CPU throttling under sustained loads.
That makes this report totally skewed as nobody who is looking for a laptop to get actual work done would consider this. People who buy these will very likely never have used a business laptop or a Macbook. So while it certainly will be better than bottom of the barrel Acer-style trash, they might rate it better just because it doesn't have major issues out of the box - although I consider 330 nits and throttling despite active cooling major issues.
To give you an example for how flawed this reporting seems to me, a colleague who always had Macbooks wanted something different because of monetary problems, I recommended a Latitude 7xxx series which is a high-end business laptop tier. Ended up sending it back as faulty because he thought the coil whine was an indication of faulty hardware. He had never even heard of coil-whine.
This reliability report would need to account for the totally different expectations of the group that buys Macbooks and the group that buys LG Grams.
You were making a general argument that it's unfair to compare the reliabiity of a luxury brand to one that has a range of products: "Apple simply doesn't have any cheap trashy computer hardware that could bog down the overall rating," so the car analogy was both relevant and a direct counter to this. I.e., your argument wasn't based on specifics about computers, it was a general argument based on a high end brand vs. one that sold stuff of a range of different qualities, and was thus open to a general counterargument.
Your personal experience is completely anecdotal and thus irrelevant to the question at hand, which is about probabilities and averages. And the same applies to my personal experience: I owned 2008, 2011, and 2014 15" MacBook Pros, and had complete failures on all three just before the end of the warranty period (all of which were completely covered by AppleCare). By the same token, my individual experience likewise tells you essentially nothing about the overall averages.
You can't say anything—let me repeat that: ANYTHING—about the average failure rates of any brand of laptop by looking at a mere handful of samples. You need to look at a large enough sample size for the results to be sufficiently unlikely to merely be products of random chance.
[The exception would be if you could identify a specific type of design flaw that is already known to fail prematurely. That could be done from a single production sample.]
Again, your personal opinion about what the failure rates should be is irrelevant to the what they actually are. If you want to level legitimate criticisms at the results of the survey, then you need to examine its methodology and say why whether you think it's valid, and back up your arguments with scientific rigor. And maybe there are problems with the survey; like everything, I'm sure it had flaws. The question is how significant they are.
Further, you're conflating reliability and performance. The survey is purely about reliability, since that was the question at hand. It says nothing whatsoever about whether the laptops perform well. It's about whether they break.
And I'm still waiting for you to provide support for this claim, from a prior post:
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This is the way to protect yourself. Don't have all your data stored just on the Apple Silicon device as that's a single point of failure. Best to have a secondary backup you can fallback to if your Apple device dies, is stolen, or is confiscated.
I am not sure I am - I am saying that the people who buy a Gram kind of laptop in the first place are consumers that use it for simple things as browsing. And they have completely different thoughts about what constitutes reliability, which I tried to show by the example that I'd consider a device with coil whine defective out of the box, which will seem ridiculous to some people who are happy if the laptop doesn't fall apart on its own in short order.
To further complicate this, someone who buys a Gram type of device might not use it for intense work, or even their actual work to make a living. I had two identical Acer models ages ago that would both reproducibly hang requiring a forced shutdown when a USB ethernet adapter was plugged in (any chipset did the trick) - but only if you tried to move a couple dozen GB. Otherwise it was fine.
My argument here is that someone buying a more expensive Macbook is more likely to put it through its paces whereas cheaper consumer devices are more likely to sit idle most of the time.
In any case, I agree that I am basing my arguments on invalid anectdotal evidence - furthermore you are also right that I am probably wrong about the SSDs only being so fast because of the controller being contained within the SoC or closely to it. I'll try to do better and not pull arguments out of thin air.
That's a fair argument, but I don't think it's applicable here, since I'd expect the typical Mac and LG buyer in that survey to be similar:
1) The LG and Mac laptops are both premium-priced products, with average prices well over $1000. So their typical buyers are probably similar in their pickyness about quality details.
2) It's easy to forget this here on MR but, as with the likely typical LG buyer, most Mac users are casual users rather than power users, as evidenced by the fact that the most popular Mac is the Air. I.e., in terms of their use cases (as opposed to their affluence), most Mac buyers are just regular consumers who like the Mac because of its superior OS and really nice hardware
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If you saw that logic board you could guess why ) It's not like it was 20 or even 10 years ago.
Tend to agree as if any issue with a new MacBook it's basically a total loss. Personally, I've moved to the cheapest I can get away with as a direct result.
Overall, I think the current MacBooks are well designed and manufactured, equally as with all consumer products a number can and do fail prematurely. Sure, you can get AppleCare but seems like yet another excessive charge to the customer on top of any other inhouse upgrades...
OP was basically unlucky, equally doubt it would hurt Apple to extend its warranty period. For many the price of Mac's is simply souring and a 24 month if not 36-month warranty period would likely help to take the edge off. That said if sales keep rolling Apple will have no compunction to do so...
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Imo the problem is not the general reliability, but that small percentage when reliability went south, customers would have very little to no recourse as everything is soldered. So although there are higher probability that your Mac last longer, when they do break, it’s more painful than ever.
After 10 weeks of searching i found chip level repair expert, who fixed M1 logic board problem without any data loss and cost of repair was less than one third of apple service centre quoted.
A lot of countries in the world do enjoy at least a 2 year warranty with many products, including MacBooks etc... EU, UK, Australia and New Zealand just off the top of my head.
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Pity more didn't. 12 months is generally the minimum, some consumers are protected past 5 years. Companies are fully entitled to make profit as that's their purpose. That said not to the expense of the customer and Apple has a long history of avoidance & denial.
People still buy as there's no alternative if you want IOS/macOS, equally it's not a good look and hopefully Apple is changing and reversing errors of the past.
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Good news. Question what did you charge the Air with, the supplied charger or a 3rd party charger etc? Did the repair shop list what the failure was? Anything related to the Thunderbolt ports?After 10 weeks of searching i found chip level repair expert, who fixed M1 logic board problem without any data loss and cost of repair was less than one third of apple service centre quoted.
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Observed a few of these cases with the M1 Air & MBP and those that have documented there seems to be a relationship with the Thunderbolt ports failing taking the Mac down. I wonder if the users utilised 3rd party charging solutions. It could be as simple as that as although USB C charging seemingly standardised in my experience it's far from that with cables and power supplies yielding differing results.
I've had no issue on my side and always used the specific charger for the MBP.
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