I think rising Mac sales are masking the problems for Apple.

From Apple's perspective, rising sales demonstrates that the criticisms are coming from a tiny discontented minority.

From my perspective, sales may be rising for many reasons, but these criticism don't bode well for the future. All these new Mac users will face the same problems, and that will slow replacement rate.

But they will know what the statistics are for returned faulty hardware. If the reliability rate is as bad as implied then I can't imagine them ignoring it.