The reliability of these products was sacrificed before a golden idol of Jony Ive on the altar of Thin. I find it interesting that this program is announced more or less at the same time he announced his formal retirement from Apple.

He did many fine designs for the company, but like any superstar, at some point they can do no wrong and it becomes impossible to criticize them within an organization.

This program has existed for over a year.

The year for which, according to WSJ, Mr Ive has "probably" not done any work for Apple.

... felt the need to quote "probably" because otherwise it will be missed in speed reading.

This was my experience. My battery was having issues and indicating service was needed, but they refused to only replace the top case since they claimed there was a "logic board failure" that caused my A and S keys to skip and repeat. It took hours of escalations and phone support to finally convince them to replace the affected parts, and of course we now know (and I always suspected) that it was never the logic board in the first place. Not sure where they came up with that conclusion originally.