2009 - 2012 would be the period where nVidia had badly-soldered GPUs affecting everyone's laptops, this was an expensive repair period for many manufacturers. Air bubbles in the solder would eventually disrupt the electrical flow, I think it was just the one year of devices but a year or so passed before anyone was affected.

https://codingfreak.blogspot.com/2009/04/beware-of-nvidia-gr...

Then in 2013 Apple started soldering/joining everything which made all the repairs more expensive.

Then in 2016 Apple had to start paying for the artificially expensive repairs themselves because of the butterfly keyboard fiasco, popping speakers, broken display cables etc.

They probably really have lost money but they don't mention it's their own fault and at this point it's really just tied to the free keyboard replacement program which ends in 1 - 2 years for the worst-affected models.

It wasn't just Nvidia GPUs. The early 2011 MBP failures all had ATI GPUs.

Do their "costs" include warranty repairs?

Do their “costs” include overpriced parts destined to move money offshore? For example in the film industry, it is common to promise actors a share of benefits, then create a subsidiary for the movie, charge it insane amounts for the producing company’s services (brand, distribution), so that the movie may be a loss even if its revenue is 3 times the production costs. Of course the head company deserves to be paid, but discussing how much a service or a part is worth, beyond its marginal manufacturing price, is the whole question.

At our office all of the macbooks have had to go back multiple times this year because of broken keyboards. And because of the way apple designs their laptops this means binning most of the laptop to fix a faulty key.

They are probably losing money on the services provided by Apple Care, but making money on regular repairs.

Honest question as an owner of a current iPad with an active Apple Care subscription on it. What services do you actually get from Apple Care? My last Macbook did not have apple care and was like 6 years old, and I would still go into the Apple store and they would reinstall my OS from scratch for free. The only real perks I see from Apple Care is that it only costs you like $70 to get a broken part repaired instead of like $500 in the case of the screen/digitizer.

AppleCare+ now covers accidental damage. It's very expensive, but repairs without it are even more so.

My wife's 13" MBP was destroyed by a 6oz coffee (while closed). That was a $3k mistake. If I had AppleCare+, it would have been 'repaired' for a total cost of $700.