That being said, Windows 10 cannot be in the business of "ship and keep calm", due to the number of businesses and governments relying on Windows.

Mac fans have defended Apple saying that "QA is expansive and they can't afford it", as if Apple is some low budget indie app developer in an incubator and not this trillion dollar goliath with insane margins.

Being a QA is the most thankless way of making the world better imaginable.

As a fellow dev, you might be getting ahead of yourself. I think there are plenty more professions that go thankless and that are actually making the world a better place.

I hope this doesn't offend you but the thankless garbage men or street cleaners on my neighborhood have a bigger impact on my life than the people who do QA on the apps I use on a daily basis.

If github, slack and outlook stop working I basically have that time off and go outside for a coffee. If my garbagemen stop picking up my smelly garbage, then I'm gonna have a pretty bad day.

Again, no offense, just stating the facts.

In every Linux thread on HN, macOS fans seem to disregard the fact that Linux has to support so many more hardware configs entirely. In fact they'd compare the experience of them installing Ubuntu on a $300 Best Buy laptop they got for $150 on Black Friday and wonder why the experience isn't up to par compared to their 2019 decked out $3000 MBP.

They do try... for instance I’ve heard the reason they always charge more for RAM is labor costs from running additional tests to fail chips other companies ship.

Which is false. Apple uses the same off the shelf DRAM chips from established manufacturers found in any PC/Phone/Laptop.

Unlike Flash storage, there is really not really bad performing DRAM per-se, just defective, And apple is no guarantee of free from defects with RAM fault in MACs being as common as in the rest of the PC industry.

The extra price is just the Apple tax.

That doesn't mean parts with some defects don't sneak into the final products but the rate is low enough that testing each chip you receive is not monetary feasible for consumer products so you just test the final assembled product to a degree, but even then, brand new Apple products are no strangers to having their mainboards replaced for a defective chip in the warranty period. Just ask Luis Rossmann or people working at the genius bar. That's why everyone recommends you get Apple care.

So the theory that Apple thoroughly tests each chip that goes in their products is false. It would be too expensive and eat into their fat margins.

What you do test, is samples from each batch you receive, to make sure your supplier did not pull a bait and switch and replaced your contracted parts with lower quality ones under the same part number and hope you would not notice but this is more common on low margin parts and Chinese suppliers are notorious for this since for them it's just regular business practice and see nothing wrong with it.

Source: my career as a hardware engineer.

We do BYOD on phones, so don’t have data there.

A friend of mine was once stationed in a jungle in South America. Most laptops couldn’t handle the humidity there. His IBM Thinkpad was the only one that held up.