> Genius Bar nearby where it’s not unusual to get free out of warranty repairs for things that aren’t your fault.

Is this sarcasm? You can pick basically any video on Rossman's channel and come across a case where Genius Bar either refused to repair a known device defect (without charging the customer for a logic board replacement), or botched a repair. Genius Bar is the last place you should take your Apple device for repairs.

Apple customer support's only advantage is that it actually exists.

Cherrypicking a few videos from a random YouTuber (Rossman has whatever credibility you choose to ascribe to him; at the end of the day he is just an independent repairman) also does nothing to tell the full story. Don't Genius Bars deal with thousands of cases every day? Simple probability shows that at least some of those cases should end with unhappy customers. It doesn't automatically mean that those customers would have had better experience elsewhere, and certainly doesn't mean that the customer support is bad.

> Apple customer support's only advantage is that it actually exists.

Sometimes showing up to the race is all you need to do to win.

Well, it’s happened to me so...

What? It's been extraordinary rare to even get a geniouse to fix a laptop for me at all. They wanted $800 to fix an issue I repaired myself for $10 with a keyboard ribbon.

They have tried leveraging and taking advantage of my elderly mother on several occasions.

I'm often unsatisfied by apple and avoid them when I can. LG Gram is such a better computer imho.

Would generally agree but the previous generation of MacBook Pro were complete garbage, primarily due to the keyboard and rubbish thermal design. Have been using Mac since they went with Intel and never experienced such a poor quality product.

Phones though have tended to last many years with few defects apart from physical damage. YMMV though of course.