They made a design flaw (too short flex cable for monitor) on some laptops but only offered extended warranty fixes to the less expensive versions of that laptop.

Apple is not the champion you think it is.

Also they made their phone have random errors and slowness if you replaced the camera module with no error message so that you would blame the tech shop you got it repaired at for "breaking it".

At least within the eco system, Apple aren’t going to push ads onto your computer.

The dichotomy isn’t Apple vs PC anymore. It’s walled garden vs freedom. If you’re going to choose a walled garden, Apple sure is the nicest. If you want to own your hardware you need to start supporting the smaller players.

They too bundle useless apps like News, Stock, etc. even if you don't want it or will ever use it on every Apple device.

You can delete most iOS apps: Stocks, News, Mail, Safari are all removable. Also they are not ads and can actually do something useful. MacOS is also ad free.

While I agree that Apple is much better than others in not bundling adware with their product (the exception being App Store, which is also an advertising platform for them) they do bundle many apps with their device. And bundling is also a kind of advertisement / promotion. And on ios you can't remove some of these apps but only hide them.

I don't believe Apple will pushing ads, but their laptop can't run OS other than macOS. So if they do harmful thing for macOS, there's no way to escape with same hardware, until Linux hackers make it possible to run Desktop Linux.

^ Absolutely not true.

I even got Linux running on an decade old 12in PowerBook G4.

There is even a browser made for PowerPC, although the name escapes me.

Do you know what's happened on M1 Mac?

Linux is being ported to M1: https://asahilinux.org/

I run Linux on my Macbook Pro 2013.

> they can actually recognize bugs and acknowledge them

Unless it’s a hardware flaw and then they will usually ignore it until it looks like they may be legally compelled not to.

GPU failures, display flex cable issues, insufficient heat dissipation, the fact that the 16” MBP GPU pulls 100% power when connected to an external display, the fucking butterfly keyboard.

Don’t get me wrong I like my MacBook as much as the next guy, but if there is a hardware problem in a MacBook you’ll be lucky if they even acknowledge it.

But because the hardware is proprietary, the length of that simpler tail still depends entirely on Apple's willingness to support it's legacy products.

This is true — and if you look at the history, it tends to support the person you replied to. They tend to support consumer hardware at least as long as most enterprise lines.

Apple’s policy is to support all hardware models for at least 5 years, 7 in some jurisdictions.

Considering that ten year old computers are still usable today, it means that the supported lifetime of Apple hardware is half of what it could be.

And it's not just the computer itself but the whole ecosystem that gets the boot periodically. Last year I built a Linux-based 24 track digital studio on the cheap by buying Firewire soundcards that no longer worked on the latest Macs. Great hardware that otherwise still worked perfectly.

It’s more that Apple is striking a balance between a reasonable hardware support timeframe and moving their software platforms forward with at a certain velocity without excessive legacy baggage.

Waste is a legitimate concern and Apple has very convenient trade-in and recycling programs to address that.

We wouldn't have to recycle as much if it was easier to reuse the machines in the first place. It's still planned obsolescence.

I consider it an extremely visible advantage.