I ended up working there through a different route and bought a 2010 13” MBP that served me perfectly for four years before I sold it for an impressive amount of cash to buy a 2014 15” which was also flawless.
I might be unlucky, but I can't count on my two hands how many times did my 2019 MacBook Pro become unresponsive (and occasionally it restarted itself... After being unresponsive for 10 minutes). It's a work laptop and there is some admin software on it (afaik), so that might influence my experience... But after a year of use, I still sometimes feel the need to defenestrate it...
My favorite bit is that after a restart sometimes it gives me a screen where I can't change the keyboard layout.. and I can't type my password because of the special characters I use. So, I just restart again and hope I get a login screen with the keyboard layout change possible. (And yes I have changed the default layout multiple times, but it always switches back to some other default)
I see people in this thread complaining that Linux distros are unreliable, but my Linux machines don't do things like beachball for 20s at a time or have complete audio system crashes requiring reboot twice a week. (Always right before a videoconference! I missed fifteen minutes of a call last week scrambling to fetch another device because the audio subsystem died and the Mac decided it had to install updates for a half hour when it rebooted.)
It's not uncommon to see uptimes on my ThinkPads measured in months. The Mac? At least it boots fast. I have to restart it once or twice a week.
Reliability aside -- and I realize that everyone values ergonomic factors differently -- Linux is just a better choice in every regard for me and the kind of work that I do. Interactive performance is much better, the docker-based workflows everyone's using are so much faster when they're native, and there's no mismatch between Darwin's BSD userland and the Ubuntu/CentOS you're probably using in prod.
I’ve been using Macs since 1984. They’re not perfect, but throughout that time, they have demonstrated over and over again that they are the least horrible hardware/os platform that I have used. Some years are better, but all years have been better on macOS than any other hardware platform I have experience with.
My verdict is: the hardware is usually GREAT but MacOS isn't. It bothered me when I quit the platform ages ago, and it is still bothering me now: little I care about has changed or improved. New annoyances though!
In aggregate I'd say I've spent ca. 15 hours staring at the beachball. Intrusive admin software has been a problem in the past for sure -- especially at Google -- but I've bought dozens of these for home use as well. Either 90% of their units are defective or we're using our computers very differently.
Terrible keyboards are another thing entirely, Lenovo went through a bout of that with the X1. My gripes about Macs are almost entirely about OSX performance/reliability and command-line habitability: version over version, it almost never improves. For my workflows
... so a bit more commonplace than "defective unit" or "admin software".
It’s pretty bad when you show everyone enthusiastically that when you open your MacBook it wakes up immediately and actually works. They think you’re insane rather than a former Linux user who has programmed irrational fear that the AMD mobile GPU drivers are going to cause a panic.