[rvz]

So after all the hype that I have heard about the Apple Silicon computers, it seems like it takes a screen crack to make it useless and issue a repair cost of almost the price of a new one.

Especially when as soon as the computer fails to boot or stops working, you have lost all data on the computer as the data cannot be recovered.

Sounds like a total scam. Glad I never bought one on launch day.

[z9znz]

Obviously there is a defect problem affecting some of the new Macbooks, and Apple needs to step up and take responsibility. But that said, I personally think the Apple Silicon computers (the Air in particular) are worthy of the hype.

This 1 year old M1 Air with 16GB RAM is twice as fast as my colleagues' Intel MBPs (comparing same year devices), and it's _silent_. It rarely even gets warm, even with Docker, several containers, JetBrains IDEs, Spotify, Firefox with a million tabs, etc. all going.

> the data cannot be recovered

For most HN readers, not having an adequate active backup/cloud sync system is difficult to imagine. When you can transfer about 1GB/s to a modern fast solid state external drive, plus we mostly have fast internet, it's easy to have live and periodic physical and remote backups.

If there's a scam to be found, it's that Apple has a real problem affecting more than a few users, but they are denying it. The scam is not in the computer but in the warranty/repair practices.

[rxhernandez]

Wasn't worth the hype for me at all. My m1 MBP might have better performance than my x1 carbon but my x1 walks all over the m1 in terms of software I can install thoughtlessly. I tried for months to get parallels + Ubuntu to do everything I needed it do to but I had to switch back to the x1 (which I could reformat today and have my productivity be the same within an hour); what a waste of time and money.

[2muchcoffeeman]

To be fair, if you really want to run Linux, why are you getting a MacBook? Plenty of better machines for that (with different trade offs) that are better suited to Linux.

[z9znz]

I'm 30% tempted to give Linux a full time try again, this time on a Framework laptop. I previously used a Dell XPS 15 (high spec), but it was loud and hot and not a pleasant experience.

[mplewis]

I returned my X1 due to poor thermal performance, bad Windows drivers, and incomplete Linux compatibility. I switched it out for an M1 Air which has been my favorite machine of all time.

[paulmd]

> Obviously there is a defect problem affecting some of the new Macbooks, and Apple needs to step up and take responsibility. But that said, I personally think the Apple Silicon computers (the Air in particular) are worthy of the hype.

> This 1 year old M1 Air with 16GB RAM is twice as fast as my colleagues' Intel MBPs (comparing same year devices), and it's _silent_.

According to the comments in the apple forum thread, this bug affects people with older Intel-based MBPs as well.

Taking the thread at face value, if this is a super common issue, then your coworkers should also have observed significant numbers of "random failures" on their legacy Intel MBPs because those laptops too are cited in that "50 page thread" as being subject to this supposed failure mode. Do you find that to match your experience?

It is, of course, unclear whether this is an actual issue, or just a catch-all for people who damaged their screens (micro-fracture) from various drops/impacts, and then over time the micro-fracture eventually worked and became a macro-fracture. They do that - glass can be damaged without actually being visibly damaged until you put it under a microscope, and then some later much smaller stress (even just thermal stress) causes it to fracture along the weak spot.

50 pages of people sounds like a lot, but Macs are the most popular single-series laptop in production (other laptops have more in total, but it's fractured over many manufacturers and series) and if that translates to 500 posts / 200 unique users who broke their screen, across 10 years of usage... that's not actually all that much, or that surprising.

Once it hits the internet it gets blown all out of proportion... remember when RX 480s were "killing motherboards", or NVIDIA GPUs killing themselves due to "bad drivers", or EVGA 1080s were "dying en-masse" due to bad VRMs? Remember POSCAP vs MLCC on Ampere GPUs? Once a social-media pitchfork mob gets started, it becomes basically impossible to measure because all kinds of random failures get attributed to The Current Thing and people trumpet every random failure as being evidence of it.

I'd believe there are some amount of "childhood mortality" in a screen - the person in this thread whose screen delaminated right in the middle after a couple weeks isn't the only person to have a bad screen. But it's very difficult to distinguish which users have that, and which users just dropped it and then later had a crack start working at that fracture point. And once it becomes public that there's "an issue" (regardless of if a significant issue actually exists) there is a huge amount of piling-in where everyone whose screen ever micro-fractured from a previous bump will pop up and tell you about their screen that "randomly shattered".

Genuine question but how is a manufacturer supposed to handle that? Let's say Framework puts out a glass screen model. Do you just give everyone who says their screen shattered a replacement screen? So you're providing unlimited warranty screens for customers who aren't being careful but know to say "it did that by itself"? Do you limit it to one freebie per customer? What if that one also shatters? Do you just do it for the first 3 months, and what happens when someone says theirs shattered after 4 months? And any customers you let fall through the cracks will post a thread like this one about how you've wronged them...

Worst of all Apple is involved here, and that just sets people off like crazy. I know I'm going to get various un-civil responses for all this. There’s no question that the design of the screen is certainly worryingly fragile, but, I really don’t think that all of these are truly manufacturing faults, they’re people bumping an overly fragile design and then later having a micro-fractured screen start working on them.

[heartbreak]

How did we get from a broken screen to unrecoverable data? MacBooks can book with an external display connected.

[ganbatekudasai]

I don't think one potential defect/quality/manufacturing issue in a particular model invalidates an entire platform.