[traceroute66]

> Perhaps one could find a country where the "you can't run it on non-Apple hardware" clause is not valid

Some of us recall the era of the officially authorised Apple clones.

In my case, I was a level one tech at the time, and so I ended up fixing far too many of the damn things.

As is the way with IT, the non-Apple manufacturers treated it as a race to the bottom. They put out cheap-ass products that were built in an equivalent cheap-ass way. Sure you could buy a clone 30%(or whatever) cheaper than the Apple equivalent, but you got what you paid for.

I for one celebrated the day Apple killed off the Apple clone license regime.

The whole point of the Apple platform is the tight integration between hardware and software and, statistically speaking, the generally high quality and reliability of Apple hardware. As above, I have witnessed first hand what happens when you legally decouple the two ... its not pretty.

To pre-empt the people who will point me at some blog-rant where someone's Mac "broke", well sure, when you build millions of machines, there will inevitably be some that break ... but I doubt anyone can seriously argue against Apple reliability overall.

[paulryanrogers]

After the keyboard fiasco I'm not convinced Apple's first party control is really all that great. Non-removable batteries, RAM, storage too strike me as repair hostile. It's a luxury brand now. The hacker spirit is long gone.

[dijit]

Apple seems to be held up to much higher standards, perhaps due to volume or a simple product line up.

but most hardware makers have fuck ups equal to; or worse yet they seem much less talked about.

ask your IT person about recent XPS models desoldering themselves or cooking themselves in peoples backpacks when they should be a asleep for a very recent example

[paulryanrogers]

Other brands get plenty of criticism. And often without folks rushing in to defend them using whataboutism.

[dijit]

not defending them at all, I dont really care, but it seems like Apple problems are all anyone talks about for an entire news cycle and continue to be talked about for half a decade, yet people very quickly forget about issues with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung even if they make news at all.

Exceptions only for really serious issues like Samsungs phones spontaneously combusting and Lenovos Superfish.

[jeroenhd]

Apple only produces a few device models at a time. Where Lenovo and HP have a laptop configuration for every use case or every price point under the sun, Apple has three tiers at most.

That makes developing for Apple products relatively painless, but it also means that if they mess up, a significant portion of their customers are affected. Combine that with the sales numbers they're pulling off, and the end result is that Apple messing up is a bigger deal in practice.

There's plenty of news about other manufacturers, too. It doesn't seem to get upvoted to the front page of Reddit and HN as often, but tech news sites report about all kinds of failures. I don't know why people keep upvoting Apple, whether it's positive news or negative, but for some reason Apple just attracts a lot of attention. If you look outside vote based news, there are plenty of "Lenovo publishes UEFI firmware patches" news articles too, they just don't get as many comments.