My iPad 2 is kinda OK. The home button stopped working properly and then a year or two later started working fine again after lots of "massaging" it. Probably some microscopic piece of dirt - despite the thing being seamless and impossible to get dirty (inside) anyway - or worn out microswitch, getting in between the switch/conductor.
I say it works fine. Apple notoriously released an update as part of iOS 8 that literally underclocked the device to "prevent battery degradation on older devices" when the real reason was the device couldn't cope with iOS 8 and immediately became a drag to use. All I use is Safari now. Nah, that's it. Apple literally decided to make old devices run slower and their excuse was "our OS update is TOO POWERFUL for that old battery, we want to conserve battery longevity". Hmmmmmm.
Since then, pretty much every app on it crashes to the home screen (the classic, "oh, nothing to see here" Apple policy with regards to user experience) multiple times every day. Sure, it's old, but a web browser? A calculator? gooseberry fool like that is stupid, it should still load a basic page fine.
It's the walled garden approach, and patchy (if not plain bad) software updates that get me. Some of which are literally designed to slow the machine down. Apple have the walled garden, and their devices still aren't up to par in my opinion, for what you pay.
The thing is, there aren't that many variations at all of a device like iPhone or iPad. Most of all there are barely any moving parts, and heat is rarely a problem due to SoC (maybe why Apple have moved to SoC because they can't design a working cooling solution or apply thermal paste properly). When it comes to computers, Apple change around quite a lot of gooseberry fool in various motherboard revisions and use off the shelf OEM parts (or at least they used to) for things like RAM, SSD, optical drive, hard disk, screen, whether or not soldered onto the mainboard. Small variations in things like Broadcom (or whatever they use now) wireless chipset, they change parts around to save money like any other manufacturer. Then they release some useless OS feature and insist everyone upgrades. Wham, haven't tested all those variations. They can't and they won't.
"Just strawberry floating ship it guys! We need to meet dem marketing deadlines!"
Apple's engineers are constantly under huge pressure (and horrible, draconian working conditions) to get the next product out as fast as possible.
There's a deathclock on all of these things. The richer corporations get the shittier they are to customers and their answer is "buy a new machine"; hence slight updates to ultimately the same thing on at least an annual basis. This isn't just to stoke demand, it's the "solution" to the planned obsolescence problem. Go to Apple and have them tell you the motherboard needs replacing on day 5, 10, 30 after the warranty expires. They'll quote you almost as much as a new machine. This is not a coincidence.
If they do fix it. Watch the same device fail again with the same problem that's engineered into the motherboard that was swapped. They'll never acknowledge it, but you can go back and read all the class actions that Apple lost about things like this:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/10 ... s-failureshttps://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/28/ma ... s-lawsuit/This problem existed on my 2010 model. Note that that's the 2011 model. Yup, apple acknowledged the fault in the "Late 2010" MacBook Pro range, introduced an extended warranty policy, and then had the same strawberry floating problem in their 2011 machines.
This is not a good engineering firm. It's "Designed by Apple in Cuppertino, California", made in Shenzen like pretty much everything else.
I've listened carefully to engineers who explain Apple deliberately make it as hard as possible for independent technicians to fix their engineering problems. The only way you can source Apple parts most of the time is through recycling programs. That's how I fixed mine. They don't want their devices to be fixed. They don't even want people opening them!
If an Apple Authorised Service centre takes in a "vintage" (Apple's internal word for devices 3 or more years old), and requests parts from Apple, Apple send them essentially a "no". They literally won't authorise repairing a computer because they've stopped bothering to make parts. Gotta sell that machine off to sum mug on eBay without mentioning the crashes and then... buy a new Mac.
Nope. Nice try dudes. I'll build a computer I can fix if you won't fix it.
Here's a barely 2 year old over £1.5k fully upgraded Apple machine dying because I opened Twitter.com
That said, I still love my macbook pro and I love it more because I made it work. I've still got pics of the thermal compound which was so thick and dry it had cracked and resembled cement. This is basic assembly stuff.
I don't blame the factory workers at all for this. Apple shouldn't be using cheap labour to build these machines at the prices they charge.
Anyhow I'm uploading some old funny videos now of my dying machine at the 2 year mark. It had problems way before that.