I've been sitting on writing something about this video from Louis Rossmann where he lays into Marques Brownlee for his admittedly pretty softball interview with Apple about repairability. I found Louis's video pretty absurd, and was really annoyed by it. He spends upwards of 10 minutes ripping Marques for not bringing up an internal cable that was one length in one model of MacBook and was longer in the next one. Louis is also angry Marques didn’t bring up a reliability issue in a 2008 MacBook in his interview. Yes, why didn't he bring up an issue that basically no one has ever heard of in his 2024 interview?

Louis rattles these issues off with remarkable memory, but one thing he doesn’t ever bring up are metrics on how often Apple products fail compared to other companies’ products. He paints a picture of Apple making cheap junk that breaks down constantly for everyone, but never cites any numbers showing this to be the case.

Which brings us to today, when Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz published Aging Apple Apparatus:

In addition to iPhones and iPads, we thought we would look at some numbers for Mac computers that also support his analysis.

Customers upgrading in all three product categories now report owning their previous devices longer. In the most recent 12-month period, the percent of iPhone and Mac computer owners whose previous device was older than two years increased to 71% and 68%, respectively (Chart 1). In 2020, 63% of iPhone owners and 59% of Mac computer owners reported owning their previous device for two years or more. Older iPad owners showed a somewhat smaller increase.

So Apple customers today are keeping their products longer than they did years ago. What do they pin this shift on?

Gurman points to many fewer breakthrough features that excite current customers, and more reliable and durable products that mean devices break much less often than before. We tend to agree, and earlier showed that reliability in particular has improved in measurable ways.

Yup, reliability and durability have measurably improved.

Look, I'm certainly not one to cheerlead for Apple on all things, but I'm not going to ding them for making low quality junk hardware. Louis may be technically right that these issues (many of which are from over a decade ago) were bad choices, but the apocalyptic story he tells simply doesn't square with the reality of the billions of Apple products out there today.