Apple, these days, seems to be doing their very best to alienate the hard-core base
This isn't something new, Apple has ALWAYS been about snobbing the hard-core base, and aiming primarily for the technically-challenged user base, by offering as few features and settings as possible to all of their products. Then when something basic is missing, you need to use voodoo to work around their design decisions, or you are simply told that "No, you can't do that. You do not want to do that. You don't NEED to do that. Just look how COOL our product looks like? Forget about that feature you're missing."
I had the misfortune of working on an old Mac for a customer a few days ago. It's an old Core2Duo Mac that I needed to wipe before it could be sent to recycling. What would have taken me 5 minutes on any regular PC took me a good hour... Online documentation telling me I could use Recovery mode to wipe out the disk. Uh-uh. Turns out that the recovery partition was only added with 10.7 - this old Mac ran 10.6. None of the initial documentation I had found mentioned that.
Couldn't boot off my usual tool USB thumbdrive either, probably because it wasn't UEFI.
I ended up digging a very old Hackintosh DVD I had gathering dust in a drawer that contained 10.5, and booted with that to use Disk Utility to wipe out the disk.
Figuring out how to eject the DVD from the bloody device afterward was also a challenge of its own. "Press the eject button" This is a PC keyboard, there's no frigging eject button. If it were a PC, I'd use a paperclip - problem solved. Did some online search, found some weird trick that involved swiping a paper clip around from 1.5" off the left side, toward that left side. Why not a simple frigging HOLE like every CD/DVD drive has had for 20 years??? In any case, it didn't work either.
One of the guides I found online listed like 5 different eject techniques to try, the last one suggesting trying to insert a SECOND disc. Seems like some people got even more desperate than me in trying to solve this problem...
So, more googling later, I learn that pressing F12 at boot time would do the same thing as pressing eject. That feels so much like an improvised hack to me, a simple stupid pinhole allowing access to a mechanical eject would have been far more intuitive.
replacing a Macbook Pro keyboard that stops working - out of warranty that's a $700USD bill...
I replaced my Thinkpad Yoga keyboard last winter. Was a 50$ (original) part found on eBay, shipped to me within two days (Chinese reseller, but he was located in Canada). Then, a 30 mins job to replace it (I wasn't sure how much force to apply, there was some sticky tape preventing the keyboard from lifting off the laptop).
We could also talk about the debacle of people's iPhone being irremediably bricked following an iOS upgrade because they had DARED having their fingerprint reader repaired by a non-approved Apple center, and an iOS update would prevent the phone from booting when detecting a non-approved part. How naughty of you, not wanting to pay an Apple tax to get your iPhone repaired while traveling abroad.
Every time I touch an Apple product, I'm reminded why I have such a strong aversion for the company that designs it, where it's all about how it looks, nevermind common sense design decisions that are related to actual usability.
Regarding the Airport: take most of the competitive routers out there, disable all the fancy features to bring them down to the functionality level of an Airport, and you will find them just as good and stable as the Airport. Those fancy, often half-baked features like USB disk sharing are what tends to make many of these routers on the market be so buggy, quirky, and insecure.
