I still use my Macbook Pro 2011 15inch modell, which had the discrete GPU broke twice. Thanks to the vibrant DIY community I could revive it – with the Intel GPU running solely – and it flies along perfectly well again, upgraded to a aftermarket 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM. I am still angry that Apple didn´t issue a firmware upgrade themselves to permanently disable the discrete GPU in the affected Macbook Pro models from 2011 and 2012 – perfectly capable machines for years to come, you know. But things considered: It was a thermal design failure right from the beginning, and not by chance.
Another experience: I had to replace my battery recently and the machine grind to a halt, with lots of jittery and slow downs. I couldn´t figure out at first what would make the machine misbehave like that. I again found help online and had to learn that hidden deeply in parts of the IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext there are profiles which check on the serial of the battery and only allow listed ones. Of course, Apple no longer sells them ... still made my machine misbehave with a third party one installed. I double checked it, and yes: With the native battery installed, no troubles, with the third party one slow downs everywhere and a machine hardly usable. I deleted the profiles and guess what ... it runs like new again, with the third party battery.
I recent years it became more and more clear to me and others, that the Apple of today designs and engineers planned obsolescence/built-in obsolescence into their hardware products, based on dedicated hardware design, hidden software programming and restrictions regarding third party access in software and hardware.
Take, e.g., the recent iPhone revelations regarding their failing batteries. The point is not only the secret throttling to hide the failure, but more so the tiny built in batteries right from the beginning, which cycle far faster than usual past their specifications, especially with those power hungry processor architecture, and make the iPhones prone to be replaced with new ones - when you don´t know a simple battery swap would do it, but shadowing it with shaddy battery diagnostics.
It was the community outside of their influence, which finally showed us the evidence - and pretty it is not.
The thinness-craze with Apple hardware is not about convenience for the user, but improvement/increasing of profits. There is no margin for quality anymore.
The Macbooks Pros 2016 and 2017, they are designed to be as cheap as possible to produce while priced higher than ever. They are engineered to costly fail prematurely and therefore increase the steady profit with selling extended warranties and repairs – after those ran out.
You know what: I want them to continue this path. They need to fail really really hard, so they can learn one or two things. Or their competition finally becomes brave enough to fight them with quality and longevity of hard- and software - and not copying them to the bone.