Ok, there’s a few points to reply to here.

Firstly, and this is the one that pisses me off the most — my wife choosing to buy an apple watch is HER decision (and she wasn’t my wife until the next day, but regardless, if you are the sort of person who thinks a husband should stop his wife buying something like that then God help you — and your partner if you have one). It was bought with money that she was gifted for the wedding and it’s what she wanted, still uses daily, and loves. How you possibly confuse my problems with a Macbook with her choice of buying a watch is beyond me.

I bought this Macbook after many years of being invested in the ecosystem.

All I wanted from the start, after the first one broke, was a replacement so I could get on with my life. They made it a nightmare, but my whole argument was I should get one that wasn’t faulty when it left the factory.

And yes, I did ‘manage’ without the then top spec one until I upgraded although that was only for a few months until March when I returned the first one, that’s when I got the top spec one. At this stage I decided I need the extra power and storage.

I didn’t buy a refurbished one because I wanted a new one that I hoped would be perfect from the factory. I wasn’t going to take the risk on the refurbished one being one like mine that had been sent back, ‘repaired’ and sold on.

Of course, at that stage I didn’t know this was a more widespread problem with the design rather than just bad luck on my part getting a duff one.

Anyway, this story is months old. Since then, the second one, the one that was ‘repaired’ broke again (the one they forced me to choose between repairing in Spain, or leaving my pregnant wife alone in Spain while I flew back to England to return it). So this time I got a full refund under UK consumer law. I finally got the money back last week but they even managed to make that a nightmare too.

In between them agreeing and refunding took about 6 weeks, 3 weeks or so of which I didn’t have the laptop or my money. I couldn’t return it to Apple in Spain (different company you see…), I couldn’t SEND it to Apple in the UK from Spain. No, I had to send it to the UK and get it collected from the UK. I couldn’t even have it taken in to a store in the UK. But even when they had it back, it was two weeks before the money was in my account. The literally only process such refunds ONCE a week on a Tuesday. And for some reason, even though mine was put through on the Monday, it didn’t go out on the next Tuesday but the one after. They actually say it can be 15 working days… Funny they can take money so quickly but not return it as fast.

But in the meantime I built a high-end Hackintosh, a 4k monitor, studio monitors, and bought a Chromebook for more-or-less the same price of the Macbook return. Good job I could manage to do that, or I’d have been without for weeks.