My MacBook Pro had over 10k USD in repairs

Yeah, true. When I was new to HN, I had a minor altercation with some mod here because I posted a reply to a particular comment that the poster seemed to be doing paid marketing / shilling for Apple. My comment was deleted and I was reminded that as per HN community rules, I cannot accuse anyone of such things. Annoyed, I replied to the mod that it seemed obvious that the post was paid social media marketing. Someone (I don't remember if it was the mod or another fellow member of HN) pointed out that if the same logic was applied to my critical and negative posts about Apple, someone could make an argument that too was paid social media marketing by Apple's competitors. I was honestly stumped for a moment because negative campaigns are a fact too (e.g. politicians do a lot of negative campaigning through social media; the Chinese are aggressively known to do such kind of negative campaigning by posting negative reviews of their competitors product on Amazon).

That said, it does happen on HN too. It would be unreasonable to expect otherwise - the kind of high net worth / IT influential crowd that comes to HN is the very market that Apple (and others) target.

The problem I and a lot of other firms have is the value you're getting for it. It's utter garbage, and has been all over the press for years now, so it's not exactly news.

When big studios and little firms alike are complaining and asking, "Who exactly is this for?" It's clear they don't care about mass professional market consumption. And I'm talking about businesses that are going to spend over $6000 per desktop-compute unit.

The organizations that I have seen are the only relevant customers are the ones who have deep Apple-centric workflows, and they're not buying a lot of the hardware. They might have under 10 units in the office at most.

If the prices were more inline with what the rest of the hardware market looked like, I'd provide Mac Pros to each staff member because it would be a no-brainer.

Were you using an Apple adapter when this happened?

It appears the author doesn’t know this as they seem quite nervous about losing coverage.

In my case I got a keyboard / top cover, logic board, and battery all replaced for $400 and change, on a 6.5 year old machine well out of AppleCare. They only do this while the model is not considered obsolete, and they have more discretion to do things in your favor if your initial purchase was made directly through Apple, and if you previously had AppleCare on the device, even if it is expired.

In the US, after five years they declare your device obsolete. Or after seven years in some states in the US (edit: in cases where it is required to be that long by state law). Then after that, your only repair options are DIY or third party.

Also if there is a repair done by Apple at any time, in or out of AppleCare, that repair itself is warrantied for 90 days. And if an issue was put on the record in Apple’s support system for your device before AppleCare expired, it can still be covered even if it is brought in for repair after AppleCare expired.