But I never said that. I just countered an anecdote with a different anecdote. In the absence of contradictory anecdotes, people reading the thread would be left with the false perception that Apple doesn't produce the occasional lemon.
I'm citing a fairly well publicized incident that affected a significant number of Macbook owners - and these models were the top end 15" MBPs with quad core i7s with discrete GPU models - among the most expensive of Apple laptops, I might add - that Apple completely dropped the ball on. And this is coming from someone who recognizes that Apple historically has the best build quality and customer service.
There was a massive thread on the official Apple support forums on this problem that spanned a couple of years and a few hundred pages. Tens of thousands of posts without a single official peep from Apple. There were plenty of articles written about it on Mac sites and other tech sites like Ars Technica. It took Apple over a year to even acknowledge the issue. By the time Apple did issue the Repair Order (recall), a lot of people wrote off or sold their laptops at a loss and had no recourse.
So this is a little different from other laptop manufacturers having issues with a specific model. Before the Repair Order was issued, the official fix was to replace the logic board with a fresh logic board that had the same defect (most of the people who had their logic boards replaced got the same problem within a few months, including myself). Great if you had AppleCare, but a $500+ fix if the AppleCare had lapsed or if you didn't have AppleCare.
Am I bitter? Of course I am. I bought a relatively top end laptop from a company that had a reputation for treating their customers way better than their competitors. And I happily paid the premium (maybe 1K more than a similarly spec'ed Windows laptop at the time) with the expectation that I would be taken care of in the unlikely chance there was something wrong with my MBP. And that didn't happen. I was just lucky that I kept my bricked MBP around so that I could get it fixed when the recall finally came around. At least then I could get some salvage value out of it.