Comment by wtallis

It's not exactly a decade-old issue when the problem started a decade ago and persisted for half a decade. The MacBook Pros from the tail end of that era are only just now starting to reach an age where they can reasonably be considered obsolete and due for replacement, because that kind of machine absolutely should be usable for 5+ years. From the perspective of Apple's current product offerings those laptops are many generations back, but from the perspective of the actual user base they're still recent history.

Reputational damage always outlasts the defective products. There's nothing HN-specific or even nerd-specific about that phenomenon.