Real geniuses prefer a bar with drinks. 
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How about the MacBook power adapter? https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD506LL/A/apple-85w-magsafe-2-power-adapter-for-macbook-pro-with-retina-display with a 1.5 star rating on the apple site. Why? Because the cable is flimsy and breaks at the juncture with the power supply and at the computer. But does apple fix cables? Is the cable replaceable? Nope! You need to by a new $80 power supply because a cable they know very well frays easily breaks.
Want to fix it yourself? Well they glue the whole power supply together so you have to break it to open it to replace the cable. At least you can fairly easily splice a new cable on (that is if you consider work with a soldering iron and heat shrink tubing simple) if you are lucky enough to have the computer connection fail.
Same goes for iPhone charger. It is a terrible scam that they do quite deliberately, it is quite impossible they don’t know about the failings based on the rating on their own website.
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Not as if Microsoft is any better. Does remind me though of a monitor cable I accidentally drilled through in 1998 on my Gateway computer. The power cord was severed and when I went to shops to get an estimate and repair I was told can’t be done, the cable is hard wired and all Gateway components are proprietary, so it is cheaper to contact Gateway and buy a new monitor. Needless to say I never did business with Gateway again.
But, I have been driving BMW since 2009 and they have a sweetheart deal with Apple, other phones can be paired to the cars but few of us have the expertise to do it, and even then some of the functions are not compatible, so I was forced to adopt iPhone technology in order to get the full range of use out of the car.
I am now so disgusted with Apple that I would rather not even have a cell phone than get another Apple product. But then when it comes to telephony in the USA any of you that have spent significant time outside the country know we are paying hundreds of percent more for it than a lot of the rest of the world, sort of like phone companies learned their capitalism from prescription drug manufacturers. In Australia I had to get an Australian sim card for my iPhone and Optis, the phone company I went with there charged 20 (AUS not US) per month for unlimited use.
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This sort of shit combined with everything being done to make devices unrepairable (practically and legally) makes me consider joining the luddites.
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Sheesh, c’mon. I’ve used Macs since the 90’s and have two that I use every day. It’s not a matter of taste, the new Apple laptops are nowhere near as good as they were. The new keyboards are absolutely unusable from a tactility standpoint, and professionally I see them fail far more often than everything except some of the Surface models.
The aesthetics do not make up for the loss in functionality. I don’t care how thin or light the thing is if it can be rendered unusuable by dust and is almost completely unrepairable.
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I did actually get one replaced free, after I noted that Apple almost burned my house down with their known faulty design. But the next one after that I had to pay for. That really bad design continued all the way from my 2001 TiBook until they finally switched to USB-C 
They’re “genius” in the same way that Wall Street guys are “smart”.
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It sounds like you need a new logic board.
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Either that, or they operate like (I am convinced) many corporate repair shops do: begin with the most expensive repair on the list of likely suspects, and work their way down. It’s the ‘throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks’ methodology, and it’s lazy.
DH’s Honda had a fault in the a/c which caused it to switch off intermittently. The dealership wanted to replace most of the cooling system, beginning with the compressor and condenser for $1200. Our shadetree mechanic took 20 minutes to find the problem – a bad air gap in the clutch – and repaired it with 2 shims for $300.
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2001 TiBook
My wires didn’t fray, but holy hell did that bastard get hot. I eventually resorted to strapping an old CPU heat sink to the thing.
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Apple store tech support are geniuses in approximately the same sense that Subway employees are “artists.”
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Sometimes you have to separate suckers from their money. There’s a reason why Apple is making bank
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And how is that not fraud?
Take your car to a mechanic and have him replace working parts and see how long he is allowed to stay in business.
My iPhone 5C started powering off with an 80% charged battery less than two years after I bought it. The quote to repair it was more than the phone cost.
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I agree – I can’t count the number of things that shouldn’t have broken down but did. Fortunately some of them I could repair, like the faucet that sprung a pin hole leak (duct tape), or the ceramic support for the bread machine element I bought for $1.50, or the car cigarette lighter LED light that had a short. And I didn’t even need a “UY CHAN Upgraded Original TS100 Digital OLED Programmable Pocket-size Smart Mini Outdoor Portable Soldering Iron Station Kit Embedded Interface DC5525 Acceleration Sensors STM32 Chip Fast Heat (B2)” from Amazon for the first two.
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Must have been a bug in the push updates. They’re not supposed to kill your phone until the next one comes out. /s
That’s pretty much the de facto " ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" response when they don’t know what’s going on but it’s obviously hardware related so I’m not at all surprised. The Genius Bar and other services like it operate on throughput - not on in-depth troubleshooting.
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Considering that’s >= the cost of a whole new Macbook Air, and 2-3 times the cost of a PC with superior specs, it’s pretty obvious they were trying to gouge someone that they thought wouldn’t know any better.
Aside from bad hardware, software, design, and prices, Apple comes with premium bad service. But you get the cool logo, so that’s worth it, right?
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