It’s defensible because people who have had a first gen of every new r/MBP for the last five years who experience no problems whatsoever (such as myself) do not take to the Apple support forums to post their counter anecdata, and Apple is a hardware vendor, and it would be terrible for people prior to sale to visit the Apple website (ie the support forums) and get a wildly inaccurate picture of hardware reliability from only seeing posts from a small fraction of people having problems. It's (self) selection set bias.
As a shareholder, I entirely support exercising this type of control of the message (on their own website). It is the right thing to do. Nobody has any right to have their words hosted on apple.com except Apple, and I would prefer that anyone with a sample size of less than ten not post negative things about their products on a site potential customers visit.
You may not agree with it, but this is a legitimate defense of what they are doing.
people understand that forums are there to get support, and that five-year owners with no issues don't post. but taking down posts that expose a design flaw is terrible customer service, and borderline unethical.
The determination of whether or not it's a design flaw is subjective. It could be a manufacturing flaw; millions of touchbar retina MBPs have been sold, and it seems that the issues are affecting hundreds or perhaps single digit thousands. A design flaw would manifest in a much larger percentage of machines, would it not?
As a shareholder, I entirely support exercising this type of control of the message (on their own website). It is the right thing to do. Nobody has any right to have their words hosted on apple.com except Apple, and I would prefer that anyone with a sample size of less than ten not post negative things about their products on a site potential customers visit.
You may not agree with it, but this is a legitimate defense of what they are doing.