Am I old or is this not even close to the most controversial Apple laptop? I feel like the white plastic Intel MacBooks and the original TiBooks were both more controversial.
Purely anecdotal: I worked at an Apple VAR when the TiBook was released, but I honestly can't remember any real controversy. They were a big hit. Quite easy to repair too.
I wasn't there for the plastic Intel MacBooks, but the biggest complaint I remember hearing about was that the black one collected fingerprints like crazy and, later on, some overheating issues. They were also a pain to repair, though not as bad as the iBooks before them.
At least RAM and hard drive were very easy to replace, which I appreciated. I don't think I ever needed to actually open my MacBook back then. But I do remember repairing white iBooks, which was a pain indeed.
The real pain with the (well at least the earlier) plastic Macbooks (especially along with their short support life) is the 32bit EFI, and some even had 32bit-only Intel CPUs.
There was quite a kerfuffle over these machines, as they were retina (at the time, this means expensive), woefully underpowered, and basically required a dongle (also new then) as they had a single usbc port for all charging and IO. Also the butterfly keyboards failed if you looked at them wrong.
Despite all that, I loved these machines, but many people found them to be just a bit too Apple.
The touchbar models didn't go down too well either, even after software had some time to catch up with the hardware it was still so unpopular that Apple gave up and completely walked it back.
