Well here’s my perspective, having bought a MacBook Pro in 2010, in my case I didn’t just buy it to use GarageBand, as I needed a mac based machine to test applications for work. But certainly, one of the additional benefits was GarageBand to see what all the fuss was about.
Within a month I was having issues, the first one being that an OS update wiped the bootcamp partition meaning I had to rebuild the windows side, luckily, I had a backup but even still it took several mind-numbing hours to get back to square one. Then it turned out the on-board graphics card had an issue (a known issue with that model apparently) which led to a series of unpleasant trips to the genius bar, having to finally pull up articles online before they finally agreed to run the in-house test app specifically designed to find that issue and still tried to charge me for replacing the logic board. Strike 1 & 2 right there. Needless to say, I didn’t pay for the repair in the end, but hardly a hopeful start.
In actual fact, despite the initial problems, I had relatively little trouble with it after that, until the graphics card finally died on me a year back. I suspect that because the windows side always ran hot, with the fans regularly engaging at full rpm the card eventually fried itself.
If this was still 2010, I might still be inclined to recommend one, GarageBand is a genius piece of Software and although I soon outgrew it, I do recommend it as a beginner’s tool. Also, the screen at the time was second to none, the build quality was great (the rubber feet did fall of regularly and required purchasing a kit from apple each time to replace them) but since then, in a bid to extract even more cash from their disciples they’ve upped the built in obsolescence and rather than 9 years I’d be looking at a 5 years max life span on a new mac. The once replaceable memory and hard drives are now soldered to the logic board making upgrades nearly impossible for the average owner. This also increases the initial outlay as it makes sense to buy a higher spec model.
In Short, Apple products are great, but the greatness comes at a price, the sales funneling alone is enough to put me off the appetizer, the Genius bar is the sauce on the doggy doo sandwich.