2009 - 2012 would be the period where nVidia had badly-soldered GPUs affecting everyone's laptops, this was an expensive repair period for many manufacturers.

2009 - 2012 would be the period where nVidia had badly-soldered GPUs affecting everyone's laptops, this was an expensive repair period for many manufacturers. Air bubbles in the solder would eventually disrupt the electrical flow, I think it was just the one year of devices but a year or so passed before anyone was affected. https://codingfreak.blogspot.com/2009/04/beware-of-nvidia-graphic-cards-in.html https://codingfreak.blogspot.com/2009/04/beware-of-nvidia-gr... Then in 2013 Apple started soldering/joining everything which made all the repairs more expensive. Then in 2016 Apple had to start paying for the artificially expensive repairs themselves because of the butterfly keyboard fiasco, popping speakers, broken display cables etc. They probably really have lost money but they don't mention it's their own fault and at this point it's really just tied to the free keyboard replacement program which ends in 1 - 2 years for the worst-affected models.