Unfortunately, I would also assert that overall product quality has been neglected as of late. Because you had a Mac Pro with a faulty firmware for the latest

Unfortunately, I would also assert that overall product quality has been neglected as of late. Because you had a Mac Pro with a faulty firmware for the latest OS? Whole stacks of iBook G3s had to be returned (some of them again and again) because of faulty logic boards. The Cube had overheating problems. The batteries of a few Powerbook lines where problematic and had to be recalled. G5 Mac Pro's had leaking liquid cooling and fan problems. Powerbooks had problems with their DVD writers. Early MacBook Pros also had problems with their fans. You can find tons of similar events from 1999 to 2012. Lots of older Apple machines had problems that needed a firmware update to fix, from graphic glitches to what have you. They don't imply that "overall product quality has been neglected as of late". Just that, in every company and in every product line, there are to be some problems in some models, some machines or even whole runs. Nothing is perfect, and nothing was perfect before. I cannot even enumerate how many times I had problems with faulty Wintel PCs. What happened is you just had some Mac computer that didn't have a problem before whereas your new one has a non-yet-updated by Apple firmware. A very little empirical evidence for any claim regarding overall QA. Gee, Apple in 2011 made what's perhaps the world's best laptop, the MBA 13" (touted as so by many Mac and PC review sites and magazines).