They're also not doing us any favors with the way they're building their hardware these days. If a firmware update was to brick the system board in a Mac from 15 years ago (or most PCs from today), replacing the system board might cost 10% of the total value of the machine.

If the same thing happens today where everything is soldered and epoxied together, you practically lose the whole machine and all the data on it. Woof.