The other day I watched my new Macbook Pro just up and die while dragging a file into a folder!
Screen went black and that was all she wrote! haha! The quality these days... back on my trusty
2012 that has been dependable since day 1
Thankfully I did a time machine backup recently and only lost a couple days of work.
I have to ship my new one back to Apple and wait. If I understood the agent, they will be erasing the
drive before they return it. Has anyone else had sudden death issues recently? I'm actually shocked
this happened

It is not unusual or surprising. Every manufacturer has some fraction of computers die one way or another. Failure rate is "bath tub" shape - higher early times, then drops, and raises late in lifetime. Yours was early death... These things happen and that is what warranty is for.
My 2018 MBP died few months ago when I put it to sleep by closing it, and in hour tried to wake up. Never woke, completely dead. Nothing at all, no more power in any way... While this was older computer, it was only ~9 months after Apple replaced mainboard, so it was relatively new.
Time machine is designed to be connected as much as possible and makes hourly backups, if attached. There are other ways to protect against data loss using on line storage, if Time machine is not convenient.
If Apple replaces mainboard (likely), you get new SSD ("drive"), these are now soldered to mainboard, so you cannot get yours back. They are also encrypted, so even if you unsolder the chip, it cannot be read in different machine. So, do not expect to get your SSD with your data back, except if they replace other parts - and there are not that many parts in MacBooks by now. Which means, that backup is critically important.

Honza1 said:

It is not unusual or surprising. Every manufacturer has some fraction of computers die one way or another. Failure rate is "bath tub" shape - higher early times, then drops, and raises late in lifetime. Yours was early death... These things happen and that is what warranty is for.
My 2018 MBP died few months ago when I put it to sleep by closing it, and in hour tried to wake up. Never woke, completely dead. Nothing at all, no more power in any way... While this was older computer, it was only ~9 months after Apple replaced mainboard, so it was relatively new.
Time machine is designed to be connected as much as possible and makes hourly backups, if attached. There are other ways to protect against data loss using on line storage, if Time machine is not convenient.
If Apple replaces mainboard (likely), you get new SSD ("drive"), these are now soldered to mainboard, so you cannot get yours back. They are also encrypted, so even if you unsolder the chip, it cannot be read in different machine. So, do not expect to get your SSD with your data back, except if they replace other parts - and there are not that many parts in MacBooks by now. Which means, that backup is critically important.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I wasn't expecting my data back since everything Apple sells now is embedded by solder or glue. I've been on a Mac since 2002 (Jaguar days) and this is the first time something like this has happened to me. From what I'm reading, it seems to happen more often now-a-days. I dont understand how 10+ year old macs are still solid and going strong but the new ones lasts a few months or years at most. Really disappointing

rovostrov said:

Yeah, I wasn't expecting my data back since everything Apple sells now is embedded by solder or glue. I've been on a Mac since 2002 (Jaguar days) and this is the first time something like this has happened to me. From what I'm reading, it seems to happen more often now-a-days. I dont understand how 10+ year old macs are still solid and going strong but the new ones lasts a few months or years at most. Really disappointing

New ones are under greedy Tim.

rovostrov said:

Yeah, I wasn't expecting my data back since everything Apple sells now is embedded by solder or glue. I've been on a Mac since 2002 (Jaguar days) and this is the first time something like this has happened to me. From what I'm reading, it seems to happen more often now-a-days. I dont understand how 10+ year old macs are still solid and going strong but the new ones lasts a few months or years at most. Really disappointing

My own 25+ years with Macs is not very good sampling, but my observed failure rate (normalized by number of devices) might be about the same. I had lot less Macs 25 years ago, but that one failed... And crashed routinely, like daily. Over the years, once in a while one of the macs failed. The 2018 MBP one was more of lemon than any other, but I maintain now 4+ macs, most are reliable. There are no reliable statistics I would know about. And also, some of it is expectations and how long and hard are we running these things. We got spoiled by reliability of iPhones and our expectations are high. Have you used powerPC macs with macOS 7? Froze with screensaver no reason at all.