When I look back over all the years and myriad of gear I have worked with, nothing comes close to the failure rate, and poor service time/communication of my Leica S system journey ... premium gear that was supposed to be for professional use and was advertised that way.
This includes some early digital equipment that was fraught with growing pains and questionable engineering:
A very early Imacon DB that was quite temperamental, but once sorted was a work horse for many years.
Or the ill fated Contax N Digital ... the first full frame DSLR with a 6 meg Phillips CCD sensor ... that ate AA batteries at a ferocious rate due to poor power management and lack of the better batteries we now have ... not to mention the worst proprietary processing software ever conceived by man, something that was fixed when a group of us petitioned Thomas Knoll to support the Contax ND RAW files in Adobe Camera Raw. In my opinion, the Contax N Digital struggle is what prompted Kyocera to abandon photography equipment, or at least was the straw that broke the Camel's back.
The only Hasselblad fiasco I experienced in a decade of using their digital products was the overly ambitious H2D/22 that shot DNG Raw files (the first to do so), but was not ready for prime time and proved to be the very definition of "finicky". Hasselblad was apologetic, admitted their error, and with no questions asked replaced the camera with a new H2D using their 3FR RAW file format.
All these were pretty significant issues, but isolated ones that were resolved one way or another.
But this S experience is beyond the pale. It is systematic and epidemic.
What mystifies me is that I do not recall the S lenses failing like this during the early stages of the system. I had 3 or four S lenses that I used a lot for years, and not one failure. Only after I swapped up for the CS versions did the failures began. However, it isn't just CS versions that are systematically failing, all of them are susceptible to the AF issue. This may be coincidental, or could suggest some change had taken place in the manufacture that is now failing.
Leica needs to get ahead of this, and deal with the service issue pronto!
At least they are fixing stuff ... but it is so painful and time consuming as more and more failures happen that at some point one may have to cut and run. A shame, since there is nothing else out there that I'd like over the Leica images these cameras help me make.
- Marc