Charles Arthur, The Overspill:

I wrote a while back about the problems I had with my 2012 retina MacBook Pro, and its strange shutdowns – which I suspected, but couldn’t absolutely prove, were due to the graphics card problem that these models have been known to suffer from: when the discrete graphics card was activated, there was a chance it would go completely off the rails.

Finally it shut down and didn’t seem to want to start.

And:

The only way to absolutely prove that the problem with the computer was the graphics card, of course, was to take it to a Genius Bar. After eventually getting an appointment (the Mac Geniuses are rare, compared to the iPhone/iPad Geniuses), I turned up with the rMBP which I’d left for dead.

If you’ve got a Mac, especially if you are running High Sierra, take a few minutes to read this story.

My hope is that this is specific to Charles’ Apple Store and not a symptom of a much wider problem. And I do take heart in the fact that the store manager wanted feedback, wanted to find the problem with their systems.

But I do think this solution should have been driven from the top, at corporate. APFS is not news.

From the very end:

But anyhow, if your Mac does break down, and you’re on High Sierra, make sure to tell them if you’re on APFS when they come to the diagnostics. And if they tell you that you need to wipe your drive and start again, just make sure to ask them: “are you certain it’s that, or could it be your network drive can’t read the APFS file system on my machine?” It can’t hurt to ask.

Indeed.