Windows on New Macbook Pro Permanently Damages Speaker Due to Poor Drivers

The damage here is much bigger than a few laptops. We have been trying to educate, encourage people to go and try everything ;) saying you can't write software damaging your hardware. This sort of bug violates that trust and IMO it's a big deal.

That's a bizarro notion, and a moot point in any case, as very few people write audio drivers, which is the software in question.

Besides, you could always write software that damages your hardware. For example you could kill your hard disk or SSD quite easily with bad file using code (just recently Spotify had a bug that could kill an SSD in a short period of time by writing TB of data), and lots of other things besides.

Nobody has ever claimed you could write drivers without damaging hardware. When I was writing my own toy kernel there were many warnings such as:

"Probing memory-mapped PCI devices may have unpredictable results and may theoretically damage your system, so once again we discourage its use." 1

[1] http://wiki.osdev.org/Detecting_Memory_(x86)