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Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

appleinsider.com

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Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#41

Post by abtinf »

mopsi wrote: post #39
IAmEveryone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple may choose form over function, but the power adaptors are a good example of how they still spent more time thinking of function than any competitor. For the typical "elongated black box" notebook charger, a cumulative sum of exactly zero effort was spent on improving it in either form or function. Meanwhile, Apple had MagSafe (which is nothing but function), the extendable prongs to wrap the cable, or the littl…

All Magsafe chargers I've seen fell apart in a few years time. Even chargers that were used only on a desk and saw no stress had their cable expand a little near the connector (enough for the small clip got stuck), then turned yellow, then yellow-green and sticky, finally becoming brittle and just eroding away. I have never experienced anything like this with other brands nor with no-name brick chargers. Even Chinese…

Cables turning yellow and sticky is a uniquely Apple experience.

I have boxes of cables accumulated over decades. Every other brand of cable is basically in the same condition it was when it went into storage.

But Apple cables are fucking disgusting (there is simply no other way to say it). Why are they so sticky? Why are they so yellow? Every Apple cable seems to be affected--headphones, power supplies,and dongles.

My guess is it has something to do with the "soft" touch finish and the white coloring.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#42

Post by scarface74 »

By removing the reviews, it's possible that Apple will be seen as less credible to potential buyers.

How could anyone disagree with this. Just look at Amazon for a shining example of reviews done correctly. They are always so credible, never gamed, and you never have to worry about fake products especially if you buy products labeled as “Amazon’s Choice”.....

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#43

Post by ratsmack »

scarface74 wrote: post #42

By removing the reviews, it's possible that Apple will be seen as less credible to potential buyers. How could anyone disagree with this. Just look at Amazon for a shining example of reviews done correctly. They are always so credible, never gamed, and you never have to worry about fake products especially if you buy products labeled as “Amazon’s Choice”.....

Somehow, I must believe you are being sarcastic, or you are terribly misinformed.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#44

Post by derefr »

abtinf wrote: post #41
mopsi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Magsafe chargers I've seen fell apart in a few years time. Even chargers that were used only on a desk and saw no stress had their cable expand a little near the connector (enough for the small clip got stuck), then turned yellow, then yellow-green and sticky, finally becoming brittle and just eroding away. I have never experienced anything like this with other brands nor with no-name brick chargers. Even Chinese…

Cables turning yellow and sticky is a uniquely Apple experience. I have boxes of cables accumulated over decades. Every other brand of cable is basically in the same condition it was when it went into storage. But Apple cables are fucking disgusting (there is simply no other way to say it). Why are they so sticky? Why are they so yellow? Every Apple cable seems to be affected--headphones, power supplies,and dongles.…

IIRC the thing that makes BPA plastic yellow over time is the gradual oxidation of a fire-retardant chemical added to it. You can reverse this process with bleach+UV light, reducing the chemical back to its non-oxidized form (sort of like how you can use activated charcoal to absorb moisture from the air, and then bake it to re-activate it.) If your 30yo white plastic isn't yellow, that's because the manufacturer skimped on the fire-retardant and it's likely highly flammable.

No idea about why some plastics get sticky, though. I'd imagine it's the plastic's polymer literally breaking down, but it might also be some additive "sweating" out. Maybe it's the very same fire-retardant chemical. (Old yellowing hard plastics don't get sticky, but they don't tend to have plasticizers in them, so they need far less flame-retardant.)

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#45

Post by otakucode »

scarface74 wrote: post #42

By removing the reviews, it's possible that Apple will be seen as less credible to potential buyers. How could anyone disagree with this. Just look at Amazon for a shining example of reviews done correctly. They are always so credible, never gamed, and you never have to worry about fake products especially if you buy products labeled as “Amazon’s Choice”.....

I've never understood why online reviews, at least on sites as large as Amazon with a competent technical team behind the company, aren't better. First step, if I review a product, then you should immediately be weighting the visibility of all reviews by reviewers who posted a review which agrees with my own. So if I rate Avengers: Endgame bluray a single star, guess that I have similar opinions to the others that rated it the same, and when I go look at some other Marvel film bluray, if those others have reviewed it, push them to the top. As I review more and more things, the weightings should get better and better. And gaming it would be basically impossible unless you managed to tailor bot posts to match the way I rated dishware, movies, books, videogames, food products, and the dozens of other things I've rated. Fake reviews would get pushed to the bottom with almost instantaneous speed if they would do this. If they cheap out and decide to aggregate and 'bucket' reviewers rather than training a recommender engine per-customer, its performance will fall short and still be gamed, but even that would be better (and seems to be the way big companies handle the computational load per-user systems would incur... personally I'd prefer they push the calculations clientside, but they haven't gone that way).

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#46

Post by ddoolin »

ratsmack wrote: post #43
scarface74 wrote: post #42

By removing the reviews, it's possible that Apple will be seen as less credible to potential buyers. How could anyone disagree with this. Just look at Amazon for a shining example of reviews done correctly. They are always so credible, never gamed, and you never have to worry about fake products especially if you buy products labeled as “Amazon’s Choice”.....

Somehow, I must believe you are being sarcastic, or you are terribly misinformed.

100% satire.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#47

Post by Someone1234 »

projektfu wrote: post #34

It boggles my mind why Apple doesn't have any engagement at all with the community. Their community Q&A is full of questions like "How do I play notifications through the phone speaker instead of bluetooth speaker" and the answers are just community members with the same problem, also wondering how to do it. Zero engagement from Apple.

This is one area where they could learn something from Microsoft. Microsoft use UserVoice for product feedback. Outdated list of UserVoice product sites:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/o365guy/2018/01/02/submi...

UserVoice allows voting on what issues impact people most and allows the company to provide feedback to those issues/ideas. This isn't to say that a company must do all upvoted ideas, Microsoft certainly don't, but it is a useful outlet for both parties.

Microsoft aren't the only major company using UserVoice: https://www.uservoice.com/customers/ and there are competing services offering similar benefits. The concept is maybe more important than that specific product.

Apple seems to lack basic communications channels in both directions. This is a problem regardless of company policy.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#48

Post by derefr »

jlarocco wrote: post #36
LeoPanthera wrote: post #3

I'm not surprised. Most of them were just bitching about Apple, and not reviewing the product. Most of the reviews of the USB-C dongles were just complaining about USB-C, for example. Useless.

Is that really useless, though? If I'm about to drop $3-6k on a laptop, I want to know beforehand that it's going to be a PITA connecting things to it. The fact that lots of people think it's difficult, and that Apple responded to their problems, is also useful to see.

Products are rated relative to one-another, though, not on any absolute scale (because everyone uses a different personal subjective scale, so all a review or recommendation system can hope to do is to normalize each person's ratings against their own learned model of rating criteria such that the person's lowest score becomes a 1 and their highest a 5.)

If people don't like USB-C, they're just going to rate everything Apple makes as a 1.0/5, which, as far as a normalization algorithm is concerned, is the same as rating everything a 5.0/5. It carries no signal and gets completely dropped from the algorithm.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#49

Post by derefr »

rgovostes wrote: post #7

The only thing remotely surprising here is that they lasted this long. It was frankly idiotic of them to have it there in the first place. No one is happy to spend $80 on a replacement MagSafe charger because the previous one frayed, so of course the listing was marred by 1-star reviews. The community Q&A also tends to be garbage. I understand that the average consumer is not going to have the same level of technical…

I think whoever originally architected the Apple Store website assumed that, because the Store carried a few third-party products on it alongside Apple's, it would end up evolving into a full marketplace where people would comparison-shop between different third-party offerings of the same product. In such a use-case, reviews and ratings would be useful.

Of course, that didn't wind up happening; the Apple Store website has basically exactly one product in each product category, with that product being a third-party one only if Apple themselves don't make a product for that category. There's no comparison-shopping to be had, and so no justification for reviews or ratings.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#50

Post by catalogia »

abtinf wrote: post #41
mopsi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Magsafe chargers I've seen fell apart in a few years time. Even chargers that were used only on a desk and saw no stress had their cable expand a little near the connector (enough for the small clip got stuck), then turned yellow, then yellow-green and sticky, finally becoming brittle and just eroding away. I have never experienced anything like this with other brands nor with no-name brick chargers. Even Chinese…

Cables turning yellow and sticky is a uniquely Apple experience. I have boxes of cables accumulated over decades. Every other brand of cable is basically in the same condition it was when it went into storage. But Apple cables are fucking disgusting (there is simply no other way to say it). Why are they so sticky? Why are they so yellow? Every Apple cable seems to be affected--headphones, power supplies,and dongles.…

Somebody told me a while back that Apple cables self-destruct when other cables don't because a while back Green Peace talked Apple into no longer using PVC for their cables. The replacement plastic is presumably better for the environment but is less durable (possibly negating any environmental benefits by increasing the amount of e-waste produced?)

I don't know how much truth there is to this theory though. It doesn't seem to explain the poor strain relief.

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