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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

#51

Post by catalogia »

al2o3cr wrote: post #33
riffraff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first generations of magsafe adapters did not have stress relief at all, because form over function was still in full swing. Every charger had the cable completely break apart at the connection to the brick, because stress relief ruined the pretty minimalist design. To say it's nothing but function means denying the evidence.

Every charger had the cable completely break apart at the connection to the brick, because stress relief ruined the pretty minimalist design. I had one of these. Mine didn't break. A lot of them broke, to be sure - but that's because the users don't understand that a multiwire cable isn't a shoelace and shouldn't have knots and zero-radius bends inflicted on it.

You don't have to be careful with laptop charging cables from any other manufacturer. This is not a problem intrinsic to multiwire cables. It's a problem limited to cables from this particular manufacturer. You could strangle an elephant with a charging cable from Dell or Lenovo and the cable would be none the worse for wear.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#52

Post by jmull »

droithomme wrote: post #15
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…

There's definitely been tons of completely legitimate, justified, and useful bad reviews for bad products. Usually those reviews just get deleted. I guess the effort to pay staff to constantly delete Noahic deluge sized floods of legitimate honest and sincere bad reviews from actual purchasers was deemed not worth the effort and the reviewers can be dismissed to a Siberian Gulag for their thoughtcrimes of accurate ev…

The Apple store reviews were mostly unhelpful 1-star reviews. Apple didn't seem to be removing any of it.

You should share the source of your accusations.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#53

Post by cronix »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #19
kps wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many ‘accessory’ products had overwhelmingly negative reviews, because Apple's form-over-function philosophy means that they're genuinely hot garbage. … so they fixed the glitch. ¹ e.g. one I'm familiar with http://web.archive.org/web/20191113224149/https://www.apple....

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…

They might be lighter, but I consider not having a cord in between the heavy transformer and the wall plug to be a design flaw. Unless you have receptacles with vicegrip like prongs, like they are when they brand new, the transformers tend to unplug themselves over time due to their weight and gravity.

Edit: Oh, and whatever they put in that white rubber seems to really attract cats. Not sure what it is, but it's the only cables in my house that the cats like to chew on. Friends/family have experienced the same.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#54

Post by threeseed »

jjoonathan wrote: post #35
jmole wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that it's designed to fail - but it's clearly not designed to last. It does seem like, with Ive's departure, that Apple may start to make their accessories (and cables, hopefully) as long-lasting as their products.

Apple badly needs a post-Ive strain relief philosophy.

And people need to stop thinking that Ive was responsible for every design decision.

They have a hardware engineering team who are far more culpable.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#55

Post by NeedMoreTea »

derefr wrote: post #49
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 websi…

Now there I can't agree. If I were a first time potential Apple buyer, outside the Apple bubble, I would absolutely want to know if Apple's own charger has a cheap cable that frays, or a video dongle can't handle certain common modes, or something is simply crap. Comparison with a third party doesn't enter into it. It might even help get a feel for how common an issue some site's major news piece actually is.

Likewise a 2017 Macbook Pro attracting lots of negative reviews because Apple forgot how to make a keyboard resilient enough to outlast a warranty are equally legitimate.

Pulling them to present an "all is lovely in Apple World" view is incredibly buyer hostile. Even if many remain that are irrelevant complaints and misunderstandings - where there should be some effort to clean up, there is legitimate need for ungamed, unsanitised reviews and ratings.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#56

Post by core-questions »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #55
derefr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 websi…

Now there I can't agree. If I were a first time potential Apple buyer, outside the Apple bubble, I would absolutely want to know if Apple's own charger has a cheap cable that frays, or a video dongle can't handle certain common modes, or something is simply crap. Comparison with a third party doesn't enter into it. It might even help get a feel for how common an issue some site's major news piece actually is. Likewis…

> I would absolutely want to know if Apple's own charger has a cheap cable that frays

Of course, but why would Apple want you to know that before you shell out the cash?

> "all is lovely in Apple World" view is incredibly buyer hostile

They're laughing all the way to the bank.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#57

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

derefr wrote: post #48
jlarocco wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everythi…

I don't think anyone has a psychological issue with USB C.

What they have is a perfectly legitimate issue with not being able to use their existing peripherals with a supposedly top-of-the-line professional laptop/desktop with an unquestionably professional price.

Removing the reviews is PR sterilisation. It's appearance management. It's wilfully turning a deaf ear to any feedback that suggests the Emperor may not be fully clothed.

It has absolutely nothing to do with raising the SNR in the store.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#58

Post by derefr »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #55
derefr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 websi…

Now there I can't agree. If I were a first time potential Apple buyer, outside the Apple bubble, I would absolutely want to know if Apple's own charger has a cheap cable that frays, or a video dongle can't handle certain common modes, or something is simply crap. Comparison with a third party doesn't enter into it. It might even help get a feel for how common an issue some site's major news piece actually is. Likewis…

> Comparison with a third party doesn't enter into it.

Sure it does. Mathematically. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600914

Reviews and ratings only function as a pairwise ordering. If there's only one of something in a category in a marketplace, the reviews don't have any signal to them. (Before you say "maybe the numbers don't, but the text does!"—consider a true monopoly product provider, like a bread line in the USSR. Would you trust a review of the bread, given that the bread line itself is the moderator of bread-line reviews?)

Mind you, I'm not saying it's impossible to accurately review these products. I'm just saying it's impossible to accurately review them in this particular marketplace (the Apple Store website.) If you want real reviews, you need an efficient market. Try eBay.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#59

Post by derefr »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #57
derefr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everythi…

I don't think anyone has a psychological issue with USB C. What they have is a perfectly legitimate issue with not being able to use their existing peripherals with a supposedly top-of-the-line professional laptop/desktop with an unquestionably professional price. Removing the reviews is PR sterilisation. It's appearance management. It's wilfully turning a deaf ear to any feedback that suggests the Emperor may not be…

Let me be clear; I was mostly talking about ratings re: SNR. Ratings, in a very explicit mathematical sense, become literally undefined when you aren't comparing them between things, but just comparing something to itself. You can't have a vote with one candidate; you can't have an auction with one bidder; etc. The results are all undefined. In the exact same sense, you can't have a ratings system in a marketplace with one product in it.

Or, for a direct analogy: you can't have Hot or Not where it's just one dude. Is he hot? Is he not? Undefined.

Now, freeform text reviews: sure, they might hold some meaning, even in a single-seller marketplace. (For subtle behavioral-economic reasons, I would hypothesize that they probably don't, but let's pretend they do.) I would posit, though, that whatever's in those reviews is already the result of "PR sterilization." What you're seeing is what Apple wants you to see. It's their store.

Reviews only "work" (i.e. have guaranteed real signal, rather than "maybe real, maybe fake" signal) when incentives in a marketplace are aligned such that even the marketplace owner has no incentive to tamper with which reviews are or are not visible. That is not true here, and so the reviews are not, and never were, trustworthy. They were noise from the start.

Re: Apple pulls all customer reviews from online Apple Store

#60

Post by par »

LeicaLatte wrote: post #30

Do it for my apps on the App Store too, Apple.

Agreed. Convenient for Apple to absolve themselves of these things, but when my app gets a bunch of hateful reviews simply because the user doesn't want to pay, or provide an email, Apple lets all that stand.
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