Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

perfectrec.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 108 posts

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#31

Post by dclowd9901 »

asutekku wrote: post #7

They are using Google reviews as proxy for customer satisfaction. I really can't take rest of the article seriously after that, knowing anyone can leave a review at Google and there's no guarantee they own the phone. Sure, 99% satisfaction rate is pretty much impossible, but if all Apple asked was "are you satisfied with iPhone 14" with "yes" & "not at all" options and only surveyed iPhone 14 owners, I can easily see…

They mention in TFA that even surveying anomalies (people accidentally answering negatively) can’t be represented by a 99% figure.

That said, if I had a survey that asked a couple times in different ways if someone was satisfied with the iPhone and they gave conflicting answers, I’d probably simply throw their answer out for being nonsensical. Maybe that’s what’s going on here: they’re teasing out survey anomalies.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#32

Post by razemio »

minsc_and_boo wrote: post #20
razemio wrote: post #10

"They opened our email 73 times, but didn’t respond." This counter does not work right? I know it is a minor thing, but I immediately stopped reading further. I have a problem...

Email pixel tracking is an industry standard these days. Every time the email loads the pixel, it counts +1. Some platforms like Gmail partially obfuscate it.

I am totally out of the loop when it comes to these things. My client always opens in plain text or html render with JS and external content disabled. I believe this is true for most clients. On the other hand security scanners, browsers engines and other Middleware stuff can trigger such a counter without any user interaction if I am not mistaken.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#33

Post by worrycue »

pm2222 wrote: post #5

If only there’s no carrier lock and photos can be backed up easily to personal storage.

Carrier locks are not an Apple-only thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock

Seem to be a common feature on most phones. Don’t like it? Bug your government to outlaw the use of the feature like “Canada,[5] Chile,[6] China, Israel,[7] and Singapore”.

iTunes backups my photos. No idea how to access them though - apart from restoring to a working phone.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#34

Post by rottencupcakes »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #22

Give me an iPhone 5 that’s fast enough to run an os that has all the software bloat we have today. Then, stop adding more bloat to force us to buy newer hardware

Give me an Intel Celeron that's fast enough to run Windows XP and then stop changing anything.

Give me a 386 that's fast enough to run DOS and stop changing anything.

I'm surprised you've made it from mailing lists all the way to Hacker News.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#35

Post by ridiculous_fish »

jonas-w wrote: post #28
razemio wrote: post #10

"They opened our email 73 times, but didn’t respond." This counter does not work right? I know it is a minor thing, but I immediately stopped reading further. I have a problem...

Later on they said they use Mailtrack [0]. I looked at their FAQ and they just use a tracking pixel. I don't really think that mail clients in a coorporate environment (i.e. Apple) download external images automatically. Mailtrack seems to be confident, that only 5-10% of recipients aren't "trackable" [1], but I haven't seen a mail client that by default downloads external media in a while. [0] https://mailtrack.io […

See my peer comment: Apple Mail really does download external images automatically, on a server to hide your IP address. It then rewrites those emails to reference the cached images from the server. Every tracker pixel sent to a mail account with this feature will be counted as read, whether or not the user opens it.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#36

Post by nowooski »

asutekku wrote: post #7

They are using Google reviews as proxy for customer satisfaction. I really can't take rest of the article seriously after that, knowing anyone can leave a review at Google and there's no guarantee they own the phone. Sure, 99% satisfaction rate is pretty much impossible, but if all Apple asked was "are you satisfied with iPhone 14" with "yes" & "not at all" options and only surveyed iPhone 14 owners, I can easily see…

Hey - I'm the author of the post. Thanks for reading.

I included the Google reviews as a secondary example since it is public information. Google reviews are actually more positive on the iPhone than the third party surveys, which found satisfaction rates in the low 80s for 5G iPhones.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#37

Post by sezycei »

ars wrote: post #24
asutekku wrote: post #7

They are using Google reviews as proxy for customer satisfaction. I really can't take rest of the article seriously after that, knowing anyone can leave a review at Google and there's no guarantee they own the phone. Sure, 99% satisfaction rate is pretty much impossible, but if all Apple asked was "are you satisfied with iPhone 14" with "yes" & "not at all" options and only surveyed iPhone 14 owners, I can easily see…

> I really can't take rest of the article seriously after that, knowing anyone can leave a review at Google and there's no guarantee they own the phone. Do you mean you can't take Apple seriously? The article is calling out this issue, not engaging in it. > I can easily see the number being 99%. No, it can't. It's utterly impossible for it to be 99% unless it's fake data.

> utterly impossible

No, it's not. Unbelievably unlikely? For sure.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#38

Post by minsc_and_boo »

razemio wrote: post #32
minsc_and_boo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email pixel tracking is an industry standard these days. Every time the email loads the pixel, it counts +1. Some platforms like Gmail partially obfuscate it.

I am totally out of the loop when it comes to these things. My client always opens in plain text or html render with JS and external content disabled. I believe this is true for most clients. On the other hand security scanners, browsers engines and other Middleware stuff can trigger such a counter without any user interaction if I am not mistaken.

The pixel is just an image, so unless you disable email images loading by default, the server will still count you.

Pre-caching will sometimes mess with the counters though, making the counts lower than the actual.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#39

Post by [deleted] »

minsc_and_boo wrote: post #20
razemio wrote: post #10

"They opened our email 73 times, but didn’t respond." This counter does not work right? I know it is a minor thing, but I immediately stopped reading further. I have a problem...

Email pixel tracking is an industry standard these days. Every time the email loads the pixel, it counts +1. Some platforms like Gmail partially obfuscate it.

[deleted]

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#40

Post by nowooski »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #31
asutekku wrote: post #7

They are using Google reviews as proxy for customer satisfaction. I really can't take rest of the article seriously after that, knowing anyone can leave a review at Google and there's no guarantee they own the phone. Sure, 99% satisfaction rate is pretty much impossible, but if all Apple asked was "are you satisfied with iPhone 14" with "yes" & "not at all" options and only surveyed iPhone 14 owners, I can easily see…

They mention in TFA that even surveying anomalies (people accidentally answering negatively) can’t be represented by a 99% figure. That said, if I had a survey that asked a couple times in different ways if someone was satisfied with the iPhone and they gave conflicting answers, I’d probably simply throw their answer out for being nonsensical. Maybe that’s what’s going on here: they’re teasing out survey anomalies.

I'm the post author. I suspect aside from conducting extremely unrepresentative surveys, they are also aggressively filtering out respondents. I didn't include that since it is purely speculative on my part, but I'd guess that is part of what is happening.

I'd note that other seemingly innocuous things could have an impact too. For instance, if they surveyed only people who've owned their phone for 90 days or whatnot, you would eliminate the vast majority of people who didn't like it and returned it from the sample.

99% is an extraordinary claim, which is why we think Apple should be more transparent about their methodology.

Post reply on HN