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Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

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Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America’s favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, enjoys 82% popularity according to a 2023 survey by Statista. Memorial Day comes in second at 77%. > The three most popular movies of all time on IMDB are The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather and The Dark Knight. They have ratings of 9.2, 9.2 and 9.0 respectively. These examples are so orange and apples it’s baffling the authors even came up with them. You compare the mo…

That's not what's being compared. It's the rating those things received compared to the rating of the phone. I think it's fair to include the ratings of the highest rated [whatever] to compare to the ratings of another [whatever]. The author is saying "even people's favorite things don't get such high ratings."

It’s a completely different methodology!!! Are they comparable just because they express the final value as a percentage?

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey - I'm the post author. Thank you for reading! I don't think they are manipulating the data, rather that they are surveying an unrepresentative population of tech enthusiasts, and presenting it as if representative of the entire customer base.

They don’t present it as if it’s representative of the entire base, nor do they ever compare it to anyone else’s metrics, and your claim is based on information openly disclosed about how they create their metric. The piece is just clickbait. Your final paragraph is this decontextualized “Quote”: > “We’re not calling on the SEC to investigate these customer satisfaction claims, since they have more important cases to…

It's one of multiple quotes from the same CEO, who is also posting in this comment section saying "I'm quoted in the post" as though having a blog post on your own company's website where someone you pay does what you told them gives you more credibility

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#103

Is there a legal limit how much you can fake the numbers before you are held accountable? Seems like Apple is pulling a lot of numbers out of their rear end. See also LTT's recent video about Apple quite clearly faking Mac Studio performance numbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buLyy7x2dcQ

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Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#104
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what's being compared. It's the rating those things received compared to the rating of the phone. I think it's fair to include the ratings of the highest rated [whatever] to compare to the ratings of another [whatever]. The author is saying "even people's favorite things don't get such high ratings."

Better would be to ask everybody who watched Shawshank Redemption: ‘were you satisfied with the movie?’. A 9.2 on imdb is not equal to 92% satisfaction due to granularity in the answer options

Also satisfaction doesn’t mean you’d rate something a 10/10.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for weighing in and your decisions in writing the article make sense to me.

I think it’s important (and probably simply ethical) for people and companies who make such extraordinary claims to explain how they obtained them, but having taken a stats class in college and doing a lot of growth-related work in my professional career I know how frustrating it is to get useful data, especially out of surveys.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#106
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No it's very likely in fact. iPhone has been around for 15 years so there almost isn't a person on this planet who doesn't know (a) what it is, (b) what the competition is and (c) whether it's a right fit for them. So if you're surveying existing users you're talking to people who knew before they purchased the iPhone that it was going to be a suitable fit for them. So of course the survey is going to be highly biase…

It seems very obvious to me that a 99% satisfaction rating for an electronics product is extremely unlikely, even given the factors that you noted. Not impossible like the other poster is indicating, obviously it's impossible to prove that claim, but very unlikely.

If you reflect on it and genuinely believe that 99% seems realistic and even "very likely", well, we'll have to agree to disagree.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hey - I'm the post author. Thank you sharing these details on the Watch survey. I wonder if 451 Research is doing something similar with their iPhone survey. Isn't that something you should've researched before writing the post? Methodology seems like an important factor here.

I agree. Apple is making an extraordinary claim and we think they should share their methodology.

With comments like these, it doesn’t really look like that’s what you’re up to.

Re: Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t present it as if it’s representative of the entire base, nor do they ever compare it to anyone else’s metrics, and your claim is based on information openly disclosed about how they create their metric. The piece is just clickbait. Your final paragraph is this decontextualized “Quote”: > “We’re not calling on the SEC to investigate these customer satisfaction claims, since they have more important cases to…

It's one of multiple quotes from the same CEO, who is also posting in this comment section saying "I'm quoted in the post" as though having a blog post on your own company's website where someone you pay does what you told them gives you more credibility

Agreed. It looks like they are trying to manufacture a controversy in the hopes of raising their own profile. Dark.
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