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Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

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Re: Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

#61

Post by randomhunt »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #37
KaiserPro wrote: post #17

Sadly this isn't news. Apple have been doing this for the last 5 years at least. I support a large fleet of Macpros (Ha, yeah "fast" and "magical" with 5 year old procs in them) Everytime an OS upgrade comes along something is silently broken. Trying to get support is a nightmare. For example when they changed which version of kerberos they used without any warning. Or changing the syntax of automount. Apple are shit…

Recently, though, with expanding market share in the mobile space and laptops, Apple is the new Microsoft. Unfortunately Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.

Microsoft consumer product support is indeed utter crap, but I've found their developer support amazingly good.

We had a weird issue with something on Azure, raised the issue and got not only somebody very knowledgeable replying quickly who pointed us in the right direction but also had the docs updated a day or two later.

Contrast to the utter crap "support" we got when an IntelliPoint update had a fight with the Alps software on Dell Latitude laptops and randomly triggered a gazillion consecutive UAC elevation prompts. After being told by "support" for the third time to do something stupid like disable UAC or turn it off and on again we just nuked IntelliPoint from orbit and voila, problem fixed. The next update of IntelliPoint fixed the issue so I'm sure someone managed to report it correctly.

Re: Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

#62

Post by smrtinsert »

revelation wrote: post #9

Google has a better approach here. In their forums, they will promote power users to semi-moderators. These people then, drunk on the (useless) power bestowed upon them by Google, do their best to fend off and send into nirvana actual problems, or just shower askers with pointless routine stuff (reinstall, turn it off and on again) until they give up.

If you buy a consumer electronics device from Google this is what you'd expect though. Apple users are promised to never have to think for themselves again. Apparently it takes Geniuses to do that, available at your nearest over priced retail center.

Re: Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

#63

Post by davidw »

skwirl wrote: post #15
usaphp wrote: post #8

Why did not he just call apple or visit their store? I want to see him dealing with Google or other big company via community forums, I remember a story on HN when a nexus was released and people could not get the phone for months after they paid for it, they could not even get a phone number to call and ask a question. Apple has a genius bar at their stores and a phone support, you can not seriously expect a reply f…

You only get 90 days of phone support with new Apple products unless you buy AppleCare. I don't know about the person who wrote this article, but many people do not live near Apple stores. Even where I live in metro Boston, it takes 40 minutes to get to one from my home (red line to green line, ugh). Where I grew up in Upstate NY, the nearest is 70 miles away.

It's not terribly relevant who he is, but here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig

Re: Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

#64

Post by caryme »

Forums are tough. I can see why Apple opts not to participate, although I disagree with their decision. It also seems to be consistent with the Apple ethos to remove overly negative posts and calls to action from the apple.com domain. Again, I don't like this, but I'm not surprised.

At Microsoft (at least on my team) we are encouraged to be active in our forums. We use them to keep a pulse on the issues we are having, identify bugs out in the wild, and get feedback on our products. We may sometimes sound a little robotic, since we're not going to divulge insider info or participate in arguments, but we are listening and trying to help (and attempting to figure out what is actually happening on peoples machine's, which is tough). We also provide feedback to our customer service folks in the forums, giving them answers to common problems we do know about and identifying when they provide misinformation and correct that.

I suspect that Apple reads their own forums but doesn't respond. The optimist in me says they're investigating this Wi-Fi issue due to the noise in the forums. They may not have or know a good workaround or at-home fix at this point. And frankly, it's really difficult to get any useful diagnostic information from folks in the forums (especially angry ones who turn to personal attacks on engineers - been there, done that for me on answers.microsoft.com).

Re: Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

#66

Post by makomk »

Pxtl wrote: post #22
skwirl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only get 90 days of phone support with new Apple products unless you buy AppleCare. I don't know about the person who wrote this article, but many people do not live near Apple stores. Even where I live in metro Boston, it takes 40 minutes to get to one from my home (red line to green line, ugh). Where I grew up in Upstate NY, the nearest is 70 miles away.

The AppleCare might explain things. They want people to pay for Apple's high-quality care and get the great Apple experience that way, not get low-quality crappy free support from a forum. So the forum is only operated out of necessity - if Apple didn't run one, somebody else would - and it can't be a support avenue because Apple must always control the quality of the experience and you have to pay Apple for that. It…

Well, that's a nice way of spinning it. The simple fact of the matter though is that Apple want people to pay through the nose for AppleCare because it does wonders for their bottom line. In the EU they and all other sellers are required to offer certain minimum warranties with their products, but in order to make more money from AppleCare they lied to consumers about what was covered without it and got into legal hot water over it. This looks like another repeat of that pattern of behaviour.

Re: Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

#67

Post by cincinnatus »

dragontamer wrote: post #43

I know its a typical blog post... but this is the Lawrence Lessing. I hate to hype him up (especially since this post of his is just a "humble blog post" about one annoying issue), but Lawrence Lessing has a huge following. Creator of Creative Commons, Rootstrikers, friend and lawyer of Aaron Swartz... Lawrence Lessing is a name that should be respected in every online community. Again, this seems to be just one of t…

Who it is coming from makes it seem all the more whiny. And hyperbolic.

Re: Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

#68

Post by epo »

jamesbritt wrote: post #11
post_break wrote: post #4

Since 2006 when I first switched I don't remember Apple ever officially posting in those forums. This isn't something new. Their support channels are the phone number, and employees at the store. The forums are just their for archive really.

The key point of Lessig's post is not that Apple reps do not post there, it is that Apple reps remove posts that offer tangible, actionable, information, for flimsy reasons. A forum use posted information about how to get an issue resolved by exercising one's warranty rights; that post was removed. Lessig reposted that info; it was also removed, and Lessig was informed that the forum does not allow for "polls or peti…

One problem is that warranty rights vary around the world, so any advice relating to specific rights will be irrelevant to most people.

Re: Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

#69

Post by [deleted] »

caryme wrote: post #64

Forums are tough. I can see why Apple opts not to participate, although I disagree with their decision. It also seems to be consistent with the Apple ethos to remove overly negative posts and calls to action from the apple.com domain. Again, I don't like this, but I'm not surprised. At Microsoft (at least on my team) we are encouraged to be active in our forums. We use them to keep a pulse on the issues we are having…

[deleted]

Re: Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

#70

Post by justin66 »

caryme wrote: post #64

Forums are tough. I can see why Apple opts not to participate, although I disagree with their decision. It also seems to be consistent with the Apple ethos to remove overly negative posts and calls to action from the apple.com domain. Again, I don't like this, but I'm not surprised. At Microsoft (at least on my team) we are encouraged to be active in our forums. We use them to keep a pulse on the issues we are having…

> I can see why Apple opts not to participate

As Lessig notes, they're engaging actively in censorship. That's certainly their right, but it's not the same thing as not participating.

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