A manufacturing process which produces millions of phones manages to produce some with defective covers. Owner of one of these defective devices tries to rectify the situation through google's awesome customer service process because that is what google is known for. Results are less than stellar.
My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
271–280 of 354 posts
Re: My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
#272Would love to hear if someone actually has had a positive support experience with Google. My company has faced a bug in their location dashboard for over a year. We support local businesses and often get asked to update their Google business details. We're unable to delegate location dashboard access inside our Apps domain. My partner can send the invite to any gmail account, but can't send access to me inside the co…
I have had mostly positive support experiences for Google Cloud. Granted, my employer is a big customer so Google is making a lot of money out of the relationship, and gcloud is a new and growing platform that you can tell Google is actively investing in (unlike say, Gmail).
High-priority support tickets typically get a very fast response, although it may take several days to debug the issue and fully resolve it. The technical support people are very open about infrastructure issues on their side (although sometimes they don't publicly announce them as early as I'd like). They sometimes even help debug issues in our code when we determine that the problem isn't on Google's side.
We get invited to participate in user feedback meetings (through Google Hangouts of course). During these, we make feature requests that often eventually show up in releases and help prioritize features that are already planned or under development. I've even had one-on-one meetings with gcloud product managers.
Google BigQuery's public issue tracker[0] is also pretty decent.
All that being said, this is a (very welcome) exception for Google. Every time I've had to interact with the support system of a non-gcloud Google product/service I've walked away disappointed.
Re: My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without a doubt Dell has much better customer focus for technical people. The 4 year support contact w/ accidentally costs the same as 4 years of apple care, but Dell's covers everything except lost and wore down batteries. Apple requires that you book an appointment at one of their stores, go there, wait on line anyway because there are people who don't want to book online, have someone who can't fix hardware proble…
Interesting... there was this strong anti-Dell thread just last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098954
Dell enterprise support is great. Support for cheap, plasticky, consumer stuff - not so much.
Re: My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's going to cost them even more in PR down the line. I'm at the point of not buying an more google products and I know many other people who have had the same experience and sworn them off as well.
Definitely, if there was another viable smartphone platform I'd be all over it, cause Android is a burning dumpster fire that Google has no intention of cleaning up. Funnily enough, Microsoft with the same OEMs (Samsung, LG, HTC, etc) on the same SOCs got the drivers they needed upstreamed so they could provide multi-year updates to their devices. Google could get the drivers for most Android phones mainlined if they…
The biggest problem with this for me is the app ecosystem needed. If proper Android app emulation was present then I would love to try an alternative OS, but currently I rely too much on apps that are only available on Android/iOS for which a web app would provide a very poor experience.
Re: My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple service is next to perhaps only Amex, if any. Perhaps.
Along these lines, Discover has also been fantastic in my experience. One of the only no-annual-fee cards that gets you a person on the phone with no automated button pressing.
I've moved all my banking (credit card, checking, savings) to Discover and I've had great experiences any time I had to call them - except they refuse to lower my APR despite great credit. Oh well, I don't carry a balance so it's just the principle of the thing. And for no annual fee, the cash back is quite nice, and it has extended warranty and purchase price protection too!
I'm not a shill, I promise. I just really like my Discover relationship.
Re: My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Apple doesn't have the best customer service They don't? Who does then? Now if you want to say they're not perfect and they've had their problems, I would agree with that.
Herman Millar. "My chair's seat fabric has torn a bit. Is there anything you can do?" "When did you buy it?" "Erm, around 6 years ago, I think." Checks records "No problem, an entire replacement seat will turn up in a truck tomorrow. We'll fit it and leave your chair good as new. Have a nice day, sir."
I have a Steelcase LEAP, at least ten years old, that was acquired when a local company went out of business. The v1s had a design flaw where eventually a weld would break and the piece of metal that adjusted the front edge of the seat would fall out of the bottom of the chair.
I lived with this for a few years and eventually contacted the local reseller to see if replacement parts were available. Got blown off because I wasn't a corporate customer.
About a year later, I decided to contact Steelcase corporate directly. I described the problem, as well as how I'd been basically ignored by the local dealer. Told them how I'd gotten the chair, and that I was willing to pay for parts. Not only did they apologize profusely, they sent me an entire (v2) seat assembly - in black leather - at no charge, described the changes between the versions, and said it would fit on my chair just fine. It did.
There's a reason I now have four of these LEAP chairs at home.
Re: My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Apple doesn't have the best customer service They don't? Who does then? Now if you want to say they're not perfect and they've had their problems, I would agree with that.
When I had a motherboard issue with a dell laptop, Dell sent a representative to my home office to take it apart, clean it, and replace the motherboard. I've also had laptops and monitors replaced by other companies on a "we'll send you a replacement, you send the defective one back in that box with this prepaid shipping label, and thanks for buying our products" basis. I haven't heard of that from Apple.
They USED to do something similar.
When the G5 iMacs had problems with bad capacitors on the motherboards, Apple would send you the replacement midplane with swap instructions, along with a box to return the old one in.
I took pictures of the process: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/albums/1340761
They eventually switched to "take it to the local Apple store or mail it in".
Re: My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Herman Millar. "My chair's seat fabric has torn a bit. Is there anything you can do?" "When did you buy it?" "Erm, around 6 years ago, I think." Checks records "No problem, an entire replacement seat will turn up in a truck tomorrow. We'll fit it and leave your chair good as new. Have a nice day, sir."
Indeed. I have a backpack made by Tumi, it was my brother's bag from around 2001 or so. When he passed away in 2005 I inherited it, and a few years ago I finally noticed it had a little RFID tag and barcoded serial number embedded in it. I went on their website and looked it up, he had never registered it. So I registered it and found that it has a lifetime warranty, even though they stopped making that model years a…
Well, with furniture and backpack companies, the tolerance (or "forgiveness") for user error is a lot higher. If you accidentally drop your backpack, it doesn't have a screen or anything that shatters and requires a $150 part replacement. You can't even drop furniture in day-to-day use, really. Moreover, your backpack doesn't have a battery or anything that slowly but surely degrades over time anyways with a meager five-year lifespan.
I can't imagine too many ways that a backpack or piece of furniture can become accidentally damaged by "user error." Remember, so many people try to misrepresent their own mistakes (perhaps because they didn't understand what happened or they didn't realize it was their own fault) as product defects that the phone manufacturers all had to add things like internal liquid sensors to their devices.
On another note, many of my non-technical friends conflate Android OS software problems with device defects (e.g. "my phone died" actually meant that they had 300 running processes because they never learned how to close running apps on Android -- which to be fair is a PRETTY buried feature that doesn't lend itself well to user discovery; the number of people I see that don't realize they have to manually close apps on their Android phone is shocking). It's probably the reason there are so many ways to buy "refurbished" devices.
Needless to say, if Apple or Google started honoring a lifetime warranty, they'd lose a lot of money pretty quickly.
Re: My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Along these lines, Discover has also been fantastic in my experience. One of the only no-annual-fee cards that gets you a person on the phone with no automated button pressing.
I've moved all my banking (credit card, checking, savings) to Discover and I've had great experiences any time I had to call them - except they refuse to lower my APR despite great credit. Oh well, I don't carry a balance so it's just the principle of the thing. And for no annual fee, the cash back is quite nice, and it has extended warranty and purchase price protection too! I'm not a shill, I promise. I just really…
As a student currently building credit, they've also been quite helpful with increasing my credit limit when requested or giving me useful feedback on what I should work on before I request another increase.
Re: My Pixel has a manufacturing defect
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Apple doesn't have the best customer service They don't? Who does then? Now if you want to say they're not perfect and they've had their problems, I would agree with that.
I think Apple is pretty much the king of consumer level support.
I've read some pretty horrifying stories about Apple (this person had a cracked screen, Apple bricked the phone while attempting to repair it, replaced it behind his back, then charged him 3x -- they also have a required replacement device "security deposit" you must pay up front in order to even get them to attempt a repair):
https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/apple-support-honey...
There's a reason why third-party repair shops like Rossmann Group exist and make a killing doing component and board level repairs on iDevices.