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Apple - Think Twice

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Re: Apple - Think Twice

#331

Post by xenophanes »

I had a different experience with apple. my 27" imac screen had some strong ghosting and i got it replaced near the end of the 3 years of apple care. i did this without ever visiting an apple store.

when i first phoned them, i had some low quality photos of the screen and the guy said he wasn't sure if it was really a problem. i didn't want to take a 27" imac to a store b/c i have no car and apple wouldn't send me a box. so he gave me his email address and said i could contact him any time in the future with better photos.

months later i got a new ios device with a better camera, took a larger number of pictures, emailed him the link, and he sent an on-site repair guy to give me a new screen. no problem.

i think it depends on which customer service people you talk to. some are great, some are not so good.

(the on site repair guy was great too, btw. he gave me a lesson on how to open up imacs, change stuff, and put them back together)

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#332

Post by illuminate »

jmcdonald-ut wrote: post #327
joe_the_user wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly suspect that the testing mania you get on all the technical support lines comes from a mania by companies to control/pressure their customer support people and those people more or less passing along this pressure. "You have to prove you have a problem here because I've got a lot of people I have to help". The last technical support call I had for a Windows network problem (which I had isolated to the OS b…

I used to work phone support for a large auction site (your first thought is probably correct). I can confirm this notion or idea. We were given generic things that the customer could try to fix the problem. You know "Clear cache and cookies", etc. If the issue persisted and we could not reproduce the problems on our own machine we weren't allowed to push trouble tickets to our QA team. For a lot of the lower tech us…

"If the issue persisted and we could not reproduce the problems on our own machine we weren't allowed to push trouble tickets to our QA team."

Yup. There's often an air gap between the grunts and the QA people, who mostly pore over trouble tickets well after the fact.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#333

Post by xenophanes »

aespinoza wrote: post #209
robomartin wrote: post #193

As this article pertains to screen issues how about we discuss this a little bit rather than engaging in senseless rants? The "ghosting" issue the article highlights is a known problem with certain types of LCD screens. With a caveat I'll say that LG LCD panels are known for these kinds of issues much more so than Samsung's. The caveat is that ALL OEM LCD manufacturers have issues, all of them. The other very importa…

So what is the point of paying the Apple premium if they are just the same as everybody else ? I think the fact that it is possible, it should not be the norm. As you can see in the article, the problem is not that he got a defective Monitor, is the fact that Apple is trying to avoid replacing it. If I buy the best, I expect the best. When I buy an Apple product, just like the author, I expect to get the best. If it…

> So what is the point of paying the Apple premium if they are just the same as everybody else ?

OS X and increased quality of some (not all) hardware. And they do have better customer support on average.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#334

Post by mullingitover »

kamjam wrote: post #324
mullingitover wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can I say? They're the worst laptops, except for all the others. Seriously though, the second one has been a champion and I've used it for four years straight without a hiccup. It's a wash--I don't recommend Apple hardware for everyone, but I still prefer it myself.

Wow. I would have dumped it and never used them again. I was having a bit of a "debate" with a friend of mine who bought the new MBP a few months ago. We are both C# developers so we have no real use of the Mac features, and he was running Windows 8 in VM. His laptop cost over 3 times more than my Dell XPS, which granted is thicker and the screen is not as high res etc, all features which I did not care about to be h…

Here's what make the cost easy for me to deal with: resale value. A two year old Mac will easily fetch 75% of its retail price. Paying 25% of retail price for two years of use is pretty reasonable.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#335

Post by pedalpete »

robomartin wrote: post #193

As this article pertains to screen issues how about we discuss this a little bit rather than engaging in senseless rants? The "ghosting" issue the article highlights is a known problem with certain types of LCD screens. With a caveat I'll say that LG LCD panels are known for these kinds of issues much more so than Samsung's. The caveat is that ALL OEM LCD manufacturers have issues, all of them. The other very importa…

I think you are defending the quality of a companies products by passing blame to it's suppliers. Apple chose it's suppliers, decided the product met their standards and shipped it.

I've got 3 computers in front of me now. An 11" air, 26" iMac and 12.5 Lenovo. None of the screens have ghosting issues, I'm sure some of the screens are produced by LG or Samsung. None are retinal displays, but that was Apple's decision to sell retina MBPs. If the quality wasn't there, they should have made the decision to tell the suppliers that they needed to meet xyz standards, and not manufacture the devices until that time.

Selling a sub-par product and then trying to pass the blame on to suppliers doesn't make your product any less-sub-par, and does just as much to ruin your companies reputation.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#336

Post by zanny »

zwischenzug wrote: post #329

My perception of Apple has pretty much been like this guy's for 10 years now, ever since I shelled out 250GBP on a 20G iPod whose battery ran out just over a year later. I went to an Apple store and asked whether I could have the battery replaced, presumably for a price. "Just buy a new one, man!" was the response. I'd taken a gamble buying the iPod (I didn't have much money at the time), was prepared to pay to repla…

I have an iphone 3gs I stopped using this summer just due to the battery dying off. Wasn't going to pay the absurd rates Apple charges to get new batteries, especially when I could just get an iPhone 4 if I really wanted to for like $30 more.

I still try to use the thing as a groupon screen. The Android groupon app requires a persistent network connection to maintain the barcode, the iphone version downloads the page entirely and you can keep reopening it without a connection just fine.

One day I charged it for 6 hours from complete dead battery (I just let the battery die now rather than let it eat up electricity for no reason, I rarely use it) turn it on, put it in standby once I have the groupon loaded, and by the time I whip it out 3 hours later to show the barcode the screen blips on before the thing shuts off due to critical low battery. Had to sit in the parking lot for 15 minutes with a car charger to get the thing to hold the screen long enough to scan it.

The phone is only 3 years old, and the battery doesn't last 3 hours in standby anymore.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#337

Post by theturtle32 »

I just thought I'd throw this out there... I've had this issue with every other IPS display I've ever used. I had three 21" HP IPS displays connected to a Mac Pro for a few years and all three of them exhibited tho exact same condition. The 23" Apple Cinema Displays we had at my university also did the same thing. I just chock it up to the IPS display technology, and assume all IPS displays do that to some degree. IPS is not known for having particularly great pixel twist times, and thats probably related. That said, I'd still use an IPS display in a heartbeat for the color accuracy. It's truly phenomenal. The after-image is annoying, but I'm happy to trade it for the color accuracy.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#338

Post by telecuda »

I returned 2 15" Retina MBPs in 3 weeks. First had dead pixels, second had a very squeaky spacebar, and now this third machine has the same ghosting effect you've mentioned.

It's really not that much of an annoyance because it goes away quickly, but you do think they would have corrected it.

To protect my MBP, I rock this classic black briefcase, which fits the laptop and cables perfectly: http://refer.ly/agTA

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#339

Post by mehrzad »

chaz wrote: post #77

I've bought a MBP every year for 6 years. I spend so much time on them that it's absolutely worth it to get increased performance and space. My current rMBP has 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD -- more than enough. But I'll get the next rMBP for one reason: improved graphics performance. At the 1920x1200 resolution, even things as mundane as scrolling webpages is pretty low-FPS. Also, Google Chrome's aggressive GPU use seemed…

>even things as mundane as scrolling webpages is pretty low-FPS I mean, if you bought a $1300+ computer THIS YEAR shouldn't you expect better performance? OS X is pretty good, but I personally am tired of not being able to run intensive things without shelling out thousands.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#340

Post by robotresearcher »

astrodust wrote: post #68
meaty wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh yes the unibody which is basically a fucking big short circuit, hence why mine caught fire. It's engineering, but it's not SOUND ENGINEERING. I stand by my expensive trinket comment. Buy a Lenovo T-series and you'll understand.

You're essentially saying that any computer with a metal case, or extensive metal shielding inside could suffer the same problem. HP makes a number of metal laptops, for instance, in an effort to make them more recyclable, the same reasoning behind Apple's materials decision. Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red jo…

"The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing."

Not with 768 vertical pixels it isn't.

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