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Annual Customer Support Rankings
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo's Tech Tuesday is running PC Mag's annual survey of best and worst PC vendors' customer support. At the top of the list: Apple. At the bottom: Sony. Heard any good tech support horror stories lately?"
It so happened that I had to buy a birthday present for somebody and also buy some new headphones today, so I had three good reasons to go to CompUSA, and I was a tad surprised that there didn't seem to be anybody in the whole store that knew what Panther was. There was one iMac (or was it an eMac? Still confused about that) that had it installed for demo purposes, and demo I did. I'll squeeze in a mini-review of what I saw so far.
:) Highlly recommended, even though I didn't buy it quite yet. Soon, very soon. Especially now that I've touched it... I realize that I really like it but it's not so earth-shattering that I simply must have it. I'm sure many applications will soon be Panther-only (that's what happened with Jaguar), so I'll have to upgrade within the next few months. I hope to be able to do so with a good fiscal conscience within a couple of weeks.
Overall, I was a little surprised at how similar to Jaguar it felt... this is a good thing. We want improvements, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Speaking of bathwater, the Finder has been replaced and I'm sure the new one is awesome. It was noticeably different but I didn't see a whole lot of Gee Whiz stuff in my quick (about 30 minutes) runthrough. I probably spent about 10 of those minutes playing with the much-heralded Expos, which honestly is DAMN COOL. I only hope it runs that quickly on my 550 PowerBook... probably not, though. I also tested the quick user switching thing. I had to figure out the CompUSA password, but it only took me about three guesses. That's another great feature.
The nicest surprise is that alt-tab (yeah, yeah, command-tab on Mac) application switching has really matured. It's much, MUCH more like Windows now... with a transparent bar that appears center-screen and true stack-based app switching (to make it just as easy to go two applications back as it is to go one application back). As a former Windows keystroke nut, I absolutely had to have my alt-tab support, and I about lost my mind when I first switched to OS X and had to deal with the various incarnations of that, including some shareware that did what I wanted and was subsequently irreparably broken by Jaguar, at which point I got used to Jaguar's better-but-not-quite-there implementation. That was when they almost lost me as a customer, but I just love OS X too damn much.
I'm glad to see they've burst forth with this great upgrade. I obviously wish it wasn't so expensive, but hey, it could be worse... it could be like $400
Sorry it's so long... hope it was sort of interesting.
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Doing the job!
Try doing the job for a day, and you'll never biatch about TS again. It is the most underpaid and underappreciated task in the entire IT kingdom.
People hate your intestines before you even start dealing with them.
You really do see the worst of greedy, self-centered, childish, threatening, breath-holding, human behavior. Sad really.
And once in about a thousand calls someone says thank you.
Look, you get what you pay for, think about it.