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Why Everyone Loves Apple
realtorperson writes "Why, at least the Apple users, love Apple? According to a recent article, the pure and simple reason is customer service and overall experience. The author writes, 'When Apple competitors are focused on cost reduction to increase profitability, Apple is investing resources to enhance its relationship with its customers. To me, that's impressive. Unfortunately, there are too many companies in the market that could care less about their customers, but Apple is determined and committed in delivering the experience and not just the product.
It's regrettably amusing that Apple competitors are working hastily to develop iPod clones to reap in success, but what many of them fail to comprehend is that it's not necessarily the iPod that makes Apple successful, but rather its customer service.'"
This is absolutely true. I've bought many macintosh computers for the companies I have owned and worked for.
During lean times we would use eBay to buy computers and equipment for employees. One occasion in particular I bought a strawberry iMac as a work station for a designer advertised as new in the box only to find out the machine was two years past the date of manufacture. As a matter of policy, Apple only honors the warranty within I believe 90 days of the date of manufacture. After a few attempts to repair the machine unsuccessfully, Apple replace it with a new (at the time) iMac that had much better specifications at no charge. Just recently, they gave me a lot of good advice and support on a lemon iMac I received from MacMall.
I value customer service primarily because I pride myself on giving it - and it's nice to deal with a company then genuinely seems to care about it's customers. I'm an Apple customer for life partially because I prefer their product, but mostly because they treat me like a human being instead of a credit card number.
Really, portable music players that use lossy codecs are only designed to play finished songs. If you want to record bits of solo work and glue them together, you should save them in a lossless format such as .aif, and copy them across to your fellow group members by putting them onto a portable drive (such as the iPod can be, but there are better ones that aren't also music players) as regular files rather than as songs they should play.
Unless you just want to listen to each other's noodlings as they are, without futher modification, in which case, you can put your iPod in any computer running OS X, close iTunes back down when it automatically pops up, go into the Terminal, cd on over to /Volumes/[The name of your iPod] and cp the files across.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
nothing
This article is simple shilling for Apple. Anyone who has actually had an encounter with Apple's customer service would know that they're exactly the same as any other manufacturer.
My experiences have been different.
A few weeks ago I needed to order a battery for my wife's laptop, a slightly older Powerbook. I had ordered one from their website, but it was the wrong one, so I called them to replace it. Well, they had a hard time figuring out which battery I needed, and so after being put on hold for 15 minutes I hung up with the intention of calling them back the next Monday (this was on a Saturday.)
Well, about 10 minutes later they called me back to tell me my battery was on its way. FedEx delivered it that coming *Monday*. I have never had a company call me back, and I think that ranks right up there with the best customer services experiences I have ever had.
Now - we should be able to pool all our music together. But try doing it using iTunes - its on the verge of impossible.
Turn on your iPod's disk mode, through the preferences in iTunes. Copy your sound clips to the iPod. Bring your iPod to your friend's house and copy the sound clips off it. No problem.
Are you complaining that there's no GUI way to copy sound clips directly out of the iPod's music repository? That's like complaining there's no easy way to get at your toaster's heating coils. You're taking an appliance that does a specific job very well, and complaining that it doesn't give you a lot of options for doing something it's not intended to do. iPod is designed to sync up with the iTunes library, and I like that degree of simplicity. It's not designed to let you copy music in and out of its library by hand.
Yes, if you connect your iPod to someone else's computer and you're not paying attention, you might accidentally let the other person's iTunes replace your song library with his. I don't like the eagerness with which iTunes does this. But the fix is simple: bring your iPod back to your computer and plug it in and sync it up again.
The people that were wearing just the ear buds are just like the easily-led people who follow any other trend. Have no doubt about it, there are a lot of followers and a lot of stupid people in the world, but it's not Apple's fault for making products about which people become passionate.
Think about it this way- how many fads have you seen come and go within a year? 6 months? 3 months? Now think about the fact that the iPod is in its 5th or 6th generation (too lazy to look it up exactly right now) and has yet to have its dominance be realistically challenged in the MP3 (or MP3 wannabe, see WMV, ATRAC, etc.) player market.
Sure, that first guy in his prep school to bust out the earbuds had a new toy to show off, and maybe "mommy and daddy" bought it for him and he didn't really know or care if it was good. A few more people buy iPods, everybody realizes that they're not that great, and another ill-planned product vanishes into the void.
Now look at the MP3 player market. You're trying to tell me that EVERYBODY has been duped by Apple, and that OMG WHITE EARBUDS ARE SO TEH COOL! that Apple (and the iPod) are making it solely on image and marketing?
Oh, and the reason that you don't see hipsters listening to music in commercials for IBM, Oracle, and SAP (and the reason you don't see suits and boardrooms and ROI charts in Apple commercials) are because they are two different products for drastically different markets. IBM, Oracle and SAP are marketing "business solutions" to businesses; Apple is marketing personal computers and personal music players.
Also, I'm just going to say that I used OS 9 extensively, and for a while in preference to OS X while games and programs made the transition, and I have never had nearly as many problems with OS 9 as with any version of the Windows operating system up to that point.
And no, Linux or BSD or whatever else aren't viable options for 95% of home computer users.
"But try doing it using iTunes - its on the verge of impossible (in fact most ipod owners are afraid to plug their ipod in to someone's computer in case all the files are delete)."
You should be modded down, because this is user error... on your part. You will be prompted by iTunes which will say (paraphrased), "This iPod is synched with a different iTunes, would you like to erase this iPod and use this new iTunes to synch with?" You then have the option to click "No". If you want to grab music from othe people's iTunes, just set your iPod to manually update, and you can grab music from 100 different iTunes. If you wish to give your friends your music, just plop the actual mp3's onto your iPod as data and give it to them. Your entire beef is due to you not knowing how to use your iPod.
Mod him down, now...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin