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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.'"
I recently had to take my Intel Mac Mini back to the London Regent Street store after a problem booting up. Unfortunately it was one day after the 14-day refund and replace guarantee had expired. They said, 'oh well, 15 days is close enough', and they replaced it there and then on the spot, and transferred all my data on to the new machine on the same day. I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that with any other company ever.
I have two dead iPods and a dead iBook to show for my experiment with Apple. One died just out of warranty, the replacement I bought had the drive go with less than a month left on the warranty. The replacement came, and turns out had a bad dock connector. Unfortunately they wouldn't honor a warranty on the replacement and in the two remaining weeks of the warranty, I didn't happen to use the replacement. So now I've got two dead iPods.
I also have a iBook that died with the extremely common logic board failure two months out of warranty... a problem that they extended the warranty coverage for on the G3 iBooks, but didn't do on the G4 even though its a very common problem.
Apple was the reason I left ten years of Linux use as my primary desktop OS behind, and Apple is the reason I'll be going back.
Why I gave up on Apple: A tale of unrequited love
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/mac.html
So Apple's customer service happened to get way better right when the iPod was released?
Customer service may be a (small) part of the experience, but don't go claiming that iPod competitors are chasing a pie in the sky.
Most Mac users I know, including myself, have never called customer service.
I had a problem with a recent iTunes patch, long story short it broke all DRM-ed music playback on my PC but not on the iPod. Tried all the standard bits, uninstall, reinstall, looked up help page...
..." and they sent back a cookie cutter "You can't convert to WMA" ...
Sure Apple did have a help page for the problem but it didn't help one tiny bit.
So I contacted them. Said something like "DRM protection music is distorted during playback as suggested by an apple help page(URL); MP3, WMA, and CD Audio playback works just fine
This is just yet another company that doesn't give too hoots enough to read what you send them or to respond on their forums. The article is talking a whole load of bull from my experiences with apple up to this point.
If you ask me, the company with the single best customer service is Amzon(.co.uk). They don't bull you... They are MORE than fair, and don't make you jump though hoops.
Forget about the pathetic 14 day in store refund rubbish, that's only if you change your mind and decide you don't want it.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you. You may be right about the ipods, but thats certainly not grounds to judge a whole company on. I had an ibook that had an issue (bad logicboard) and called them up. After troubleshooting, they figured that out. That was on monday. I received a box tuesday morning from them to ship back the unit for repair(thep paid shipping all ways). I sent it out that day, it got there wednsday. They repaired it and shipped it out the next day, and i got it friday. I've dealt with a lot of different hardware companies, and never have I had that kind of turnaround.
Don't believe me? Why is that people were actually wearing just the ear buds when the iPod was becoming popular? Image. During the switch campaign, all of the folks that I saw in the adds were the all blck wearing, pierced noses, and other younger folks who looked really cool. I didn't see any folks in business suits talking about ROI or how it made their organization much more profitable - like you see in IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc... ads.
Is Apple really that much better than any other computer out there? I haven't seen any compelling evidence for that. I would agree that as recent as the mid-90's, Apple was superior, but now, I don't see it. Prove me wrong - please. I have to say that Apples are much nicer looking than anything out there. And I think Jobs knows this. Jobs is a genius when it comes to marketing. He made a brilliant move with the "flavor" iMacs years ago. I thought those machines were crap to use - it was slow and OS 9 crashed and hung a lot. OS X works much better on them, but it's still slow. But they sure looked great!
I haven't tried the new machines, yet. I'm not in the market for a new machine, but when I am, beleive me, I will look at Apple again. I do like the fact that all of the dev tools are free! Unlike the other OS company.
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
People love Apple because they INNOVATE!
When was the last time Microsoft innovated? Windows? Nope, they copied that from Apple and Xerox. Word/Excel? Nope. DOS? Bought that from another company. I would think you have to go all the way back to Microsoft BASIC to see the last unique product that they created.
How about Apple? Apple I, Apple II, LISA, Mac, iMac, iPOD...
Creativity wins in the long run.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
A lot of non-professional multitrack music recorders use lossy compression (mp2, mp3 or proprietary) nowadays. It uses less disk space and less disk I/O. Good A/D converters are much more important. Most of the time you can even bounce (merge) tracks a couple of times before you actually hear the difference....
Of course there are companies (like Tascam) that market low-budget multitrackers with lossless recording, but the tradeoff is that there wasn't enough money left to include good A/D converters and the recording is limited to two tracks at a time....
Apple's support for my ipod was redeemed right at the last moment. It had been a slog from the get go. I had a nano without any protection. I had kept it in my shirt pocket all the time but it still got scuffed.
I rang apple support and I must of caught the first guy on a bad day. I asked him if Apple had a policy yet on the nano's, his reply was "all ipods get scratched". Personally I think i got him on a bad day and he'd been asked this before. I told him about my ipod mini which was still in mint condition but that didn't matter, he told me I should get the Apple ipod skin covers.
The second person told me the same thing as I didn't accept his answer and rang back on another day, I was still unimpressed and told her I want to get a refund my the device. It was still in its 14 day money back grace period. That was how bad the thing picked up screen damage, to think I rang the first guy days before this person. This person also told me to get the Apple iPod skin covers.
When I got through to the third person, all she could offer me was £20 as a token of goodwill or have the ipod returned to apple and get a refund, I asked if I could just get a replacement but she said no, not possible. Duh! What am I going to do with the refund then? She also told me to get the skin covers from apple. I decided to think it was just the typical spiel that had been handed down because I had ordered them anyway before speaking to the first guy and guess what? When the covers came, they didn't protect the screen! The lunacy of it all.
Anyway, I got a new ipod and kept the plastic film on it and buried it under a skin cover. Its sad I have to do this to such a nice machine and its sad Apple support sucked in this case. I suppose its still sad that I bought a second one as well after all the shit I got off the first one.
Jonathanjk.com
"I could care less"
Compare with:
"I couldn't care less"
In other words, it's sarcastic. See Steven Pinker's the Language Instinct for further insight into this, in the section "The Language Mavens".
I dropped my wifes powerbook. The case was a little bent but everything was working fine at first - about 2 weeks later the screen stopped working. We took it the store and told them what happened - it's important to note at this point that I had not purchased the extended warranty - they said "go ahead and purchase the apple care plan ($100) and we'll fix it up and give you a loaner while we work on it.
I was stunned - I had been totally prepared to pay for the fix. It hadn't ever occurred to me that they would fix a dropped laptop or better yet allow me to buy the warranty post breakage. It was, to put it mildly, wicked excellent.
I have windows, linux and Mac computers at home and like all three - but this experience more than any has made me a fan of Apple the company as much as the products.
Most Apple customers never even deal with Apple customer service.
Which is, of course, the best service of all.
Apple pays very close attention to the issues that drive their support calls, and they get prioritized accordingly. The MagSafe power connector, for example, was developed because Apple knows exactly how many times they've fixed a machine because their users have damaged a laptop by snagging the power cable and dragging it off a table.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This is simply a case where the ingenuity of American laziness has been justified (er, rationalized) in a Wikipedia article. When you get right down to it, using "could" instead of "couldn't," literally interpreted, means quite the opposite of what is intended. What's particularly unfortunate, is my suspicion that a fair number of people don't even understand this.
Let me tell you the Tale of Two Companies.
My girlfriend bought a brand new top of the line Gateway laptop in December. After 18 days of use, the screen fried. She owns three Gateway laptops, has always purchased the most expensive warranty plan, and up until this year, they always have had as a part of that plan:
1) Free overnight shipping for repair service.
2) A toll-free number to call for repair service.
3) Very responsive turnaround times on repair.
After having her laptop for 18 days, it took her over a month to get it back from Gateway, and she had to pay $60 in shipping costs. All they had to do was replace a backlight on the screen. All three of the warranty items described above changed in the past year. They changed the terms of their existing warranties because in the warranty it says they can do so.
While that may have been legal, it certainly doesn't lead to happy customers. Needless to say, we are never buying another Gateway.
Contrast this with my experience with Apple. Whenever I've had a problem, I've been able to go to the Apple Store at the local mall and work with the Mac Genius there to get support. Free.
I bought an Airport Express in 2004, and when it broke, I took it to the Apple Store with no receipt. In under 5 minutes I left with a brand new AXP, with no hassle. Six months later that one also broke, but as I was beyond 1 yr warranty, Apple couldn't replace it. However, the Mac Genius checked all apple stores for an open-box item. He couldn't find any. He said that he would call me when an open box AXP came in.
Sure enough, a month later, I got a phone call from the Mac Genius. They had received an open box AXP. I had already bought a new AXP, but I couldn't believe that I actually got a call back like I was promised.
Having an Apple Store less than five miles away from my house means that I get fantastic service when things go wrong, with no hassles. It's what CompUSA, Micro Center, and Best Buy have all tried to do (Geek Squad?) but have generally failed at. Apple does it well and it means a lot to the average customer.
rm -rf
But can we PLEASE get it into our heads ONCE AND FOR ALL that the purpose of any big corporation is JUST to make money for its shareholders - END OF STORY!!! Whether or not you, the consumer, thinks they make good or bad products is pretty much irrelevant to them once they have your money. And if they give you a good customer service and/or a good feeling every time you deal with them, it is not because they're feeling nice, warm or friendly about you but because it is profitable to do so.
If you love your Mac or your iPod then great - good luck to you. But PLEASE get it out of your thick skull that wearing a corporate logo of ANY sort is cool - it isn't because it just goes to show the rest of the world that you are insecure enough to want to belong to one (or more) exclusive little cliques that makes you feel special because you can look down on those that aren't members of those same cliques.
Buy an article of clothing because it looks nice on you or feels good on you, buy an iPod because it sounds good or fits well in your jeans pocket - but don't just buy something because it's made by "Gap" or "Apple" because then you really are showing the rest of the world only how much of a corporate puppet you really are...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Another one is "could of" instead of "could have"...
:-p
I think that stems from people saying "could've" instead of "could have". "Could've" sounds almost exactly like "could of", so someone who has never seen it written hears it the wrong way, and walla.
Note: "walla" is another example of this phenomenon, in place of the french "voila".
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
I hate Apple because of the hipsters.
I love Apple products. I'm really in to this simple and sleek style, and OS X rocks my world. However, I couldn't believe it when I was reading this blurb about how great Apple's support is. What a joke.
I recently purchased an intel mac mini. I bought it with the intention of using it as a media center (podcasts/vidcasts/music). The day I received it I began setting it up when I noticed the fan spin up to a very loud volume. Immediately I opened up activity monitor to figure out what was putting so much load on my system. There was nothing. The CPU usage was fluctuating between 0-3%.
I shrugged my shoulders and ignored it. A little bit later it did it again. Turns out, it does it every 5 minutes. The system will be dead silent for 5 minutes and then the fan will begin to spin, slowly at first but increasing in speed until it is very loud noise that I can hear on the other end of my house.
Thinking this couldn't possibly be correct, I phoned up apple support. What a joke. I had to reset my PMU about 10 times because that is apple's phone support's solution for everything. I even spent about 8 minutes with one guy as he had me try over and over again to boot into Open Firmware with a certain key sequence. He was absolutely positive that I must be pressing the wrong keys until I brought up the fact that the intel macs use EFI, not open firmware.
So their phone support sucks, but that's not the real problem. I think the majority of computer literate users don't expect the phone support to actually solve the problem for them. The problem is the only solutions they would offer me is to bring it to a local technician, drive 60 miles to the closest apple store, or BUY APPLECARE so that they could send a technician to my home.
I obviously chose to bring it to a local technician. Turns out the local technician doesn't know jack about apple computers. Somehow they're certified, but they don't know squat. I realized this the instant I brought my mac mini to the place and they oooh'ed and awww'ed over how small a mac mini was. They had never seen a mac mini! They went on to ask me questions about it and I brought up Front Row. They look puzzled and I asked them if they knew what Front Row was, to which they replied no. I realized there was no way in hell these people were going to be able to fix a mac, they didn't even have basic user knowledge of them.
I called them two days later to see what the status was, but the technician wasn't there so they didn't know. They told me they'd have him call me the next day to let me know. Of course he didn't, so I called him. The guy basically didn't have any status to give me, he wasn't even sure if the problem was there because "he had a lot of other computers there," and he couldn't hear if the fan was on or not in my mac mini. He told me he could run some diagnostic software on it, but that he has been trying to download it from apple and their connection keeps screwing up. I told him in the nicest voice I could fake that I'd just come and pick it up since he can't figure out if there was even a problem.
After I picked up my machine, I phoned apple to let them know what terrible technicians they had sent me to, and to ask if I can just send it to someone who would actually be able to fix the problem. Turns out, I can't. There is apparently no way for apple's phone support to allow me to send a mac mini in to be fixed. Even if I had purchased the applecare, they would still only send a technician to my house (I'm betting it'd be from that same crappy local technician shop). The only other solution for me is to drive for an hour, drop off my mac mini at an apple store, drive home, and then repeat when my machine is ready to be picked up.
Like I said, what a joke. This is terrible support and I'm amazed that there can be an entire slashdot story devoted to their support being great. Has april fools started early? I just bought a brand new broken computer from Apple and they won't let me send it back to be fixed. Yeah, great support.
I'm no fan of Dell, but I gotta admit that when my girlfriend had problems with her Dell laptop they didn't waste any time in sending her a box that she could ship her computer in.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
Disclaimer: I'm currently a Mac fanboy and am fortunate enough to use them at home and at work.
But, this guy is on crack. Apple's customer service has always been pretty crummy in my experience and historically. The things I like about Apple are:
- They release great and innovative products
- They aren't afraid to shake things up
- They release products that fulfill a need or want before I knew I needed or wanted it.
- UNIX
- Sex appeal
Are you kidding? I have several friends who rave about their kitchen knives. You hear more about Apple because you are a geek. They hear more about knives because they enjoy cooking.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I've been a nearly-full-time Apple user since ~2000. I love my PowerBook, I love OSX, I love my Apple apps, and I love my iPod. But I've never felt that Apple has "excellent customer service". I mean, I'm not sure exactly what to compare it to... maybe it's better than Dell or something?
.mac and AppleCare).
I mean, the design and overall quality of products is a part of customer service, and they have that down. But actual interaction with the company we're talking about, right?
The floor staff at the Apple store are a mixed bag... I've encountered folks who were great and folks who were not. One mistake they make is to put far too much emphasis on upselling, which makes for a used-car-sales experience. They pride themselves on saying "we don't work on commission", but don't mention that their work performance is judged solely on their ability to attach items to the order (like
The Genius Bar people are always worn out and a bit testy. I've worked customer service, and in my experience this is more a function of a company who never lets customer service tell customers what they want to hear, rather than just the existence of annoying customers. Case in point: virtually any type of damage to a powerbook results in a repair cost very close to purchasing a refurb unit. If your screen is cracked or your case is dented, it's $1700 flat fee, I think. Kind of ridiculous, no? I did break a Powerbook screen once, and after steaming at their prices, I was lucky enough to find another company who would do it for $600. So I'm sure Apple could do it at a better cost.
I also remember calling support on iTunes. Back when the DRM only allowed 3 computers, i ran out because I sold a machine and forgot to de-authorize the music. They did clear my authorization list, but then they reprimanded me for my error and acted like I shouldn't expect them to do that for me. Good customers service wouldn't do that in any case.
Anyways, I love Apple products, but their customer service is average at best.
Cheers.
PS - of course I may be biased as I work at Zappos, where we really do have excellent customer service. I shit you not.
My favorite Apple CS story is about when I got my Airport Extreme, and an Apple-recommended printer to lug into it. We have two Powerbooks here, and neither of them could find the printer following the (meager) instructions that it came with. So, after a lot of frustrating failures, I called Apple for help.
The fellow that I talked to started off by wanting to make sure that my Internet connection was working properly. This was curious, because it had nothing to do with the problem; I should have been able to use the printer even without an Internet connection. In fact, that would have been the logical aproach to isolate the problem (and in fact would have worked). But I went along, to see what he knew that I didn't.
I was walked through the process of rebooting the Airport and my Powerbook. But when he got to the gateway, a linux box, I balked when he told me to reboot it. This was clearly far beyond any reasonable act; better would have been to disconnect it from and internal LAN (and that would have also worked, it turned out).
He got rather miffed at my refusal to reboot a machine that was outside the scope of the problem. His response was, in essense, to tell me that Apple doesn't support the Airport in the presence of "unauthorized" computers. If I wanted help, I'd have to shut down all non-Apple equipment, and give the Airport a direct connection to the Internet.
I finally gave up, and tackled the problem myself. I eventually pinned it down: Unbeknownst to me (because it wasn't mentioned in any documentation I could find), the Airport was running a DHCP server, and its address range overlapped that of the LAN's DHCP server (the linux box). When I found this, I changed them to not overlap, and the printer suddenly worked. None of this required rebooting anything.
This might just be a personal problem, except for something that I didn't mention to the CS guy: Part of what I was doing on my home network was testing stuff for the people I was working for. I wrote a report of this "support" incident, making special note of Apple's unwillingness to support their Airport in a mixed-vendor environment. This had an immediate effect: Apple was dropped from the list of acceptable vendors for their network. Like most companies with offices in several states, they had a rather mixed combination of computing stuff, and the ability to play nice with the others was high on their list of desirable features.
Although they had a lot of Windows boxes, and a few Macs, they went with RedHat linux rather than Macs for their net's infrastructure, with a few Cisco boxes in the obvious places. And a mixture of wireless things, all chosen partly because they were linux-friendly, and none from Apple.
So by blowing me off as they did, Apple lost at least one significant corporate customer.
I might add that it wasn't just this one incident that eliminated them from consideration. But everyone did agree that they were significantlly better than Microsoft.
Doing your testing from a "home" site can be a useful thing for a company to do. You learn a lot of things that you can't learn from a salesman. I recommend it.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to learn how to access that printer from our linux and Windows boxes. It's suppose to "just work". Yeah, right.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
People tend to justify being elitists when they're provably correct.