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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.'"
It's spelt A S T R O T U R F.
How is it a bad thing if other companies could care less about their customers ? I'd hate to a customer of a company which did care less about me than one of those that could do but didn't.
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.
Yeah, cause it couldn't be a combination of a lot of things, including solid hardware, a useful interface/software, thoughtful design, good marketing, adequate customer service, and having the right product at the right time...it couldn't simply be that complex.
Nope, Apple must have some special secret. And all it'll take for some other company to pull the rug out from under them is to find that magic bullet, that one key aspect of their success, and then an iPod killer can truly be born.
Dammit, some people are stupid.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Apple's success clearly lies in marketing its products, which is what Steve Jobs is good at; this covers not only creating a buzz at media events or seeding the iPod so that it is "cool," but to give clueless journalists who write articles which are featured on slashdot the impression that they offer some magically better quality of service.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Well, I'm rather worried about those that couldn't.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
If you have a problem with one of their systems or an iPod (like I did) you can damn well forget it unless the problem becomes widespread enough to hit popular tech pages.
Apple is a corporation, it is not Steve Jobs, it is not warm and cuddly. If Apple loved their customers then Apple would not charge such a premium for their systems. The fact is, Apple loves to exploit, and rightfully so, their position with their customers. They have worked long and hard to create their image and they sure as hell ain't going to let the profit it generates slip by.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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
... the phrase is 'could NOT care less'. If you COULD care less, that means you do care and have room for treating your customers worse, doesn't it?
Please allow me to utter a short yelp of annoyance.
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.
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.
Because they could care less.
How does a 7-person democracy cut a pie? Into 4 pieces.
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.
I don't love Apple.
Like you said, the customers service is nothing special, and arguably worse than companies like Dell, which operate in a market with more severe competition (the windows PC).
The Apple II was pretty cool, but the 25 years of unjustified media hype and the attitude of Mac fanatics have really spoiled the Apple brand for me
So when Apple initially refused to acknowledge that their new iPod Nanos would scratch easily, where exactly was good customer service being practised?
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Apple's Steve throws frisbees, not chairs.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Oh, that's easy: many people lack self-esteem and don't want to be ridiculed for the choices they make. It applies to everything -- editors (vi! emacs!), desktop environments (kde! gnome!), operating systems (Windows! Mac OS! Unix! Linux!), consoles (Sony! Microsoft! Nintendo!), politics (Fill in your own damn names!), you name it. If there are two or more choices, sooner or later an argument will break out about it.
Any challenge to any choice can be conflated into personal insult by the right (or rather, sufficiently wrong) person, requiring a response, usually visceral and insulting. And there's an even stranger response on the part of some designers, where they simultaneously insult a product for being clunky and hard to use at the same time as they're lifting UI elements for use in the version of the app that they're designing.
The only exception I can think of is U.S. mobile phone service. ("My service sucks more." "No, I have worse coverage." "Maybe, but at least you don't have as many dropped calls as I do!" Etc.)
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
cd on over to /Volumes/[The name of your iPod] and cp the files across.
That sort of solution might be OK for the linux fanboys - but this is Apple (and I would like my filenames preserved, rather then have weird ipod db names)
When I plug in an iPod that is not the one that is usually synced with iTunes, it would be trivial for Apple to offer a "Add these files to your itunes collection" option.
But they don't - because their corporate partners are more important then their customers wishes.
My pics.
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.
That argument is poof. Of course it is better for industries to partner together from a business-relationship/profitability point of view. The point being made was that Apple is choosing the interests of the RIAA over that of its customers. The fact that Apple's actions make good business sense for them is something of an aside.
In addition, we cannot simply say "well, the company is doing what is in its own interests and we should support that" whenever we see otherwise good companies making deals with those that work to screw us.
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
Gee, I was confused, I thought you were talking about Apple records!
nothing
Except that when you browse an iPod as a portable disk, all the music loaded onto it via iTunes is stored in a hidden folder called iPod_Control, randomly separated into 50-some-odd sequentially numbered subfolders, with the artist name removed from the mp3's filename. And that's just for mp3s; AACs are a whole different barrel of wax.
Still, I find myself using my good old 3rd generation 10GB iPod as my backup device of choice, even though in its ripe old age it makes all sorts of funny whirring noises and takes longer to transfer a file via firewire than it would via... I don't know, a Palm to Palm infrared link.
But hey, it's plug and play! Wooo.
Fragging my father since 2004
What's the easiest default configuration for most people?
:/ All it takes is two minutes of reading around to figure out how to get music files back off your iPod. If you are advanced enough to want to do that manually, you should be advanced enough to search around and figure out how.
:p
That's right - sync to the library on my computer! I'll bet this exceeds the 80/20 rule, but let's stick to that - if more than 20% of iPod users ever plug their iPod into more than one computer, I'll eat my iPod.
As for hiding the music directory on the iPod, what do novice users do all the time? clean up files! So I don't blame Apple from hiding the music files on the iPod either. I can't tell you how many windows and Mac computers both I have had to fix over the years from users who didn't know what they were doing, but just had to "tidy up"....
And if you do plug your iPod into a new computer, iTunes prompts you as to what to do, and warns you that if you sync it will wipe out all the existing music on your iPod. Heck, my mother figured it out when she plugged her iPod into my laptop so I could copy some files off of it.
So stop spreading the FUD... if Apple really cared about the "interests of large corporations" they would have gone to greater effort to prevent you from copying music files off than just hiding the directory
Unless you are trolling on slashdot
Don't think for a moment that this isn't specifically designed to cultivate a fear of plugging your iPod into someone else's computer. After all, if people share music, Apple can't take a cut of the transaction.
I have a 3rd generation Ipod, my sister has 4th gen, and my dad has a nano. Neither one of us had any contact with Apple's customer service. The reason we haven't, is because there was no reason to; the ipods work flawlessly. It's because of the Product, that I like Apple. I bought an Ipod because I wanted a good mp3 player, not because I wanted to talk to friendly customer support.
I myself have found that running a business is tough, not because of all the strenous work, not because of having to support customers, but in trying to sway customers your way and get them to stick with you. You can have the best intentions in the world and explain that you are on the customer's side and do all these great things for open source, but in the end customers will still treat your business like its the enemy and just go for the cheapest.
What Apple has is amazing and is not easy to get. Its not just a matter of projecting the image of being a hip company that is keen to the alternative way of thinking. Even if you mean it, that's not enough. You have to be consistent, put up with a lot of shit for a long time until you finally win. Especially since the majority of people really just care about price over their own principles.
What Apple has is rare and amazing. Truly loyal customers.
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.
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....
Having just called the local Apple Center in my town to ask about a Superdrive replacement to my MacMini all I got was "that will cost 500-600 Euro", appalled I replied that I would be better off buying a new one, the reply "that's the way we like it"... some service buddy...
I like the product but the retailers (in EU) have to learn that this is not the way to keep me coming. For what it's worth, I just ordered the damn drive myself online for significantly less and will end up installing it myself. I hope an Apple (EU) rep will read this thread and get the message. This is the last time I am fixing it myself. I am perfectly happy to switch back to *nix systems that I service myself, if the supposed convenience of Apple fails me, I will.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
It is also, in large measure because people want to be part of an aesthetic elite. They want to be smarter than the masses. They want to belong to a club.
Apple is smart enough to be that club's totem. They have managed to get people to invest their desire to be smugly superior in a product and in Apple's products at that.
There are no flaming fanboys who defend, say, Wusthoff kitchen knives, regardless of the quality of those tools. Clearly, Apple has managed to insinuate itself in people's need to think themselves smarter than others in a way that other sold at a preimum products haven't.
This makes them largely immune to network effects: They can have 3% of the market (or whatever) and not find themselves made irrelevant by their competitor's 95% share. In a "rational" calculation, you would be a fool to ensure that your version of most consumer software products will be thrown together as an afterthought, after the larger market had been satisfied. Or built for your platform without the benefit of economies of scale. By exploiting people's needs to think themselves smarter than the herd, Apple has turned this drawback into an advantage.
I disagree. Apple is not bowing completely to every RIAA wish. If this were the case each song would be at least $3.99 and you would have to pay twice, once to have it on the computer and once to put it on the iPod. Apple must make some consessions to RIAA in order to have the rights to sell the songs, or the RIAA will just take their toys and go home. The fact that you can still get a song for $.99 and can even rip the AAC files to a playable CD shows that Apple is looking out for the customer. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people forget that businesses have to compromise, not every business can take MS's and Walmart's "My-way-or-the-highway" business style or the economy would fail.
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.
its customer is RIAA, not us the people who buy & use their products.
How fashionably militant of you.
We are the customers. The RIAA is a cartel of suppliers.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Let's be honest though. With open source you can't just plug it in and it works. You have to figure out which packages you need, download those, using some updater, manage the fact that some of your dependent packages are out of date, update those, find out you killed your movie codecs doing that, reconfigure, reupdate. And finally you can see your.. oh wait that player isn't supported but you can code it yourself if you want to take the time......
Yes I'm using hyperbole here but open source does not magically 'fix' all of our problems. I still regularly struggle with getting relatively simple things in linux to do what I want when I want without having to resort to google searches to find the right path to getting it fixed.
And if you have to compile the code yourself because it's all source code.. well better hope you don't miss something in the instructions and do something out of order.
Apple does what it sets out to do. Make is so that you don't have to compile, you don't have to set options and the 90% of users who do things and want to do things the way Apple has use cased it can. Period.
That sort of solution might be OK for the linux fanboys - but this is Apple (and I would like my filenames preserved, rather then have weird ipod db names)
...
Heh. Just the sort of know-nothingness that Apple (and MS) depend on to keep you in their thrall.
If you wanna know how it works and how to get it to do what you want, well, you gotta learn how it works. You must look behind the public mask, grasshopper, and see the reality throuth the lens of the CLI. You must learn to call things by their True Names, which can't be spoken by the mouse.
Not to mix a metaphor or anything
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'll certainly get modded down for this
;)
Way off topic I know, but this statement is in fact the key to getting modded up. Of course, I am going to be modded down for pointing this out
Yes, Apple zealots vastly exaggerate the build quality, performance, and innovation of Apple products. Nevertheless, Apple generally ends up near the top in customer satisfaction and reliability ratings. Combine that with good styling, good marketing, and decent engineering, and it's no surprise that they are doing well. They don't have to make flawless machines in order to appeal to people and in order to be worth the premium, they just need to be noticeable better than most of the competition in several, and they are that.
(Here is a recent PC World ranking.)
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."
Customer service is the most overused and useless metric in business. Frankly because everyone says it's the most important aspect. Newsflash: it's B.S.
Quality of product is the most important. Quality ( another overzealously used term used without regard to what it really means ) is extremely important. Quality craftsmanship, quality in design, quality in user experience, etc. Quality != customer service or higher cost. It also doesn't mean you make the best product possible, but you make YOUR product as well as you can possibly make it. You have to demand it of yourself.
Apple does NOT, in fact, make their own products (read the box, designed by Apple, made in China/Indonesia/Korea), but they do produce a certain amount of quality in design, and do strive to produce quality in craftsmanship (note the continued push for longer battery life, in-house redesign of the click wheel, brighter displays). Out-of-the-box, I believe a new user will have a good experience with a Mac and its OS and therefore the quality of user experience is good as well. Add these factors up, and you get a significant amount of quality product. Yes, there are constraints (iTunes has to comply with DRM, the RIAA, FCC, et al.), but you can still provide quality... you just have to know how. That, in reality, is what most manufacturers and designers just don't get: quality is a sum product of a lot of hard work ON THE PRODUCT ITSELF not the PRODUCTION OF A PRODUCT. People will buy quality products at a higher price, but only if they know it's going to a quality product. That's where sales/marketing and business collide. There IS a difference between market-speak and business-speak. I wish people would stop using such crappy crosstalk.
Reality check - Apple has fought the RIAA pretty hard to keep iTMS prices 1)lower, and 2) uniform.
We all go round to the drummer's house to have a jam, we all have our ipods with us. Now - we should be able to pool all our music together. 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)
I can't help it you and your friends 1) don't know how to use an iPod, and 2) are incapable of using flash drives, which are specifically made for that sort of thing. You *can* use the iPod as a drive. However, it's not the default mode because - *gasp* - the iPod is a music player!
If you're trying to use a device for a use that isn't its reason for existance, be prepared to do some legwork to figure out how to make it do what you want. An iPod isn't a replacement for a recording studio.
Ironically, Apple makes a great product intended *just for you.* It's called GarageBand. Get a laptop.
But they don't - because their corporate partners are more important then their customers wishes.
There wouldnt even BE iPods and iTunes if they didnt satisfy their corporate partners well enough. I applaud Jobs for getting much of the music industry to agree to distribute songs one-by-one digitally. If he had to have some strings attached to make it happen, so be it. If he hadnt, none of this would exist.
And now that it does, it may be up to new start-ups, hackers, and law suits (like in France) to make it less DRM-encumbered and more accessible.
And without the RIAA willing to play ball, Apple has nothing with the iPod. The design of the hardware/software interfaces and the business model revolves around having iTunes/iTMS.
Executive summary: RIAA bad, Apple in bed with RIAA for business purposes, best chance of RIAA extracting stick from ass is iTMS/Fairplay model.
Why do people keep playing this same sorry tune over and over again? First off , get it straight, it's the record companies, not the RIAA. Without the record companies "playing ball", Apple would most likely still have the #1 selling digital music player, but not the #1 online music store. The success of the iPod has almost nothing to do with the iTMS, and without licensing from the labels, Apple would still have the "seamless integration" of the iPod/iTunes.
And also, the whole "business model" of the iTMS isn't revolutionary at all. People keep making such a big fucking deal about how it's soooooo cutting edge and innovative just because it's the first truly successful online music store, but in reality it's the exact same business model that the recording industry has been using forever: X amount of money to record company to split up as it chooses, generally keeping most for itself and giving a pittance to the person or persons who actually created the music, and Y amount of markup to the retailer (Apple) to cover overhead (storage, software development, bandwidth, credit card fees etc.) and maybe make a little bit of profit. At best what Apple has done is evolutionary, not revolutionary. The iTMS is nothing more than Amazon without any physical product.
Executive Summary:
1) Apple has no relationship with the RIAA, so will you idiots please stop saying that, Apple is in bed with the record companies, which is NOT the same thing
2) Apple derives little to no benefit from their business relationship with the record companies
3) The best chance of further entrenching and extending the current music industry model in the online world is the iTMS/Fairplay model.
fuck you.
Don't think for a moment that this isn't specifically designed to cultivate a fear of plugging your iPod into someone else's computer. After all, if people share music, Apple can't take a cut of the transaction. the RIAA will stop letting Apple run the iTMS, and we're back to where we started - having to buy entire albums to get one good track.
I agree with you, they're trying to encourage people to not copy their friends' music libraries. And yes, there are cases - the garage band with personal noodling tracks that GP mentioned - where this is completely legal. However, the vast majority of cases are people copying tracks that they don't have distribution rights for. I think it's better to slightly inconvenience the few people (and it is slight - you can copy the tracks in the Terminal, using a shell script, using Automator, using freeware utilities, etc.) in order to make the appearance of compliance to the RIAA.
Yes I know what you mean, I had to have a friend bring me her Ipod because she lost her computer copy, but she paid for it all / owned it legally.
3 bash / 1 perl script/ and 10 hours later (all automated I did it while at work)
I had all of the ipod music moved into folders based upon artist / album
and converted it out of the DRM format.
DRM, and the RIAA, only hurts the ones that they are trying to protect.
It didn't hurt me because I am able to get around it, and use 3rd party tools.
But damn, cmmon give the users what they want.
The only difference between the iPod and any other MP3 player is that iPods can play music off iTunes. There's many more mp3 players out that that don't have all this DRM BS on them, and are actually much easier to use because of this. Just rip your cd's the way you regularly would, or download mp3s off irc (if the cd is copy protected, and you misplaced your shift key), and drag and drop the files on there. About as easy as you can get.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm an audio engineer - I've got a few dozen tracks on my iPod that I recorded and engineered, and yes, I hold distribution rights for 'em. However, I've also got 8 thousand other tracks that I don't hold distribution rights for. Many of my non-engineer friends have thousands of tracks to which they don't have distribution rights for. Should the iPod have an ability that I can use legally on less than 1% of my tracks and my friends can't use legally at all? Or should we just realize that there are alternate (and better) tools for legally sharing music - burning a CD, using the iPod in disk mode, etc.?
But that just proves the point. Your inconveniencing the users who aren't 'uber computer gawds', and at the same time not really providing any real protection against pirates. It's like the CD Copy protection used by Sony, EMI, et al. It's annoys the regular users who just want to play the songs on their mp3 player, while the real pirates just use linux of disable cd autorun.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
It's not the customer service. Apple cares as much about their customers as Steve Jobs cares about a diverse wardrobe. Apple is beloved for these reasons.... 1. Style. It makes people feel cool, cause it looks cool. 2. Intuitive use. Especially for the less computer savvy, the Apple experience is simply more coherent to how people "think" things should work. 3. When you own an Apple, you are immediately inducted into the "club". Everyone want to feel their apart of the cool crowd. Owning an Apple gives some that illusion.
Last time I checked, Apple owned their own store on Regent Street, as do they every single one of their other stores (not even through a subsidary), so that had very much to do with Apple. That said, this kind of customer service - including transferring stuff over to the new box - shouldn't be surprising, and I think it's sad that it is. I know of only one local chain that would help out with stuff like that, and they'd likely charge you for that hour and not even know what to do with the Mac in the first place (even though they sell them).
This article must have been written by either a humanities major or an MBA - there is no substance behind it. Instead, the author makes the point by saying that the new volume-limiting patch for the iPod is a great example of Apple's superior customer service. Somehow, according to the article, "it's not necessarily the iPod that makes Apple successful, but rather its customer service."
.Mac, the Apple Store, cultivating the iPod's hip image (made by Apple), and so on. These kinds of things do increase Apple's stature in the consumer electronics world, but are not, Not, NOT the same as good customer service.
I call bullshit. Of course the iPod is what people love about apple these days. iPods make up about as much of Apple's revenue as its computer sales. The other driving force is the fact that an Apple computer running OS X and Apple applications is a rock solid system, with tremendous capabilities right out of the box, and a great user experience. Do not confuse user experience with customer experience - they are not the same thing. I myself love apple, own a powerbook and an ipod, will continue to buy from them, and think their customer service is indeed top notch. However, I wouldn't in a million years claim that it is the customer service that drew me to them. People do not care a lot about customer service when they are spending money, otherwise no U.S. cable service or cellular phone provider would still be in business.
The author may have hit nearer the mark by saying "Apple is investing resources to enhance its relationship with its customers." I interpreted that as brand promotion, integrated services like
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.
"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
Its good for the consumer because most consumers couldn't give a rats ass if something was open sourced or not. Apple's main theme is building complete and easy to use systems. Thats pretty much the total opposite of open source which is easy to configure only for geeks and comes in piecemeal fashion requiring one to venture all over to get everything they need. You've got to keep in mind that Slashdot folks are a subset of a niche of the general population. The things that concern a Slashdotter don't register in a non-slashdotter's mind.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
...you can choose whether you want iTunes to automatically synchronise with your iPod when you plug it in to your PC. The information that decides whether to synchronise automatically or not is actually stored on the iPod, which means that if you don't want to synchronise and plug it into your mate's PC then it won't completely wipe your iPod and put his Britney albums on there instead.
I've got my iPod set up so I have to move songs manually (I don't really have the need to store some 8000 songs on my PC) and I've plugged it into various other PC's all without problems.
I never apologise, I'm sorry but that's just the way I am - Homer
If you really believe that any of iPod, iTunes or iTMS could have succedded without the others, then you are very shortsighted. If you believe that Apple developed each of these three components in the order in which they did purely by coincidence, then you would be mistaken. iTunes is Apple's control. That is why it was developed first. Then came the iPod, the success of which forcebly spread iTunes onto millions of computers. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: iTMS. The building blocks for the success of iTMS were laid years before it was introduced. Why have other music selling services not been as successful?? It is because Apple already had penetrated your desktop and your mp3 player. All they needed to do was add a link to the store right under the button for your library. You are correct about RIAA and FairPlay. Apple had a hard enough time getting the executives at the record companies to jump on board. I doubt the company is on very good terms with any recording company. The record industry needs Apple just as much as Apple needs the record company. It is a relationship out of tenuous mutual dependance, not love. Every few months you can dig up a story on how Apple and some major label are clashing on some issue... Evolutionary? Sure. But I say that the iTunes-iPod-iTMS was quite revolutionary from a bussiness perspective.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
Wow, I had no idea people love Apple for their customer service! To me, the best thing about Apple customer service is that I don't have to rely on it much. Things tend to work on Macs, at least relative to other platforms.
No, for me, the best thing about Apple is that they remain committed to R&D. They're coming out with new ideas all the time. Sure, some of them inevitably flop, but they don't just sit around and copy what other companies are doing. They also keep their development teams fairly small and don't put out a lot of bloatware. They keep their GUI simple and accessible, yet leave the door open for tinkerers.
This is trivial. This is a no-brainer. But here we are, on a site for NERDS, and people can't grasp this basic idea.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
It's not for their product reliability, that's for sure.
At least we had class actions to help with new Ipod batteries and burned out Powerbook main boards.
How fashionably militant of you.
Gosh! Fashionably militant? I'm not sure what you mean, but it sounds exciting.
We are the customers. The RIAA is a cartel of suppliers.
Oh - right, thanks for clearing that up. God I was stupid for getting them the wrong way round. Or perhaps I was making a point and you're just more literal minded then the rest of the human race.
My pics.
I haven't found this to be difficult with iTunes, it just takes a little time getting all the files onto a single computer then dragging them to the iPod after you connect it. Make sure that you do not have auto-update turned on and there should be no problem.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
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
I think you're missing the point. If the iPod didn't provide some semblance of copy protection, if it didn't create the appearance of protecting copyrighted music, and if Apple as a company didn't pretend to give a shit about the RIAA, then the iPod could not exist as a consumer product in the way it does today.
Nobody likes the RIAA, except for the record labels. I doubt even the people who work at Apple like them, or like having to basically cripple their hardware and software because of them. But it just doesn't make any sense, if you wanted to produce a useful product -- and useful requires that you not get sued and get an injunction placed against distributing the product, or get run out of business by billion-dollar DMCA lawsuits, groundless as they may be -- you don't go taking a baseball bat to the hornet's nest that is the RIAA.
Instead, you blow some smoke at them. Appease them, if you will. You throw some trivial copy protection on there, enough so you can say "hey, we told them not to steal music," but which makes it easy for anybody with half a brain to download Senuti (or any of the other dozen utilities that are out there) and share their music with anyone else.
It's a good compromise, and I much prefer it to the alternative, which is that they wait for the RIAA to either sue them into the ground, or use their pet politicians to pass some bullshit law requiring really onerous DRM. Because that's the alternative.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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
Has anyone ever used zsh?
Badass Resumes
Face it, man. Nobody wants to look at your crack.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Yeah, at BestBuy you will end up getting another machine, and we charge $59 for a data transfer from one machine to another. If you have a "Service Plan" on a computer, it will be sent off to a service center to be repaired, and will be back in about 2 weeks. If you have software problems, you can end up spending over $200 to get it cleaned off. How much does the genius bar charge? Of course, GeekSquad is there to capitalize on people's problems, and the GeniusBar is there to help people. I hate my job, I can't wait till I'm out of school.
Sig: I stole this sig.
If you ask me, this article is a little late, as my recent experience has shown that Apple is no longer a top performer in customer service.
My Exprience:
I ordered a new MacBook Pro 2 GHz from Apple's online store. When it came, it emitted a mind splitting tone whenever the screen backlight was on. I talked to an Apple Care rep, they were nice, and agreed with me that it sounded like a problem with the backlight or the inverter board that feeds power to the backlight. I sent in my machine. This is fine everything cannot leave the factory perfect every time.
Two weeks later I got my machine back. I turned it on, and the screen whine was still there and still audible from across the room. I checked the repair record, and they had replaced the mother board. No work had been done to the inverter board which is separate from the mother board, and nothing had been done to the screen back light.
I called Apple Care and was escalated to a product specialist. The specialist was insulting, and implied that the noise was not happening. Additionally at no point did they acknowledge that this was a wide spread problem. The Apple Care specialist suggested that I take the machine to an Apple Certified Repair center or an Apple store.
Having read of people's nightmares with the Apple store, I decided to use an independent Apple Certified Repair facility. The independent repair tech heard the noise too and winced. He said they would work on fixing it.
The independent repair facility called the next day and said they could not fix the problem as Apple had not acknowledged the issue. They had to send the machine back to Apple itself, where it had not been properly repaired the first time.
Now I wait for Apple to have try 2 at fixing my brand new unusable on arrival computer. I hope I do not need to send in my machine for a third time for this problem like at least one poster on Apple's support discussion forums.
To console myself I wrote them a letter demanding either a new machine of higher specification, free warranty care for the time that I own the machine, or $500 as compensation for the fact that I am effectively receiving a refurbished machine instead of a new one.
It would have all been fine if they had fixed the problem the first time, or if the problem was one that was not obvious from the moment the machine was turned on, or if they had simply acknowledged that this was an issue that several people were having and they were trying to figure out a fix.
If you ask me, the shark has been jumped.
...there's a simple answer, and it's wrong.
... dialog boxes.)
(H. L. Mencken, paraphrased.)
I think there's more to it than great products or R&D to improve the customer experience, although those are certainly major factors. I think there's a bunch of mutually reinforcing components to the Apple Cult, all of which certainly benefit from product quality and customer service, but which separate Apple from other companies that produce great products (e.g. Gillette, Disney, BMW).
One issue is sunken cost. If you pay a lot for something -- anything, unless it totally sucks, you tend to cleave to it. (I may love Gillette Razors, but when I run out of blades there's nothing stopping me from trying Schick.)
Another is mutual exclusiveness (which ties into sunken cost). By choosing product A, getting familiar with product A, and buying things that are compatible with product A, you make switching to product B far more difficult. (If I drive a BMW there's no real financial reason not to switch to Acura for my next car. It's not like I was planning to move the leather seats and stereo from my BMW into my new Acura.)
Another is self-image. Apple is very good at projecting itself as a cool, individualistic, creative company that produces products for cool, individualistic, creative people. Microsoft tries desperately to create this image for itself (look at ANY of its mainstream TV ads for the last ten years) and fails to achieve this. Plenty of computers appear in TV shows and movies as product placement, but Macs appear in TV shows (e.g. Seinfeld, Buffy, etc.) because the folks making the shows use them. (In both examples, Apple actually paid or provided new computers to the shows to put current models in.) Here's a rough guide: if the folks in a TV Show or an ad are using your product and the logo is taped over, it's not paid product placement. If you see a website screenshot in an ad, it's probably in Safari and showing Aqua widgets. If you see a computer in a furniture ad, it's usually a Mac. (Heck many websites are essentially ads for Aqua. Look, we're desperately trying to look as cool as Apple
There's always self-presentation too. Since Apple products are expensive and stylish they're great conspicuous consumption -- especially when a MacBook Pro is cheaper than a couple of Louis Vuitton purses, looks better (in my opinion), lasts longer, and gets more use. (How many of us can afford the *clothes* -- or *shoes* -- in Sex in the City? I owned Carrie's laptop though.)
Apple also manages -- and this is a neat trick -- to always be the underdog. (At least post IBM PC.) Even when it dominates a market (as with iPod and iTunes) it somehow manages to be the "in thing" and simultaneously the underdog. (Thank you French courts, thank you constant idiotic remarks from Microsoft, thank you Apple Records, thank you Wall Street doomsayers.)
Apple has always had a lot of geek cred too. Sure, semi-technical folks (the kind of people who consider hacking an AUTOEXEC.BAT file or using RegEdit makes them an elite hacker) prefer PCs, but uber-geeks have almost always preferred Macs (at least to PCs, if not Suns or Lisp Machines). Part of this probably stems -- ironically -- from Macs being harder to develop for than PCs. (At least until RealBasic came out.)
Ok Fritz, Perhaps this will drive the point home.
I own a 30" HD Cinema Display purchased as a refurb, and a ViewSonic 20" purchased new. I paid $2099 for the 30" and $1299 for the 20" (when it was new). Given their respective pixel densities, I paid $0.051 per pixel for the 30" and $0.067/pixel for the 20".
Both of the displays have had to go in for repair. Both companies honored my "basic consumer rights", however I believe you will find that their styles vary widely.
The 30" would intermittently get an abundance of white pixels. I contacted Apple, they overnighted me a box. The next day I put the display and some photos of the failure mode in the box and called Airborne who picked it up that day. It was at the factory the following day where they replaced the panel and the cable and overnighted it back to me the same day. Total down time: approx 40 hours. Cost: $0.
Now, here's the story of the 20" repair. Basically, the inverters are failing. I contacted ViewSonic, spoke to a tech who didn't seem to understand my explanation that after power up, I could see a flickering image of my computer's desktop for about 3 seconds, much like a faulty fluorescent light fixture, then the screen would go black and the power LED stays green, and yes the cables are screwed down and firmly inserted. After about 10 minutes, she told me her computer was fubar'd, took my number and said she would have to call me back. I waited 6 hours, no return call. So I called back. Next guy says sure, here's your RMA number, you can ship it to us or drop it off at our place. You also have to fax your proof of purchase to this number. Note he did not specify any sequence to these steps.
ViewSonic is about 20 miles away from me, and I wanted to get out for a drive (and I did not have a box), so I dropped it off. I had previously taken this same unit in for repair, and they accepted it with just the RMA number. Not so this time. When I was at the factory, I was then informed they could not accept my display because nobody had approved it for receipt. I showed her the photocopy of my store receipt I had brought with me, but no dice. She tells me she has no authority to override the system, then pointed at the phone, yes an extra phone on the service desk which was oriented to face the customers. I'm guessing they need the phone a lot. So I call tech support again, give them the RMA number, tell them my situation and that they had responsibility for not properly instructing me about the sequence of faxing and returning. I ask, can you please fix this for me so I can drop the monitor off? Basically, somebody needed to push a button to enable the receiving clerks software to accept the barcode scan from my monitor. On hold for 10 minutes. The guys tells me sorry he can't do anything. I ask to speak to a supervisor. 10 minutes, sorry there is supervisor available. I tell him I'll be OK if he can overnight me a prepaid shipping box to my home, I'll send it then. 10 minutes on hold, sorry we can't send you the box. I then tell him if I have to go home I will be suing them in small claims court for damages due to their negligence. 10 minutes on hold, and still he can't do anything to help me. He says after all that time on hold that the problem is between me and the clerk. I tell the clerk that was the last thing he said, and she was flabbergasted. She says I don't have any way to do that. So she calls up tech support via the same 800 number (I heard the same voice prompts while she had it on speaker), gets through to a supervisor, who finally after she explains the situation 3 times, pushes the appropriate buttons to set whatever flag in their RMA database. Nearly an hour later, they accept my monitor.
As for the repair, well, how do you think that goes? It will be 7-14 BUSINESS Days for them to repair my monitor, at which point, they will ship the unit back to me via ground. Total down time: so far, about 11 days, and I still don't have my monitor back. Just to replace some cra
cat
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.
....According to the link below, Apple's marketshare has been cut in half......
Why is there so much ado about market share? How much market share does BMW or Mercedes Benz have? How about Jaguar etc.? Apple is a huge company and is making more profits that the Dells of this world. I just had an iPod die after about ten months. I was told that they would send me a new one and I should return the dead one. I had a brand new one delivered to me in two days. I put the dead one in the supplied return envelope and had no costs whatsoever. That is pretty fast, considering that we live in a rural area. I have been using Apple products since the Mac-Plus in 1985 and this the first time I had a warranty claim or an Apple product die. We still have a color-classic Mac sitting in the corner, that runs 24/7 since 1995 as an answering/fax machine and X-10 programmer/controller. Apple is not perfect, but they get a lot right and therefore have loyal, repeat customers.
All theory is gray
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.
My reasons for not liking appleas are many. My best example being a lightning strike at a client's home. One iMac and one Dell. Both network cards were bad. Ten minutes and $45 later, the Dell was up and going. Eight days and $850, and the apple came back from an authorized repair center never to act quite the same (client's words, not mine).
They are not more stable. "Better" is relative. They are pretty shinny things. I prefer a platform I can upgrade, and find software and hardware for. If I don't like the OS, I like a wide variety of choices to replace it with. This just is not currently available for the mac. All this, and you have to pay more, as in "A fool and their money are soon parted."
These are the talking points of people who haven't bought an Apple product and don't intend to. Asking them why Apple is popular is like asking a conservative to explain why someone would support a liberal candidate. You're going to get a pretty biased, inaccurate view. If you want to know why people do something, you'll get the best answer if you simply ask them--not the critics.
And don't be shocked when you get a bunch of different answers. Different people do things for different reasons...successful companies are the ones that provide a lot of good reasons (not just one) to buy their product.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I have worked and played on Macs since the Mac SE. I had an SE, IIci, IIcx, Quadra A/V, 9500, G3, G4, iMac, iMac G4, iBook, 2 Powerbooks, and am currently using a Dual G5. I have three generations of iPods; perhaps there is some hardware I missed somewhere. At any rate, I have never used Apple's support aparatus. Ever. No DOA units, no failures, no substantial data loss -- just plenty of wonky software, but no disastrous problems. I read the support forums, and I see lots of problems -- perhaps I have been very lucky. Apple is not without their problems, and as a software developer, I do see a lot of them, but the performance of the hardware and software I have purchased from them speaks for itself. It's great stuff.
I don't think the crappy article gets this across at all, but it's probably the submitter's fault for hyping the article to be about why people love Apple so much. I would say that Apple's loud headphone solution may be commendable, but I wouldn't really know because I am smart enough not to blast my ears out with the thing and never needed to call them about it!
Fanboy? I guess so. And it's deserved. I am a conspicuous consumer, cynic, and generally hard to please. Getting me to be a fanboy is quite an achievement on Apple's part. All they had to do was make products that don't suck.