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Why First Generation Apple Products Suck
mmAPP writes "CoolTechZone.com has an article up that pleads with Apple to focus on its quality assurance before releasing new products. From the article: 'If anything, I think Apple should do a better job at quality assurance than Dell, HP or other OEMs that deal with more units than Apple. The benefit of being a considerably small company (in comparison to other OEMs) is to focus on delivering quality products. There's no denying that Apple is perhaps one of the most innovative companies when it comes to consumer electronics, but ignoring quality as a result is not something it needs to ignore.'"
[sigh] Yet another vacuous "story" posted by someone just trying to drive hits to their ads. I'd like to see the day when the text on a page offered up more than a few paragraphs, surrounded by ads/other useless stuff.
... well "interesting"... Apparently a smaller company has *more* resources to devote to indirect profit activities such as QA. Apparently the larger you get, the harder it is to use that workforce. Seems ... odd to me.
Sure, Apple aren't perfect, but let's face it, who is ? Not that I'm at all religious, but I'm fairly sure there's some mention of "let him without fault throw the first stone" in some old book somewhere. Ok, so everyone has an opinion, hell there's no reason why you should listen to me - bitch if that's what floats your boat; but to do it purely to provide profit via another vector *does* annoy me. One more site to ignore from now on...
I'm sure pretty-much every company does their level best, within some budget, to give their customers the best experience - it's only good business sense. I think Apple actually do *better* at that than most. Shame the nay-sayers disagree...
Not to mention that the logic is
For what it's worth, I gave my sister a nano, she's an air stewardess, and it travels a lot, stuffed in a handbag along with loads of other luggage (tardis-like, in fact - another story...). Yes there are some (small) scratches on it, but no more than any of the other plastic items she carries - significantly less than her credit cards, for example. Yes, it's only one data-point, but the pictures of the unusable screens that were floating about the internet seem maliciously-driven to me - you'd have to take a scourer to the surface to get it that bad...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
...is actually quite fantastic. I've bought lord knows how many laptops from them, with not a single dead pixel, ever. Never a failed hard drive, never a faulty component.
Where first-gen Apple products do have issues is not with QA, but with design stubornness. They used the scratchy ipod plastic not because they didn't know it was scratchy, but because Steve liked the look of it. The heat issues are not an issue of "whoops! look at that, processors produce heat!" They know that the machines will run hot, but want to keep the sleek form factor anyway.
All in all, I think Apple products have few overall bugs, but the tight design all around makes those few design flaws stick out like sore thumbs. (damn you, TiBook hinges!)
The trouble with innovation is that you typically learn things before anyone else does, through your mistakes.
When I say innovation, I am not suggesting the iPod as a product is innovative. Or the MacBook as a laptop is innovative. I mean more towards specifc features and functions.
The screen used on the Nano, for example. Nobody tried putting it on a MP3 player before. Someone at Apple thought it would hold up. Oops. Guess not.
One approach would be to take the Dell route. Only incorporate technologies already proven by someone else. Well, that lacks the innovative spirit that is driving Apple's products. (Again their specific products may not be innovative, it is the feature they incorporate.)
I know a great number of you wait until a new batch of products arrive before opting for one, but is it really too much for Apple to release products that are near perfect (or at least don't have major problems)? Maybe I'm expecting too much. I can't think of one vendor who hasn't had to recall a product which leads to investigate a bit of logic... Nobody is perfect.
don't think Apple should focus on increasing its market share. Apple is not responsible enough to handle a small (I use this term loosely) group of users; do we really expect them to be a mainstream company? Apple will always have a great market share because of their marketing and they've been mainstream since Billy boy was stealing Xerox codes.
Is it me or does this author sound like a disgruntled Apple enduser. Perhaps a Dell employee or other corporate shmoo.
Infiltrated dot Net
The article is 100% Pure Troll.
His "questions" he'd like to ask sound exactly like "Have you stopped beating your dog?"
Do you really do real world testing on early adopters?
Why is it that nearly all products you unveil are plagued with serious setbacks?
Why is your quality assurance department so incompetent?
Do you ever learn your lesson from previous mistakes?
If so, how do you correct them? If not, why not?
Could you please admit that you will continue to release products with serious flaws in the near future (that will at least give us something to count on)?
And would like Apple to increase the quality of their products not only at first revision levels, but with further revisions as well.
,core logic boards fail, bad hard drives, lids that don't close properly,
You know what an apple employee told me when i said my hard drive in my powerbook died after 2.5 years?
"Laptop drives die between 2.5 and 3 years after use, it's normal"
Overheating in all their laptops^Wportables (no longer can be called laptops)
chipped paint off the latch button, whine sounds,need to repair permissions after each update (why macs need this?)...
Where's the old "macs cost more because they are made for better components, and last longer so you don't have to upgrade often" line i was getting 3 years ago in this forum?
Mac quality isn't superior anymore.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Why did he mention Dell several times in the article. They have considerably more QA issues than Apple and develop very few of their lines to a stable state. They have never released and Inspiron that did not require a BIOS update for thermal stability, at least not one worth using. Fact is some issues are hard to find in a controlled QA envionment. The nano screens was the glaring case of a failure in QA and Apple has acknowledged that.
So let me get this straight, this guy is arguing that because he's read a lot about first generation Apple products being buggy, they are not doing as good of a job as everyone else? And he has no numbers to back this up? And we're just supposed to assume he's right?
Apple products get more press coverage. They are high profile and do a better job attracting the press than most other manufacturers. They also tend to be more cutting edge than is average and since many users want OS X and there is only one practical source of hardware that runs OS X, people care about their releases. Thus, when there is a problem, everyone hears about it. Does that mean they have more problems? Independent reviews of their hardware reliability put them at or near the top of the heap. This is despite releasing more "cutting edge" features that can't benefit from the mistakes of others. I've heard it said they update their product line less often, which may mitigate this somewhat. Still, from what I've seen their products, first rev or otherwise are no worse than anyone else's. I don't buy first rev cars, or other expensive, engineering heavy, devices. I usually don't do the same with computers, from any manufacturer. Basically, I just don't see any evidence that Apple is worse (or even as bad) as the average.
Just because Apple is a smaller company doesn't mean you should expect better quality assurance out of the same Asian factories that output HP or Dell products. I mean, overseas, its all the same. Apple's stuff is made in China, just like Dell or HP. Apple only designs their stuff and once it is in production, they have little control over quality assurance. If an Asian manufacture is screwing up, then Apple will find another manufacture or take steps to improve the process, but I think the opposite is true.
Dell make 10x the amount of computers that Apple does in a quarter. Dell NEEDS better quality assurance because they make more products. By the same logic, Dell has a lot more potential to find problems and fix them then Apple. If Apple sells 1 million iMac's in a quarter, they may not see glaring quality problems until months later, where as Dell will see glaring problems if 10 million units are shipped.
It may be growing pains for Apple as they have never had the kind of successful product as the iPod. They sell 5+ million iPods in a quarter, more product then they ever used to ship. For Apple, this is new, and finding the right manufacturer to assemble the units while balancing finding the right design that will work for mass quantities is key.
I still think that people over exaggerate Apple's "Quality Assurance" problems, but I do feel that Apple's biggest flaw is style over substance. They want the thinnest and lightest notebooks, but forget that putting a hot processor in a metal box is going to make the box get hot. Plastic wrapping aside, you can't get enough airflow in a thin notebook in order to exhaust the heat without the case getting hot, and I find the Power/Macbooks biggest flaw is the fact the case becomes uncomfortable during heavy processor loads.
Apple needs to learn that there is no point being the smallest, or thinnest or lightest if you can't be the coolest!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The most obvious reason is of course money, but also it's because of the culture surrounding Apple. Apple is a darling of the tech and consumer industry. People love their iPods and are getting turned onto their computers, and for the most part investors are warm to their financial performance.
So, when someone has some bad experiences, they cry louder than, say, someone who has a problem with a Microsoft product. "Oh, Windows broke again? Well, it does suck, that's just the way things are, oh well, no sense in complaining."
Being in support, I know all about the hyperboles users make when complaining about their problems. They go on and on about how this is a critical problem that must be fixed, how there's no quality assurance going on, and that everyone else in the world must be experiencing this same problem. Meanwhile, no one else has reported this problem, there are confirmed tests of this problem not occuring in many standard configurations, the user has a highly specialized configuration, and the affected area is not in fact a critical function.
The guy wants a little extra satisfaction, and wants to be heard. However, he wraps it in the cloak of an editorial, like most bloggers, so called journalists, and other web writers do.
Did the guy get into a crap situation? Probably, and that sucks.
Did the guy get crappy support? Maybe, and that would suck.
But making a sweeping generalization that the products just suck when millions of human beings completely disagree with you is not going to get you any points with Apple or anyone else.
Whatever happened to writing about the facts? If you want to editorialize about any technology company, you have to go find the facts and then lay them out. Finding the facts means getting information on other peoples experiences, surveys, reviews, etc. You then take that information in context and write your own article.
However, if he was going for ad hits, congratulations. Good job there.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
GNOME 1.2 anyone?
Mozilla 1.0?
Fedora Core 1?
And now for the obligatory MS bashing:
DOS 1.0?
Windows 1.0?
NT 4, Win98/ME/XP without service packs?
Generation 1 of anything sucks.
Really? A simple software update fixed the perceived problem, but that makes the MacBooks suck. So sayeth Gundeep Hora, the same person that starts out the article by stating:Nice preface to your FUD and blatantly unbiased attacks against Apple.Gundeep Hora just said that only 1% of the nano's were affected and replaced and that the MacBooks had a software update address a perceived problem. Where are all the examples of recalls? One percent does not justify the concept that first generation nanos were replaced, only those, seemingly, owned by the careless and ignorant needed replacement. So where does Gundeep Hora come off making such a vast generalization? Well, regardless of what he claims in his preface, Gundeep Hora obviously does hate Apple and their recent success. How does this article classify as a "featured story" on CoolTechZone? How does the "editor-in-chief" release such garbage? Maybe he just sucks?
Wow, verifiable facts, I love those. "Mass hysteria" comes from 1% of the users, now that's mass hysteria... I'm sure that Apple does no QA before releasing to the public, I believe Gundeep Hora, he's some kind of expert. I had no idea that they were so lucky. What a hack this moron Gundeep Hora is. Somebody should really reconsider his position.This article is tiring. Gundeep Hora's incomepetence is tiring. Those two weak examples of Apple's supposed incompetence aren't sufficient for these extreme anti-Apple sentiments. What has this douchebag got against Apple? Did Steve Jobs run over his cat or something? Sheesh...
Some people believe the exact opposite. Get the first generation products because they are so solidly engineered.
After the first generation, manufaturers start looking for ways to cut costs.
I saw a great show on the BBC once about washing machines. They took apart an old first gen washing machine and showed a beautiful machined flywheel. The thing was a work of art and I can't imagine how long it must of taken to make or how much it must of cost. The latest version of the same style of washing machine had the equivalent of a coffee can filled with concrete fulfilling the same role. I kid you not.
When I look back on CD players or VCR's that I bought, the first generation models were like tanks. They weighed a ton and held up under constant use for over a decade. I bought them in the mid-80s, and I gave them to the Salvation Army when I moved in 2001, I'm sure they're still running still 20 years on unless someone tossed them out. I only switched to newer models for the new bells and whistles.
Its like the 360. In order to meet the initial demand, QA may slip a bit as they try and get as many units out the door as possible. Quality goes down. Once the initial rush has gone though, they settle down into their regular working practices. Quality goes up. its not first gen but just the first few deliveries that have probs. Same with PS2. I'm gonna leave it a couple of months for them to flog all those first boxes and then get a MB.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.