Slashdot Mirror
Apple Seemingly Censors UltraFine 5K Monitor Reviews After Poor Feedback (thenextweb.com)
It appears Apple is filtering and censoring bad reviews of the LG's UltraFine 5K display. From a report on The Next Web: The deletion was first spotted by a Reddit user four days ago. Though it's possible the reviews were removed for some other reason, at first glance, it looks like censorship. It's not a good look for the company. Apple said it was getting out of the monitor business, and instead chose to work more closely with third-party partners, heavily featuring LG's 5K and 4K UltraFine displays at its recent MacBook Pro unveiling. But then the monitor received multiple negative reviews from users who were experiencing issues such as the screen failing to wake up from sleep. The Reddit post also points out that: "In many cases, attempts to fix the problem through physical reconnection[sic] of the monitor, or manual restarts, have caused the attached Mac to crash, become otherwise unresponsive, or develop problems with the touch bar (where equipped)."
I have a feeling [sic] that no one [sic] actually knows [sic] what [sic] means!
"reconnection" is a word...
Latin, "thus".
"(Sic)" after a word means "thus", a statement that the word used is correct as written and not an error.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It was a MagSafe adapter. They still make some pretty bad ones that fail all the time and get very bad reviews, but they don't seem to care.
TFA has been retracted and an apology has been put at the top of the page due to the erroneous reporting. Shockingly, the redditor got it wrong and the Internet-at-large didn't bother doing the slightest bit of verification before posting their clickbait headlines about a company being evil.
MacRumors has some additional reporting on what actually happened, but the gist of it is that no reviews at all were being posted for the 5K display until earlier today. In fact, the Ratings & Reviews section of the page was entirely disabled for that page until earlier today, presumably because someone forgot to activate the section after the product went on sale. Cached copies of the page confirm that that's been the case since the page went live last year, so the notion that Apple deleted bad reviews is demonstrably false, given that there never was a way to submit reviews--good or bad--in the first place.
Anyway, the inability to submit a review was already fixed by the time Slashdot posted this story, but, no doubt, people will be talking about the fictional bad reviews that Apple censored for months to come, simply because a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
I thought they were selectively removing reviews, but they just disabled reviews and made the (low) star rating disappear completely just for that monitor.
Except that they didn't. The article was retracted and The Next Web has issued a formal apology for their erroneous reporting.
The actual problem wasn't that Apple disabled the section in order to censor reviews; it was that they forgot to enable the section in the first place. Cached copies of the page show that the section was never enabled at all. It looks like someone at Apple simply forgot to press the button to enable ratings and reviews on the monitor. From there, a redditor used the opportunity to bend the truth quite a bit by claiming that Apple had disabled the section to hide bad reviews, despite the fact that they have a history of letting bad reviews stand, as you pointed out. The blogs love salacious news, so they posted it without doing proper vetting, and now they're all having to post retractions.
Yay for the Internet.