Sorry, I know that rational discussion of an issue involving an apple product is impossible.
Short of Steve Jobs getting up on stage at a press event like this and saying, "Well we fucked up big time, we're closing the company and telling everybody to buy Android phones," I think most of the people sitting here bitching about the "lukewarm" response will never be satisfied.
Really - and you consider the model you described to be a "better" customer experience? A model that runs by the principle of: Show up whenever, and either wait until we decide we want to talk to you, or be an obnoxious prick and come to the head of the line?
I understand it sucks for you to be told "come back later" the first time, but to say "that's terrible customer service" is pretty weak.
And for the record, the people who actually are looking at your problems at a Mac store aren't "sales clerks" in the sense that they're mindless hourly wage slaves. I've had the occasion to use the Genius Bars before, and as a software engineer, I've been impressed to see one of the girls (at the Salem NH store) drop to a unix command line and start digging around in logs to try and figure out what was wrong with my system when I brought it in for them to look at.
They actually do have some training and expertise beyond what the typical best buy "sales clerk" has.
It can be - but you need more practice. Your grip is weak.
Lets have a little perspective shall we? What % of the population sees a doctor? 80% or better, right? What percent of the population drives? 80% or better, right? What % owns macs.... 1-3%. Right? So in your world, 250million people are exactly the same as 9 million people? Really?
Fail. The real question is - how many mechanics & doctors are there to service those 250 million people, versus mac "geniuses" to service those 9 million people? ] There are what, 300-ish retail stores? Let's assume each has 5 geniuses available at any time. That means there are 1500 geniuses to service 9 million people. (~6000 users per genius)
Now, according to 2003 Business & Labor statistics (http://www.bls.gov/oes/2003/may/oes_29He.htm) there are about 6 million healthcare providers in the US to service 250 million people. (~42 people per provider)
I'll leave it up to you to figure out why "only 9 million Apple Users for them to support" doesn't mean dick.
If I bought an iPhone 4 and was experiencing the problem,
STOP. What is "the problem"? That you lose bars when your hand interferes with signal? Does this ACTUALLY translate to real-world performance degradation? Or are you freaking out because your phone shows "only 2 bars!" (while it continues operating just fine)?
The actual usage data that ATT & Apple provided suggest that it's much more the latter than it is the former.
So your completely scientific safe-to-assume's, more-likely's, and other speculative commentary are a more authoritative way to judge the scope of this problem than Apple & ATT's real-world usage data.
You realize that when you walk in with a computer and say "Can you fix this?" - which is exactly what you said you did - that you are interrupting their work with OTHER customers who have issues, and who have made appointments? The Genius Bars in the apple stores work by appointment, and at that appointment, they will run diagnostics and try to give you an idea of what they think is wrong with the system, and most times an estimate on how much it'll cost to fix if it's outside warranty (which, at $700+ for a repair, your system most certainly was).
I don't think this is bad customer service, I think that you simply expected "great customer service" to mean "we drop whatever we're doing at any moment when you walk in the door." And that's no way to run a business.
Macbooks are "often discounted" by 20%? I've never seen these sales.
No, I understand quite well that they provided the statistics that paint the problem in the most favorable light. Even if it's a "100% increase", from 1 drop / 100 calls to 2 drops / 100 calls, you're still talking about a very small *impact*.
Let's look at it in regular usage, say I use an iPhone to make or receive 20 calls per day. In 5 days, I'll have to hit "redial" two times if I have an iPhone 4. With an iPhone 3GS, I would have had to hit "redial" once in that same time.
Yes, that's a "100% INCREASE!" No, it's not a "major problem." You might say it's a minor problem, or an inconvenience.
Please explain how the hardware is "broken" again? Or perhaps you'd prefer to actually describe the problem in more detail and explain how "doesn't work as well in specific conditions" means "broken"?
So you don't like Apple because they're Apple, and think everybody who spent several hundred dollars on a shiny new phone would keep it even if it didn't work because it's an Apple product.
Wow, so repairing something requires an appointment? Who would've thought that, considering cars, appliances, human bodies and just about any other thing on earth requires you to make an appointment with the qualified service provider in order to get the item repaired.
And really, the nerve of people demanding they make a profit with the time they're spending fixing your stuff. Congratulations, you've just also discovered that it's cheaper to change your own oil than it is to bring it to a repair shop.
And also, what Macbook has ever cost $800? Have they ever sold them at that price point?
Really, and is AT&T not logging your friends' dropped calls too, like they do with every dropped call on their network? Or are they just not making or receiving calls at all because the problem is so horrible for them that they just can't get a connection, and "waiting patiently" for someone to come fix their phone?
Signal attenuation due to grip is a more pronounced problem with this antenna design than with other phones. But the question is - does it matter at all, and is it impacting the day-to-day usage of most people? And the answer to that question is that it is not actually dramatically impacting most users.
When you put it in perspective and consider the data offered, it is a fairly minor problem.
1) Every phone exhibits signal attenuation to some degree when the hand is placed on/near the antenna assembly, and many can be made to exhibit this same behavior; 2) The dropped call data from ATT shows that the iPhone 4 has performed less than 1 *more* dropped call per 100 calls than the 3GS - an increase, and a sign of a problem, but certainly not in the "IF YOU HAZ IPOHNE 4 U WILL DIEZ" class of problems. 3) 1.7% have been returned so far (about 1/3 the rate for the iPhone 3GS) 4) ~0.5% of the sales have prompted a call to AppleCare about this problem. 5) 3 Million units have been sold so far.
Does this sound like it's a widespread problem where 3 million iPhone 4's are nonfunctional? If all these iPhone 4's were causing call after call after call to drop and just weren't working, the return rate & AppleCare volume would be much higher. Their response is to adjust the signal strength algorithm being used to more accurately reflect the strength of the signal, to offer a free bumper case with each purchase, and to say "if you really find it intolerable, return it for a full refund." If you were following any of the coverage, Steve Jobs actually did offer an apology to "the small number of users affected by this," as well.
What more, realistically, do you expect them to do?
No, I'm saying they were successful in implementing a solution which included a fair degree of DRM to prevent handing around copies, despite the fact that there was an entrenched "free way" to get it.
That DRM, coupled with convenient shopping & a reasonable price certainly helped reduce the number of people sharing - it raised the difficulty of sharing, and people bought through an official channel, rather than pirate the music.
I don't see that this is a bad outcome, even though it didn't "eliminate" piracy, and I think this is a useful model for the game studios to consider and adapt (e.g., Steam, XBox Live).
And if they have to re-crack everytime a piece of DLC is released, and update all of their scripts, and re-upload the whole bundle every time a piece of DLC is released... you don't think that would get a little tedious, and become less attractive for a pirate to keep doing? And even if the pirate keeps doing it, having to re-download the entire game, reinstall every time a piece of DLC is released... won't get tedious for players?
Just because something is "technologically easy" doesn't mean it's not annoying, tedious, and simply not worth the effort.
Explain, in light of this logic, the success of retailers like eMusic, Amazon's mp3 store, and iTunes then? DRM-less alternatives always existed - p2p networks and the like. And yet they've collectively sold billions of tracks.
It's not a binary situation, where everybody pirates, or nobody pirates. It's a matter of degree - if you make the product convenient to purchase, price it reasonably, and have DRM that's reasonably nonintrusive (remember, iTunes did not eliminate DRM until long after they had achieved a substantial degree of success) - you discourage many people who might pirate from doing so.
It's the dedicated pirates that make it easy/possible for the rest of us.
And if those instructions get much more complex, would "most" users bother? Sure, the crackers will continue doing it for the fun and challenge of a good puzzle, but if you have to download half a dozen different pieces and go through 15-20 minutes of work to get everything working... I think a lot of casual users will simply go "God, not worth it."
Look at the online music retailers' model. You buy the pieces of the album you're interested in, and they've collectively sold billions of tracks to people who could have easily pirated that stuff instead.
Perhaps it wouldn't make much of a dent in game piracy, but I think there's a lot to suggest that it would help reduce the frequency of piracy.
For one thing, there is still nothing to stop pirates from collecting the game as it's released. Remember, if it can be engineered, it can be reverse engineered.
But if it's not there in the game files waiting for a single code or crack to unlock everything, it limits the usefulness, or at least the scalability, of a hacked version, doesn't it?
I don't think anybody is foolish enough to believe that "nobody" will ever crack the game, but if it's sufficiently difficult or inconvenient, and you have an easy & cheap way of doing it in an officially sanctioned manner (see iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, other online music retailers), you do cut down on *some* of the piracy. And in a way, online music sales which have been so successful are exactly microtransactions - you don't buy a "CD" anymore, you buy parts of the CD - 1, 2, 3 tracks in many cases, rather than the full 10-12 tracks that you would've gotten in the model of the physical CD purchase.
My primary concern is what happens if the game studio goes belly up prior to the "full game" being completed and released?
That's certainly a risk to this model, I can't argue that it's not... however, consider that if the game studio is really going to go belly up mid-development, the game very likely wouldn't have seen the light of day, or would have been an unusable train wreck... so you got half the levels they expected to produce, instead of none of them. There's certainly pricing implications that studios would need to take into account here, but I don't think that this argument would necessarily preclude some sort of phased / downloadable content.
The "true" pirates are the ones who actually crack the games...
Sure, these people will always exist - it's just a puzzle for them to figure out. But there are not "millions" of these people out there, while there are "millions" of people willing to simply grab a copy of the unlock key or a cracked copy of a game if it means they don't have to spend a few bucks. The solution to dealing with this group of people is two-pronged: price it reasonably, and make it more difficult to crack than most people are willing to spend the time on.
The argument I've seen others use that "people who would pirate wouldn't have bought it anyway," is fallacious - everybody loves something for free, and if there is no real penalty or effort required to get it for free, lots of people will take advantage of that method, even if they know they "shouldn't."
Because even if YOU are willing to pay for it, there are a lot of freeloaders out there. See Humble Indie Bundle.
Re:FU - Things are already worse (for consumers)!
on
DRM vs. Unfinished Games
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
A lot of games simply don't lend themselves well to multiple replays - I find FPS titles *especially* difficult for this - Halo, etc. Once you've gone through "Campaign" mode, it's pretty goddamned boring playing through it again more than once or twice. At that point, with no DLC or online multiplayer component... how are they at all interesting? That $50-60 game disc might as well be a beer coaster at that point if the game studio says, "And that's it... no more stuff at all ever."
And even many networked games would get boring as hell if you were playing the SAME game on the SAME maps that you've always played on.
No no no no no no no. Microtransactions are NOT the way to go.
Why not? I get that you don't like it, but I don't understand your reasoning, you just make a flat statement that "microtransactions, they r teh devilz!" I'm genuinely curious, there's no "HA! IN YOUR FACE!" waiting, just curious how you're coming to the conclusion that it won't work.
I'm not certain it'd be effective, but I do see that it might raise the bar for people trying to pirate the games, which might be "enough" of a solution that it discourages casual piracy. As you noted, you'll never fully defeat piracy - so maybe the goal is to simply make it hard enough that only really dedicated pirates will bother?
If "extending beyond the cult" was going to kill them, the ipod would've already been their last rites, dummy.
This is bad press about a legitimate design flaw with one of their products, and it's going to hurt them some - lost sales, probably have to exchange some units when/if they come up with a manufacturing fix, and perhaps also offer a free bumper to anybody who has a unit that wants one.
Trying to forecast something from the fact that their stock has dropped a couple % INTRADAY is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I know that rational discussion of an issue involving an apple product is impossible.
Short of Steve Jobs getting up on stage at a press event like this and saying, "Well we fucked up big time, we're closing the company and telling everybody to buy Android phones," I think most of the people sitting here bitching about the "lukewarm" response will never be satisfied.
If it's the terrible, broken product that everybody's spouting off that it is... why would you buy it?
Really - and you consider the model you described to be a "better" customer experience? A model that runs by the principle of: Show up whenever, and either wait until we decide we want to talk to you, or be an obnoxious prick and come to the head of the line?
I understand it sucks for you to be told "come back later" the first time, but to say "that's terrible customer service" is pretty weak.
And for the record, the people who actually are looking at your problems at a Mac store aren't "sales clerks" in the sense that they're mindless hourly wage slaves. I've had the occasion to use the Genius Bars before, and as a software engineer, I've been impressed to see one of the girls (at the Salem NH store) drop to a unix command line and start digging around in logs to try and figure out what was wrong with my system when I brought it in for them to look at.
They actually do have some training and expertise beyond what the typical best buy "sales clerk" has.
It can be - but you need more practice. Your grip is weak.
Fail. The real question is - how many mechanics & doctors are there to service those 250 million people, versus mac "geniuses" to service those 9 million people?
]
There are what, 300-ish retail stores? Let's assume each has 5 geniuses available at any time. That means there are 1500 geniuses to service 9 million people. (~6000 users per genius)
Now, according to 2003 Business & Labor statistics (http://www.bls.gov/oes/2003/may/oes_29He.htm) there are about 6 million healthcare providers in the US to service 250 million people. (~42 people per provider)
I'll leave it up to you to figure out why "only 9 million Apple Users for them to support" doesn't mean dick.
STOP. What is "the problem"? That you lose bars when your hand interferes with signal? Does this ACTUALLY translate to real-world performance degradation? Or are you freaking out because your phone shows "only 2 bars!" (while it continues operating just fine)?
The actual usage data that ATT & Apple provided suggest that it's much more the latter than it is the former.
I see.
So your completely scientific safe-to-assume's, more-likely's, and other speculative commentary are a more authoritative way to judge the scope of this problem than Apple & ATT's real-world usage data.
Thanks for clearing that up for us.
Your agenda is showing.
You realize that when you walk in with a computer and say "Can you fix this?" - which is exactly what you said you did - that you are interrupting their work with OTHER customers who have issues, and who have made appointments? The Genius Bars in the apple stores work by appointment, and at that appointment, they will run diagnostics and try to give you an idea of what they think is wrong with the system, and most times an estimate on how much it'll cost to fix if it's outside warranty (which, at $700+ for a repair, your system most certainly was).
I don't think this is bad customer service, I think that you simply expected "great customer service" to mean "we drop whatever we're doing at any moment when you walk in the door." And that's no way to run a business.
Macbooks are "often discounted" by 20%? I've never seen these sales.
No, I understand quite well that they provided the statistics that paint the problem in the most favorable light. Even if it's a "100% increase", from 1 drop / 100 calls to 2 drops / 100 calls, you're still talking about a very small *impact*.
Let's look at it in regular usage, say I use an iPhone to make or receive 20 calls per day. In 5 days, I'll have to hit "redial" two times if I have an iPhone 4. With an iPhone 3GS, I would have had to hit "redial" once in that same time.
Yes, that's a "100% INCREASE!" No, it's not a "major problem." You might say it's a minor problem, or an inconvenience.
Please explain how the hardware is "broken" again? Or perhaps you'd prefer to actually describe the problem in more detail and explain how "doesn't work as well in specific conditions" means "broken"?
So you don't like Apple because they're Apple, and think everybody who spent several hundred dollars on a shiny new phone would keep it even if it didn't work because it's an Apple product.
Clearly your logic is astounding. lol
Wow, so repairing something requires an appointment? Who would've thought that, considering cars, appliances, human bodies and just about any other thing on earth requires you to make an appointment with the qualified service provider in order to get the item repaired.
And really, the nerve of people demanding they make a profit with the time they're spending fixing your stuff. Congratulations, you've just also discovered that it's cheaper to change your own oil than it is to bring it to a repair shop.
And also, what Macbook has ever cost $800? Have they ever sold them at that price point?
Really, and is AT&T not logging your friends' dropped calls too, like they do with every dropped call on their network? Or are they just not making or receiving calls at all because the problem is so horrible for them that they just can't get a connection, and "waiting patiently" for someone to come fix their phone?
Signal attenuation due to grip is a more pronounced problem with this antenna design than with other phones. But the question is - does it matter at all, and is it impacting the day-to-day usage of most people? And the answer to that question is that it is not actually dramatically impacting most users.
When you put it in perspective and consider the data offered, it is a fairly minor problem.
1) Every phone exhibits signal attenuation to some degree when the hand is placed on/near the antenna assembly, and many can be made to exhibit this same behavior;
2) The dropped call data from ATT shows that the iPhone 4 has performed less than 1 *more* dropped call per 100 calls than the 3GS - an increase, and a sign of a problem, but certainly not in the "IF YOU HAZ IPOHNE 4 U WILL DIEZ" class of problems.
3) 1.7% have been returned so far (about 1/3 the rate for the iPhone 3GS)
4) ~0.5% of the sales have prompted a call to AppleCare about this problem.
5) 3 Million units have been sold so far.
Does this sound like it's a widespread problem where 3 million iPhone 4's are nonfunctional? If all these iPhone 4's were causing call after call after call to drop and just weren't working, the return rate & AppleCare volume would be much higher. Their response is to adjust the signal strength algorithm being used to more accurately reflect the strength of the signal, to offer a free bumper case with each purchase, and to say "if you really find it intolerable, return it for a full refund." If you were following any of the coverage, Steve Jobs actually did offer an apology to "the small number of users affected by this," as well.
What more, realistically, do you expect them to do?
No, I'm saying they were successful in implementing a solution which included a fair degree of DRM to prevent handing around copies, despite the fact that there was an entrenched "free way" to get it.
That DRM, coupled with convenient shopping & a reasonable price certainly helped reduce the number of people sharing - it raised the difficulty of sharing, and people bought through an official channel, rather than pirate the music.
I don't see that this is a bad outcome, even though it didn't "eliminate" piracy, and I think this is a useful model for the game studios to consider and adapt (e.g., Steam, XBox Live).
And if they have to re-crack everytime a piece of DLC is released, and update all of their scripts, and re-upload the whole bundle every time a piece of DLC is released... you don't think that would get a little tedious, and become less attractive for a pirate to keep doing? And even if the pirate keeps doing it, having to re-download the entire game, reinstall every time a piece of DLC is released... won't get tedious for players?
Just because something is "technologically easy" doesn't mean it's not annoying, tedious, and simply not worth the effort.
Explain, in light of this logic, the success of retailers like eMusic, Amazon's mp3 store, and iTunes then? DRM-less alternatives always existed - p2p networks and the like. And yet they've collectively sold billions of tracks.
It's not a binary situation, where everybody pirates, or nobody pirates. It's a matter of degree - if you make the product convenient to purchase, price it reasonably, and have DRM that's reasonably nonintrusive (remember, iTunes did not eliminate DRM until long after they had achieved a substantial degree of success) - you discourage many people who might pirate from doing so.
Nope, but it would be a lot harder for the freeloaders to hand around their free copies of the game to anybody else, wouldn't it?
And if those instructions get much more complex, would "most" users bother? Sure, the crackers will continue doing it for the fun and challenge of a good puzzle, but if you have to download half a dozen different pieces and go through 15-20 minutes of work to get everything working... I think a lot of casual users will simply go "God, not worth it."
Look at the online music retailers' model. You buy the pieces of the album you're interested in, and they've collectively sold billions of tracks to people who could have easily pirated that stuff instead.
Perhaps it wouldn't make much of a dent in game piracy, but I think there's a lot to suggest that it would help reduce the frequency of piracy.
But if it's not there in the game files waiting for a single code or crack to unlock everything, it limits the usefulness, or at least the scalability, of a hacked version, doesn't it?
I don't think anybody is foolish enough to believe that "nobody" will ever crack the game, but if it's sufficiently difficult or inconvenient, and you have an easy & cheap way of doing it in an officially sanctioned manner (see iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, other online music retailers), you do cut down on *some* of the piracy. And in a way, online music sales which have been so successful are exactly microtransactions - you don't buy a "CD" anymore, you buy parts of the CD - 1, 2, 3 tracks in many cases, rather than the full 10-12 tracks that you would've gotten in the model of the physical CD purchase.
That's certainly a risk to this model, I can't argue that it's not... however, consider that if the game studio is really going to go belly up mid-development, the game very likely wouldn't have seen the light of day, or would have been an unusable train wreck... so you got half the levels they expected to produce, instead of none of them. There's certainly pricing implications that studios would need to take into account here, but I don't think that this argument would necessarily preclude some sort of phased / downloadable content.
Sure, these people will always exist - it's just a puzzle for them to figure out. But there are not "millions" of these people out there, while there are "millions" of people willing to simply grab a copy of the unlock key or a cracked copy of a game if it means they don't have to spend a few bucks. The solution to dealing with this group of people is two-pronged: price it reasonably, and make it more difficult to crack than most people are willing to spend the time on.
The argument I've seen others use that "people who would pirate wouldn't have bought it anyway," is fallacious - everybody loves something for free, and if there is no real penalty or effort required to get it for free, lots of people will take advantage of that method, even if they know they "shouldn't."
Because even if YOU are willing to pay for it, there are a lot of freeloaders out there. See Humble Indie Bundle.
A lot of games simply don't lend themselves well to multiple replays - I find FPS titles *especially* difficult for this - Halo, etc. Once you've gone through "Campaign" mode, it's pretty goddamned boring playing through it again more than once or twice. At that point, with no DLC or online multiplayer component... how are they at all interesting? That $50-60 game disc might as well be a beer coaster at that point if the game studio says, "And that's it... no more stuff at all ever."
And even many networked games would get boring as hell if you were playing the SAME game on the SAME maps that you've always played on.
Why not? I get that you don't like it, but I don't understand your reasoning, you just make a flat statement that "microtransactions, they r teh devilz!" I'm genuinely curious, there's no "HA! IN YOUR FACE!" waiting, just curious how you're coming to the conclusion that it won't work.
I'm not certain it'd be effective, but I do see that it might raise the bar for people trying to pirate the games, which might be "enough" of a solution that it discourages casual piracy. As you noted, you'll never fully defeat piracy - so maybe the goal is to simply make it hard enough that only really dedicated pirates will bother?
If "extending beyond the cult" was going to kill them, the ipod would've already been their last rites, dummy.
This is bad press about a legitimate design flaw with one of their products, and it's going to hurt them some - lost sales, probably have to exchange some units when/if they come up with a manufacturing fix, and perhaps also offer a free bumper to anybody who has a unit that wants one.
Trying to forecast something from the fact that their stock has dropped a couple % INTRADAY is ridiculous.
*sigh* it was a joke - as in "they're never gonna release it for Linux."
Smile, man.