[Alec E]

Yes. Is the world to be aware that you can't enter an Apple Store at this time, as if one were in the Middle East, and society had shut down for a scheduled mass prayer?

 

[Uncle Erik]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alec E /img/forum/go_quote.gif At the risk of appearing to be in agreement with Jason "Jdawg" Calacanis, this seems like the appropriate thread in which to vent a little. I've been thinking a lot in the past couple of days about how annoyed I am with the basics--i.e., the most important aspects--of my Apple products. My Macbook Pro has the worst keyboard I've ever used, an enormously big deal to me. My iPod Classic's touch wheel is the least responsive example of touch technology I've ever used, and there are plenty of other stupidities about this device--the always snail-slow-to-appear album art; the difficulty of adjusting the volume at particular moments, or of viewing the clock--all rather shocking to me since this is the seventh generation of the most wildly acclaimed gadget of its era, by The Company Which Does Not Make Mistakes. I'll mention that I've had to (fight to) return two Macs in the past because of monitor problems which Apple deemed "within spec." When my eMac's screen would ripple, because the built-in speakers were in use, and Apple had skimped on magnetic housing, since this was just some piece of junk for the unscrutinizing education market? Apple told me to buy external speakers. I'll also mention that the only computer on which I've ever seen "the blue screen of death" was a G4 iMac. Then, you have the Apple Store. I am regularly stunned by the pig ignorance, and the the air of arrogance which can almost seem to signal inebriation, of the youthful caucasians who work there. They're not even sufficiently familiar with the product line to be able to answer basic questions, but they seem to have each been trained extensively in maintaining the most patronizing and supercilious smile and tone of voice. Then you have, of course, Apple's behavior of late, all because one of their microserfs lost a phone. Then you have the idiotic iPad. I can't respect the intelligence of anyone who doesn't see major problems with this magical and revolutionary slab of nothing. Then you have what just happened. I'm in Louisville, Kentucky, and the mall is empty today because of some horse race. I found the iPad annoying and useless the first time I tinkered with it, but I thought I might tinker with it one more time before banishing it from my consciousness forever. There was a short line of people outside the Apple store--about 14, I'd say. There were few people in the store, but a great many staff, and, most conspicuously, at least four morbidly obese security guards in varying uniforms, standing with their arms folded. Great atmosphere. I assumed the people in line were waiting to buy the wifi iPad. Since even if the whole line had been inside the store, there would still have been fewer people in the store than is typical, I assumed I could walk in and browse. No! Approaching the entrance, a fat kid (yes, I call everyone "fat" when I'm annoyed--but he was) sort of used his girth to block me, and another Apple Store staffer scurried to stand beside him, as if I were trying to get a football past them. This was not even in the literal entryway of the store. Fat Kid says, in this ridiculous, phony tone: "Can I help you?" I stated that I wasn't there to buy anything, just to browse. "You can hang out over here [pointing to the line] and someone will be with you in a moment!" I said, "This is stupid." And it was. My next computer will probably be a Thinkpad. My next music player will be a Sony.

The amount of passion Apple generates - on either side - is remarkable.

I don't see this with other manufacturers and don't understand it.

If you want a ThinkPad, great. Buy one and enjoy it.

But I don't understand the purpose of the rant. I chose to buy one car out of a few dozen manufacturers and have no desire to run down the others. Neither do I have the desire to trash any number of other products I choose not to buy.

But Apple draws strong opinions from those who don't want their products.

Why?

It doesn't make any sense to me. If you don't want something, don't buy it.

 

[grokit]

Whatever Apple is doing, they seem to be doing it righter and better than anyone else, if your success metrics include market share growth, increased shareholder value, and profits. In a very competitive capitalistic free-market system, they are literally thriving during a world-wide recession. They continue to innovate on a grand scale, creating one major consumer niche after another like no other company. They even lead the way in customer satisfaction and support. If they change their strategy, they would make less money which would be irresponsible to the shareholders, and to their customers making them less successful by those same free-market metrics. It would be downright anti-American to do anything different than what they are doing, which is kicking @ss and taking names.

 

[Currawong]

Whatever Apple does, people will complain about them. This blogger seems to mistaking Apple's intolerance for the mediocrity and anti-competitive demands of the music and movie industries, Adobe, and others as being the same thing as those companies and industries they are rallying against. As well, the blogger, like so many people on the internet, doesn't understand what anti-trust laws are about.

 

[Alec E]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Uncle Erik /img/forum/go_quote.gif The amount of passion Apple generates - on either side - is remarkable. I don't see this with other manufacturers and don't understand it.

I see it daily, hourly, certainly on this forum.

Quote:

If you want a ThinkPad, great. Buy one and enjoy it.

Thank you so much.

Quote:

But I don't understand the purpose of the rant. I chose to buy one car out of a few dozen manufacturers and have no desire to run down the others.

Perhaps this is the issue. Criticizing Apple in very specific terms, as I did (albeit admittedly in an intemperate fashion), is inevitably characterized as "running them down." It is characterized as destructive behavior. That is unreasonable.

Quote:

Neither do I have the desire to trash any number of other products I choose not to buy.

"Trash." And you'll note that my complaints were primarily about Apple products I certainly have owned.

As for the iPad, it is at this point a media event being shoved down all our throats, and when people conclude that it's a foolish piece of junk, they have every right to say so.

Quote:

But Apple draws strong opinions from those who don't want their products. Why?

Because they are continually being told that they should want their products? That, in part, is surely why. This company has a permanent get-away-with-murder pass from the tech media, i.e., people who offer free advertising while pretending to be journalists. (As for myself, I outlined a number of concrete complaints about this company's products. You're acting as if I had screeched that I've never owned a Mac and would never want to.)

I remember when the first aluminum Powerbooks were issued. Macworld bought six. Half of those were unusable and had to be returned. Half.

With any other company, this would have been a scandal. With Apple, it may as well have never happened.

I've myself had to return two Macs, as I said, and I remember seeing countless eMacs with the same problems that mine had. Apple generally won't make a move on a hardware quality control issue until there is the threat of a class action suit.

Quote:

It doesn't make any sense to me. If you don't want something, don't buy it.

It doesn't make sense to me that you think people should take a vow of silence when it comes to criticizing this company.

 

[Currawong]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alec E /img/forum/go_quote.gif Apple generally won't make a move on a hardware quality control issue until there is the threat of a class action suit.

I can tell you categorically this is BS. I can tell you coming from having known people suitably senior in Apple, having sold Apple computers and owned many (quite a few of which broke or died, some DOA!). Apple will not pubicly discuss issues, nor will any large company, as doing so will leave them open to the suggest that they have acknowledged any reported issue as being their fault. They will first very thoroughly examine affected customer devices and perform tests and attempt to reproduce a reported fault to determine the cause of a problem before deciding whether it was the result of a manufacturing or the customer.

I would say actually, that Apple were easier than dealing with some other large and well-known manufacturers of consumer goods whom, in some cases, absolutely refused to accept fault in their designs at any cost. In one case, senior management of a billion dollar company had to go directly to the company in question to get action taken. While public communication from Apple is close to non-existant, a person whose machine is affected by a manufacturing fault will have it acknowledged, if not straight away.

Apple has customers who directly try and scam them on a regular basis when they break their own devices. I'm sure without doubt that all large companies do, as so many people these days don't want to take responsibility for their own actions, such as breaking their gear. This is why, for example, you can't change the battery in an iPhone or iPod. If you could, you'd have a flood of dodgy batteries from China available, with customers damaging their iPods and iPhones with them, resulting in a huge loss for Apple as their reputation for reliability dropped. Customers, wouldn't, of course, blame the 3rd party hardware, but Apple.

So while I understand people feel like Apple is run by ****holes, it's done this way, because, frankly, as soon as anything goes wrong, people blame Apple, even if it's not their fault.

 

[gbacic]

Only thing apple is good for, IMO, is the Macbook Pro, the Mac Pro, and OS X. Everything else could disappear for all I care.

 

[nsx_23]

I constantly curse my 13" MB pro for not having more than 2 USB ports which are actually spaced out properly.

Other than that, its been good to me so far. Some better Windows 7 drivers wouldn't go astray too (I boot into Win7 regularly as many programs of mine run only in Windows).

 

[chadbang]

As a victim of the iBook G3 logic board failure syndrome (Apple finally got around to offering logic board replacements for ibooks built between 2001-2003 because they would crap about after a year to a year-and-a-half), I have to say I don't seen the Apple as shiny as I once did.

Of course, an apple was my first computer (WOW! *MAGICIAL* *AMAZING*). But after an eMac died after a year (bad logic board Apple told me and wanted me to pay for a new one) and then my iBook died after 20 months and WAS NOT COVERED IN THE REPAIR PROGRAM (I believe they had to pony up for a class action suit in the Netherlands), all this talk about Macs "just working" is a bit over zealous.

Sure, I think Macs have better OS, but machines are machines and everybody's are prone to failure and, in my experience, Apples are just as susceptable to mechanical failure as any other manufacturer.They look cool (of course, a lot of their "cool" stuff has dated - how do the blueberry iMacs look sitting on thriftstore shelves today - sort of goofy), but in my 20+ years experience with Macs, you're just a likely to get a lemon as anyone else.

But, in Apple's defense, they're generally good with returns and long as you buy the expensive extended warranties - which I've found about mostly effective (they refused to fix a dead iPod screen which should have been covered). But the minute Apple starts getting stingier with returns (they will) then I won't see them as anything but another manufacturer. I think their open door policy for equipment is going to slow close has they get more of the market, remember Apple has always been a company essentially "fighting back" from the void.

Oh yeah, the iPad. Finally played with one. It's a toy like the iPhone. After App fever starts to wane, alot of the "possibilities" feel kind of useless.

 

[nvkid909]

i love this 2D world "apple vs PC" malarky

there is a third party. those of us who make our own choices, do a little homework, get cheesed off when something goes wrong etc etc etc...

if you buy something because it looks better, then good! you made a choice. you are human! if something went wrong with your choice - oh well, that's life.

why all this two dimensional slanging match when PC is rubbish, apple is perfection? er, no! when my macbook fails, suddenly microsoft are saying "haha, told you so!"? erm, no.

that's the thing with choice, no choice can ever be the most definitive most perfect choice because of these things called "life" & "time". you just can't tell the future.

they just do things differently to each other. it's easy to fall down in all the internet fanboyism bullying & feel compelled to take sides, but please people, remember you have minds of your own & that it's ok to make mistakes!

 

[Drubbing]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alec E /img/forum/go_quote.gif Apple generally won't make a move on a hardware quality control issue until there is the threat of a class action suit.

This really sums up your petulance. I'm not interested in the MAC PC war at all, despite owning a Mac myself, I'm not part of the Apple religion.

But given you've experienced some issues with Apple from early on, I'm at a loss why you go back for more punishment? Most people would write that brand off and go elsewhere.

However some of your rants are purely subjective, such as the keyboard and wheel issues - both of which you would have found to be not to your liking when you tried the product in the first place. So why buy them? As for your mall experience, maybe you should just not go out of doors if people annoy you so much?

Even so, when you sell enough of something, you have an inbuilt failure rate; it's simply not possible to get 100% QC, 100% of the time.

Things fail. It's how the company goes about redressing it that's more important.

 

[appophylite]

The only peeve I truly have against Apple is the insistence during press conferences, product demos, or review done by them or 3rd parties that 'Apple products are simply intuitive'. I don't buy that at all. One person's intuitive is not the same as another's.

In my case, my dad started me out on computers when I was 6. He and I would plug away trying to figure out DOS and how to get the programs running. When I turned 8, my school started us out using Macs, and my father bought a PC for use at home. the computers were used very minimally in school but my dad would often sit me in front of the computer and tell me I was not allowed to get up for 1 hour until I could show him new things I had learned, even if it meant something that caused a BSOD. I had so much more exposure to PCs than Macs in those first couple of years that I got very used to the PC GUI and where everything was and where everything went. I spent 5 years in India after that working exclusively with PCs which just bolstered that news (at the time, it was almost impossible to get a Mac in India). When I finally came back to the US 10 years ago, I was so used to PCs, that everytime I had to look for something on a Mac, it was no longer intuitive to me where things were and how to find other things. And it isn't limited just to the Macs for me. My dad bought my sister her first iPod back in '03, and asked me to play with it and set it up. The iPod continues to remain, the only MP3 player under my roof for which I had to pull out the manual to figure things out.

In short, I don't hate Apple as a company, and I don't have any gripe about people who believe in their Apple products or who believe that Apple products are worth a premium. If the product you purchase appeals to you, it is money well spent. My only gripe comes from blind insistence that Apple products are intuitive for everyone.