A Hidden Genius at the Apple Store | Hacker News Reader

A Hidden Genius at the Apple Store

duncandavidson.com

120 pointsglhaynes53 comments

Just an example of how Apple has changed the build of their equipment for ease of maintenance:

I had someone give me an broken iBook G4 and ask "Can you see about getting the data off the drive?". Here are takeapart instructions for it:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-iBook-G4-14-In...

14 pages, 60 screws.

Compare to a recent MacBook:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-MacBook-Unibod...

3 pages. 3 screws.

That's progress.

(in fairness, that's the model with the door on the bottom - the more recent models have 14 screws to remove, but the disassembly isn't difficult compared to the iBook: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-MacBook-Pro-13... )

HP's Envy line, essentially MacBook Pro clones, has the exact same design. One latch removes the metal panel covering the battery and hard drive. They actually paid attention to the details of the MBP, not just the aesthetics, when creating their own premium line.

"3 pages. 3 screws. That's progress."

I wanted poke around inside my new Thinkpad X100e. Might be four screws I had to twist, and they were designed to not fall out; they loosen up but stay in the cover hole, so no more concerns over lost screws. Very nice touch.

It may well be progress, but as this guy describes Thinkpads are unreasonably friendly to disassembly. They have little graphics on the underside to show you what size screw goes in what hole on my X61, and the hard drive comes out with just one screw

What's the point? How often do you disassemble your computer?

I'm pretty happy to go and look up some instructions (or, y'know, just undo all the screws) rather than having ugly stickers all over my laptop.

They aren't stickers, they are simple icons printed directly next to each screw hole with a table under the battery. It's very slick. Not vital as you say, but very nice. Especially if your manual is a pdf, the task is 20 pages long, and your only computer is the laptop.

Thinkpads have a lot of nice little touches like that. Mine even has drain holes for the keyboard in case of beverage. How often have i spilled? Never. Do i appreciate their presence? Very much so.

I have to inquire as well, how many laptps you serviced? 'cause they are usually a complete pain in the *#?!$.

For other people? None. For myself? Three.

They've all been as easy as piss to change RAM/HDD. Though I'm not sure if this is what you mean by 'service'

Dells are not as nice to get inside, but the D810 had a handy feature. The hard drive was attached to a tray, and the tray slid into the side. With an extra tray it became a snap to swap drives for times when I wanted to boot off a different drive. The D830, however, no longer has this. It's similar, but it's not quite as nice for swapping drive.

Captive screws/fasteners are lovely. I've personally encountered them on the engine housing of a Cessna (where a lost or loose screw may be much more than an inconvenience) and an iMac G5 (where just three drive the latch that holds the computer onto the back panel/stand). In both cases I was left with the impression that the entire remainder of the screw-turning world is missing out.

The big problem I have with Apple is that they sometimes have the tendency to be a bit too restrictive for apparently no good reason. Their most recent MacBooks have no door which allows you to quickly replace the battery which is fair enough (it’s a feature I personally don’t really need anyway).

The battery, however, is still pretty much the same as before. There is not much you can do wrong replacing it all on your own when it stops holding a charge (which will happen sooner or later). It’s not harder than replacing the hard drive or RAM, really. Yet, contrary to the hard drive or the RAM, you lose your warranty replacing it.

Were my battery to stop working I would have to drive 400km (two times 100km to the nearest place Apple deems worthy and back) and be unable to use my MacBook for a few days. When the same thing happens to my current 2007 MacBook Pro (this actually happened to me a few times but that is another story) I just have to call Apple and they send me the battery. All I have to do is hand the UPS guy my old battery.

Apple, don’t treat me like an infant. You are selling me a product called MacBook Pro, trust me with disconnecting a freaking cable! I like your small cars (iPad, iPhone) but it would be very nice if I could continue to buy nice trucks from you.

I was under the impression that the latest MacBook Pros had different, more embedded batteries to enable them to have that 10-hour battery life, and that was why they can't be user-replaced.

They do have different batteries but you can remove the new one by unscrewing three screws and disconnecting a cable [+]. The battery has even a pull tab which allows you to easily lift it out of the case.

That’s a little more involved than previously when you only had to open a latch and pull out the battery but it’s pretty much exactly as hard as replacing the hard drive.

[+] Here is iFixit’s guide: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-MacBook-Pro-15...

It was my understanding that parts that are officially consumer replaceable parts need to be more structurally sound for safety compliance (e.g. in case it is dropped when it is outside the machine), and that this extra battery casing takes up significant space—space that could otherwise be used for more battery.

Aha, here we go:

"With the MacBook Pro, Apple engineers went further. To make the lithium-polymer battery even bigger, they looked for extra space within the enclosure. And they found it in an unlikely place — the removable battery itself. Removable batteries take up a lot of space. They require infrastructure that takes up space. The batteries themselves have to be encased in bulky plastic housings to withstand the wear and tear of handling. Those housings take up more space. And the notebook enclosure has to include mechanisms for a separate battery compartment, such as latches and a door. All those parts take up space that could be used for the battery itself."

Source: https://www.apple.com/macbookpro/battery/

Apple's marketing copy gives a plausible reason for their design decision that makes them look good? Shocking. Apple's site is not going to say, "if the battery was removable, we couldn't charge $99 to replace it," which is probably the real reason.

Objection. Look at first generation iMac G5s which had the entire back panel come off granting access to practically every part of the logic board, followed by the next generation G5s that only offered user upgradeable RAM to the C2D intel iMacs only offering an upgradeable RAM slot. Consider also the removable battery of the pre-unibody laptops compared to the built-in one on the unibody MacBooks.

Progress is relative depending on what you want out of your machine. I want matte 16 bit screens back.

My no-name (HP) work laptop only requires a single screw to get at the hard drive. And you can hot-swap it.

Thinkpads have done this since about 1995.

Can't replace adequate product testing.

For example I think the biggest problem with the iPhone4 was not attenagate but the material chosen for the camera lens.

After 3 weeks the phone camera is completely unusable due to blurriness from the act of setting it down on a table due to the lens being made of a non scratch resistant material and being flush with the casing that is.

It's interesting that both this lens concern, and the antenna problems, may have been under-appreciated by Apple because much of their practical-use testing was with cases -- either in-house or for camouflage field-testing. Then, the iPhone4 ultimately launched without a broad variety of available cases, so most people used it without a case.

On my phone (Nokia N86), there's a sliding cover for the lens, which is a nice bit of reassurance. (It's also very convenient: open the cover, and the camera app starts up.) I wish some of the Android phones would imitate it.

I work for a small shop, so I know very little about how big players work, but I was under the impression, that every company takes data in account, while making product decisions.

Most every company will take the data they have on hand into account, but some companies are much, much better at funnelling quality information back to themselves than others.

A Compal laptop doesn't have the benefit of having a lot of data from previous models incorporated into its design, because sales, support, and repair takes place at 3 or 4 levels of indirection.

Another hidden benefit that they may or may not make use of - Apple can directly observe their users interfacing with their products. With websites and to a certain extent with software, usability data collection is a given. But for consumer products like iPods, iPhones and Macs, it's a little harder to come by. By having thousands of end users in dozens of stores around the world playing with their gear, it seems like a great opportunity for Apple to get direct feedback on user pain points.

It wouldn’t be an easy task to adequately collect that information. Their retail employees are not sociologists or usability experts and letting them collect usability data which might be quite subtle and usually cannot be had with a simple standardized form seems like a daunting task.

There is also the danger that Apple ends up with massive amounts of unstructured data, so much that no one can possibly make heads or tails of it.

Yes that seems a very possible result. Besides, I'm sure Apple already does UX/UI testing of their products as much as possible.

This is probably one reason why Apple is able to belt out products that customers wants. They put a lot of thoughts to the concerns of real customers who come to their store to report or have something fixed. They are relying on these data/information to make their next product, stand out far better than their last one.

I think they are living by the mantra - "it ain't cheap but it's worth it."

is this really that different from, say, Dell? I imagine their tech support also has a database or two.

Does Dell do face-to-face tech support?

They do for corporate customers.

correct me if i'm wrong, but I thought "the Dell Guy" that comes is a 3rd party company? They'll come to your office and fix your machine, but I'm not sure that guy is a Dell employee...

No idea honestly. Our company has that "gold support" thing, so when something breaks, Dell dispatches a guy within a few hours. We deal only with Dell, not sure what is their employment/subcontracting structure is. I'm in Norway so it might be different anyway.

my father was one of those guys for this area, and he didn't work for dell

The guy who came to fix my current laptop was a contractor. Also very concerned about my giving a nice service rating. (Which I did, because he was good.)

They are and the system demonstrates how badly it works compared to Apple.

I had a Dell with a faulty touchpad - it took 12 TWELVE onsite visits to fix it. That included 2 visits where the tech had been given the wrong part and 2 to replace parts that had been broken by the previous tech.

Every visit was a new person, none of them knew that the part they were swapping had already been swapped 6times before - until finally they stopped swapping the touchpad and replaced the motherboard.

But the info that this release MB was faulty was all over the net - it was only Dell that was unaware of it.

At one site where I worked we had somewhere between 20 and 30 Dell Optiplex desktops breaking down due to this http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=4

Every time a skilled technician (InfoCare business support in Norway) would arrive within the time frame specified in the support contract, change the motherboard and make sure everything worked smoothly.

Well here a lot of my friends had problems with Powerbooks and simply abysmal service from Apple, while Dell Norway for us was impeccable on several occasions. Can be just a regional thing.

When you have high-quality documentation available to the public, you don't need specially trained engineers. Apple's secrecy creates an artificial scarcity which they can capitalize on.

For an Optiplex, Inspiron or a Latitude, no. You'll get a Banctec guy. For Poweredge, SANs and such, you get a Dell badged dude, based on your contract.

It's not different than any large company in the world.

I bought a Dell server 3 years ago, its power supply is now damaged (because of a power outage and failure of the surge protector). It is unclear whether there is more damage, but the first thing to do is to try using a new power supply.

I called Dell to order a new power supply. They didn't have it in stock, but promised to get back to me by the next Monday. They never got back to me. A week after that Monday, I called them again and they directed me to a third-party supplier. That supplier listed the price of the power supply at $259.99 (the power supply is not available in any local store in the Seattle area)

In fairness, Dell sells PCs at low prices, Apple sells their products at premium prices and so it may not be fair to compare the two. However, in terms of customer support, it is hard to see how you could be correct in suggesting that Dell's customer database and awareness of customer concerns is anywhere close to that of Apple.

Also, to be Fair - Dell is optimized for supporting the poweredge line with a support contract, which it offers in 4 Hours turnaround time. Since 1999 I've had roughly 600 Dell Servers under active support at three companies in the Bay Area, and have probably called dell about 20-30 times. They've never missed their support window of 4 hours (come close several times, but by the 240th minute, I've always had part and a body on site). Ironically, Apple still doesn't make it easy to purchase that type of support for their product. The typical answer is "Take it to the genius bar" - Apple is optimized for consumers, Dell is optimized for corporations.

Also - None of the people who come on site, for parts or labor, are actual "Dell Employees" - they are subcontractors that are typically certified on a number of platforms - Dell is just one of them.

AppleCare Premium provides similar 4-hour onsite for XServes, and in my (admittedly singular instance) experience, they meet their commitment.

I bought a Dell laptop a few years ago, and the main battery went flakey. I still had a service agreement in place, so I called them up. After a few minutes dancing around the "I don't have Windows installed" prelude I explained the behavior and was all set.

Had a new battery show up at my house either the next day or the day after, with postage-paid packaging to send back the old one. Pretty sweet.

I have a T7400 Dell Precision Workstation, basically the class of hardware you would find in a MacPro of the same vintage.

Should it break, I'm not responsible for packing and hauling all 25 kilos of it back and forth to a "Genius." Instead a technician will come to me because the basic warranty is next business day on site.

I didn't have to pay $300 extra to have warranty coverage which matched the machines depreciation schedule, because three year coverage is standard.

One year depot service is fine for consumer electronics. But my computer is vital to my business.

Dell contracts out the bodies that go onsite to service their warranties. I once did a few of these contracts. When you get onsite you're just supposed to call and do everything you're told. You're literally just their eyes and hands. If you try to figure things out on your own you'll just be ignored and if you persist the contract will be canceled and you wont be paid.

I was looking at the PC of one of these poor customers, Dell was having me do a couple of power checks. At the end of it they said "we've ordered a new power supply, you'll have it in 2 days". When I hung up the customer says to me "they didn't say power supply did they? This will be the third one. Why doesn't someone actually figure out what's wrong with my computer?"

I've never touched a Dell product since that day.

My friend switched to the Mac mostly because of my example (though I shy away from advocacy) and his iMac had multiple, far more invasive repairs including at least two motherboard replacements.

Eventually my Mac expertise helped because I picked up on forums that 3 major repairs was usually enough to argue for a replacement (or similar, the details are hazy with time).

A rough introduction, but he's now the proud owner of many, many iPods, multiple iPhones, Airports, iMacs and Macbooks and probably going to get an iPad.

I'm sure there are stats available that would reveal exactly who is more likely to sell a defective device rather than rely on anecdotes.

What I am happy to offer as an anecdote is that there is clearly a certain kind of Apple purchaser, who even when returning a faulty product(!), will managed to convince themselves that Apple has some magical process that is unavailable to any other company, when generally almost everything they do (excepting the rare flash of brilliance) is fairly bog standard and boring, if not inferior to the competition (e.g. A4 is slightly worse than Samsung's sister chip in it's phones, PPC was in later days much slower than intel except in carefully staged Altivec bake-offs).

Yum, Baked Altivec!

My understanding was that after the second failure you were eligible for a replacement. Apple consistently scores well on customer service.

All PC makers are buying from the same place so of course one isn't going to be much better than the other. The difference is in customer service and extras (e.g. that fantastic touchpad on the mac book line).

Lol. I've been in retail and market research for 15 years. Trust me. They aren't that smart. And they don't look at as much data as they could. You would assume so, because you think that as a consumer, who is as impressed with the company for being Apple, that it must be doing something to make themselves the Apple that they are, but retail companies look at a shockingly basic amount of trends, and the rest they hire professionals to shuffle numbers around with. It's alot of luck and guess work. Yes, this includes Apple. it's just a company, that you like.

They aren't learning fast enough. I've had every Apple product (~10?) that I've ever owned replaced at least once due to hardware issues. Some 3 times.

This reminds me of Craigslist Craig's job in customer service. Absolutely no better way to understand your customer's pain points. As an engineer I'm a fan of spending time in customer support once in a while, especially as a company grows and more layers are added between engineering and the customer.

Well. What he's just saying is that Apple is getting a feedback and listenning to it. So when I brought my 1 year mac and refused to pay 1000 euro to fix it. I guess the next customer won't have the same issue. COOL.

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