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Comment by oldjokes | Hacker News Reader

I went in a few months to get a hardware thing fixed with an appointment set and nobody helped me. I waited for like 10 minutes past by appointment time and everyone was booked up. I tried pestering people but everyone was helping someone else and asked me to wait for another associate.

Eventually I gave up and left the store. I'm sure their analytics never even noticed me, their data says I just never showed up for the appointment. It's a bad outcome, I sold the old half broken macbook and switched to a thinkpad.

I still think their phones are better than android, but mainly that's just because I don't want anything that Google touches anywhere near me.

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It seems like the standard inevitability for every service related thing that it degrades noticeably with time.

Start out and offer a thing and tout the level of service, then shave off bits of service to save money until it is bad... probabbly still touting service.

That's one of the reasons I left a career of 20 years supporting high end networking equipment. Company after company would talk big but the gradual (sometimes sudden) dialing back on training, tools, and staff (sometimes outsourcing that cost even more than locals in the end) seemed inevitable and tiresome. But the pressure on individuals to maintain the service level was always increasing. Eventually it was a grind that I just didn't want to do anymore despite the pay being good. You can only take so much talk talk talk from the company but decreasing investment and conflicting action before you lose heart. I decided to start over with something else.

> It seems like the standard inevitability for every service related thing that it degrades noticeably with time.

I don't think that's an inevitability, just the effect of a particular type of corner-cutting business culture that's very prevalent nowadays.

Today's business conventional wisdom isn't very wise, and I do hope that it's eventually replaced by something better.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes hold inside service related business units.

I saw a strong trend where good leadership in those business units simply leave that area and move into other business areas (engineering, sales etc) when it became clear that any initiatives they started that didn't involve cost cutting were not going to happen in any support related department.

There was a serious brain drain as far as leadership with vision, a backbone, knowledge as far as support organizations went. I had conversations with several who recognized that there was simply no future / chance of them being able to do much of anything in those roles so they simply moved on.

Meanwhile what was left were largely yes men who embraced the endless (often counter productive) cost cutting, and in doing so didn't really need / care to understand how things worked if all you had to do was slice out X% and hit some arbitrary metrics.

I fear that fundamentally support related business units are just not likely to have anyone who knows how to do it right (even if suddenly given resources), let alone care.

> I fear that fundamentally support related business units are just not likely to have anyone who knows how to do it right (even if suddenly given resources), let alone care.

Yeah, the rot starts from the top and needs to be fixed from the top, and least in today's corporate structures. I think it's the conventional wisdom of C-suite people that needs to change.

I setup an appointment at an Apple Store and walked in about an hour earlier then the appointment. The person at the front created me a walk-in appointment and told me to wait.

An hour goes by without anyone so I ask the person at the front (new person) and neither my scheduled appointment nor my WALK-IN appointment were checked into... How the hell do you check-in to a walk-in appointment?

Definitely not a great experience. He checked me into both and 10-20 minutes later I get two people asking me what I need help with.

> I waited for like 10 minutes past by appointment time and everyone was booked up

Ha. Here in New York, I’ve never had an Apple Store appointment honored inside an hour. Usually an hour and a half. My strategy is now to get a cocktail at the Cipriani Dolce, walk it across to the Apple Store, ignore the “you can’t bring that in here” protests and wait out the hour with a drink.

This is hilarious, if you actually do this you should make videos where you tell jokes or just film yourself silently drinking for an hour while waiting. Instant viral success.

I walked in a few months to ask about a phone glitch. The rep was happily asking me detailed questions and for a moment I thought they were going to actually help me. Only then did I realize he was just making an appointment for me weeks in the future.

I made an appointment last year for an iPhone SE battery replacement several weeks in advance. Showed up on time at my appointment. Waited 15 minutes just to hear someone tell me that they don't have the SE battery in stock. When I made the original appointment, I had to specify that it was for a SE battery replacement.

I have also had a bad experience with repairs. Took my laptop in for the first time for keyboard repair, when I got it back they had damaged the screen and some brown hues where randomly popping up on it (its apparently caused by leaving dust inside when assembling the laptop). I took it in the second time and they replaced the screen but didn't tighten the screws inside properly and now my screen wobbles a bit

This was how my keyboard looked after my last repair from Apple. They were so busy that day they shuffled me out without getting to inspect it in store:

https://twitter.com/syneryder/status/1066258885923635200

I mean, it was an easy enough fix that I ended up fixing it myself on this model rather than take it back. But for a company that used to pride itself on "painting both sides of the fence", now they're not even painting the front of the fence.

I've moved on to a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 now - I don't "love" it, but so far it's required no repairs and been reliable, while that MacBook Pro has had 6 repairs during its 3 year lifetime (all internal SATA cable replacements).

> I sold the old half broken macbook and switched to a thinkpad

Di you switch to thinkpad just because of this service support issue? Because I don’t think thinkpad is better in service dept

Thiknpads are easily serviceable and Lenovo often just sends you a replacement component if one on your laptop fails and you know how to replace it on your own.

Apple instead is trying very hard to make everything not easily replaceable, even the failing keyboard is hard to remove for a common user

+1, I've benefited from Lenovo sending out parts before. If you want to swap the part, they will happily mail you the part and send a link to their step by step guide on how to swap said part.

You can service pretty much everything yourself with thinkpads (except some recent models). No need to ask anyone to open up your machine as long as you have a screwdriver.

That's another good point. All you need are fine phillips (P1/P0) head screwdrivers. No oddball Pentalobe or Torx screws.

Torx screws are not odd and quite superior to philips. Since the patent ran out I expect them to slowly take over.

I think it's safe to say that someone who switches from a Mac to a Windows/Linux machine just because of a bad experience at the Apple Store is probably not quite telling the whole story. I assume they had other experiences that were already pushing them to make that decision, but which are not shared in this post.

Well I’m one of those people and it’s the only factor. They wasted so many hours of my time and money because of their poor service, I just feel bad buying anything from them.

To each their own, but you're setting yourself up for a lot of unhappiness if you think there isn't a corporation out there that won't disappoint you at least once. Switching your entire ecosystem out for one bad experience seems like asking for an unnecessary headache.

It’s not that I expect fewer issues. The reason I started using Apple over Linux was because I thought I could avoid some of those headaches and I do think years ago they cared about quality of experience. But if I’m going to have just as much trouble I might as well keep my freedom.

Ah, so indeed it was not the only factor. ;-)

It is though - the lack of a good experience means lack of a reason to use Apple.

Agreed, with two caveats. You have the option to switch hardware vendors with Linux and Microsoft, without having to sacrifice your entire ecosystem. There is also a world of difference between being disappointed by a single experience with the corporation addressing it in a meaningful way, and having that disappointment cascade into a series of disappointments because the corporation is not addressing the problem.

You can't dump a glass of water on a MacBook and expect it to still work. You can on a ThinkPad. Lenovo has a partner network and Lenovo authorized service centers worldwide that can fix your Thinkpad when it eventually does break.

Admittedly I'm biased as I work for Lenovo ASP and reseller and daily with a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. My MacBook Air stays at home.

I can understand being anti-Google, but why anti-Google and pro-Apple?

I think their view is that Apple tries to keep your data to themselves vs. sharing it with third-party ad providers

Last I heard, Google also tends to keep data to themselves. The difference in business model is that Google internally uses user data to effectively place and sell advertising, not that advertisers have direct access to that data. Apple isn't an advertising company the way Google is.

But perhaps things have changed.

Apple (legal) really doesn't want your data if they can help it.

One company makes its money selling you goods, one company makes its money selling your goods.

A subtle, but important distinction.

Their genius bar is just slowing down since they want you to buy new instead of repair what you have. Not always the case but I get that feeling. That and “IT at home” requests seem to flood the bar now.

Yea they persuade you to buy more from them with bad service. Flawless logic right there.

No, he means that they value replace over repair.

Like when I brought a MBP in with a charging circuit issue - just wouldn't charge, OS said battery was healthy, but at 0% capacity. Would run on AC.

I thought $200... no... $600.

Not "Would you like to schedule that service?" (I didn't - for its use case it could stay on AC the rest of its life)... but the first comment after the price?

"That's quite a bit, huh? Maybe we should talk about getting you into a new Mac instead?"

Yup, noticed the same in the UK. I can't help but feel like the prices are intentionally kept high to pressure people to replace rather than repair.

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