Three Design Hacks from Apple | Hacker News Reader

Three Design Hacks from Apple

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87 pointsfogus42 comments

That last part explains why customer experience in Europe sucks so utterly and completely. Decisions at Apple seem to be made by these design teams, which have no direct experience or feedback from Europe.

Examples:

- There is a § key at the top-left of my MacBook Pro keyboard. It has been there for years, in all the different models (Powerbook, iMac, etc.), and this is the first time in over several months that I've actually touched that key.

- Applecare in Europe is a joke. We pay the same premium price for a service that is only a fraction of the kind of service you get in the US. In Europe there are next to none official Apple Stores, which means a repair must always be dealt with by the official repair center. This means that any repair to your computer means you have to part with it for over two weeks.

While I completely support the idea of being your own customer, you have to extend this globally if you are planning to expand your market globally.

Here's a another point: People around the world wished for "Personal Hotspot" (where your iPhone becomes a UMTS-Wifi router) for years. I talked to a high-up guy at a big European provider about this wish - reply "Apple won't listen to us". Many even jailbraked their Phone to add a software for $10.

Out comes the Verizon deal, and suddenly the feature is here, both for the Verizon iPhone and the worldwide GSM one. Looks like Apple only ever talked to AT&T and their customers, never to people outside the country.

Another one: the bandwidth-limitation of the YouTube app. Other providers around the world would be happy to move more data, but AT&T says Njet, Apple complies and denies more bandwidth to every iPhone user around the world.

I disagree on the hotspot complaint. People in the US have been asking for hotspot functionality and jailbreaking to get it for years, just like Europe. Similarly with tethering before it showed up.

It's far more likely that the delay was just Apple doing its usual feature triage and taking its time to get hotspot functionality up to their standards.

And with tethering in particular, it seems clear that if Apple only listened to AT&T it wouldn't have even shown up as soon as it did. Or have you forgotten the time-lag between announcement and international availability and when AT&T finally decided to turn it on, even with a steep fee?

If you're iPhone is jailbroken for another $3 you can buy My3G to make apps think they're on WiFi all the time. I use it to download apps > 20MB and see good quality YouTube everywhere.

You can also get higher res video by going to the YouTube site instead of using the app. But if you click a youtube link you have no choice...

I think it makes sense that it's taken a long time for Apple to implement Personal Hotspot; it's a feature that runs in the background that can suck up a lot of battery and add a lot of charges to your plan. I'm sure they had to think a lot about how to best put this into the interface, making it obvious that it's running, easy to turn on/off, etc.

That said, it's my favorite feature of my Nexus One...

> - There is a § key at the top-left of my MacBook Pro keyboard. It has been there for years, in all the different models (Powerbook, iMac, etc.), and this is the first time in over several months that I've actually touched that key.

Another odd one is the continued lack of a dedicated '#' key on the laptops…

Hmm, the Dutch seem to be blessed with just the single § key. Other European variants are indeed much much worse, check out the Hungarian one:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2841

That must be a disaster to code on, lacking access to [, ], {, }, and even < and >

This is in most cases probably not an Apple thing. All German keyboards lack dedicated [], |\, and {} keys. We have umlaut keys instead of those (this is obviously the right tradeoff for the vast majority of all German computer users except programmers).

I would like to see the circumflex key (directly below esc) replaced with something more useful but that’s also not an Apple thing.

The only thing odd about Apple keyboards is the very narrow enter key.

I would like to see the circumflex key (directly below esc) replaced with something more useful but that’s also not an Apple thing.

It's useful as the shortcut for "terminal" in most computer games, but indeed that's about it. Now Scroll Lock and Pause/Break are keys I've never used.

if you'll ever have to use windows: win+break => system preferences

But I guess it's easier to type in hungarian notation.

I don’t know of any similar, well, localization problems in Germany but I agree that the service isn’t so great. It has gotten better in recent years; still, there is no Apple Store anywhere close to me [0].

A repair means losing access to my MBP for several days or weeks. It’s not so much that the service itself sucks (though I had an awful experience with an Authorized Apple Service Provider once), all that waiting sucks. (Besides that, my experiences with Applecare were pretty great. Apple was willing to repair everything without flinching – broken keyboards with suspicious amounts of crumbs under them included – and was always extra accommodating whenever I had a problem. They have very friendly and patient people taking support calls who approved exchanging my battery five or so times for free.)

[0] The situation is improving. There are now four Apple Stores in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Oberhausen (near Düsseldorf and Cologne) and Munich, all built in the last two years and Apple might well build several more.

> Applecare in Europe is a joke.

It may be lower than in the US. But Europeans have more protections and guarantees by law with their purchases than in the US.

> are next to none official Apple Stores

This may be a problem. Yes, outside the UK, Europe is short of Apple stores (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Store#Locations), but this 'issue' is getting resolved fast.

A few months ago, there was none in Spain, and it has plans to open 10 stores (there are two already open, three more on the way) Right in the most centric-touristics spots in the major cities.

> It may be lower than in the US. But Europeans have more protections and guarantees by law with their purchases than in the US.

Yes, in Europe customers have a guarantee on hardware failures for the first year or so. Extending this to three years costs you more than the US counterpart (thanks to the nice €=$ apple conversion rate), and you don't have the benefit of mail-in or walk-in repairs, because there simply are no places to walk in to.

>"there simply are no places to walk in to."

From a practical standpoint, that's true for much of the US as well. If you live outside a large metropolitan area, your nearest service center can easily be 50-100 miles away. It's one reason many PC manufacturer's offer onsite service at the time of purchase.

You should never buy Applecare directly from Apple and always from ebay. It costs a lot less (185€ vs. 350€ for a MBP). Make sure to check the sellers’ ratings.

I successfully bought Applecare from ebay twice. (And heavily relied on it in one case. Apple replaced pretty much every part of my MBP without any fuss.)

The conversion rate isn't as outrageous when you take into account that US site shows prices before tax, and EU sites prices with tax.

iPhone and iPad international keyboards are amazing though, way better than the international keyboard support on Macs.

It depends. There are two layouts for Bulgarian keyboards - "Standard" and "Phonetic", and I believe phonetic is more commonly used. With iOS 4.0 the phonetic layout disappeared, to be back in 4.1.

> you have to extend this globally if you are planning to expand your market globally.

Not necessarily. Quite to the contrary: welcome to the world of those living in soft colonies. Sure, we pay the same premium price for a service that is only a fraction of the kind of service you get in the US[A]. You pay more.

World economy and its supporting legal framework is built to naturally shore-up the financial power of western, chiefly USA economies (mostly through petrodollars and entertainment industry, namely AAPL).

And the funny thing is, people like it, just like junk TV (this is just for those wishing to downvote this) -- this is how soft dictatures work (sometimes it is not so soft, see "rogue" states).

But imagine the rest of the world, were the premium price is mandatory for basic goods, not just "shiny cool" stuff.

Having more Apple Stores nearby doesn't necessarily mean you can get repairs done faster. I've had Apple laptops repaired a number of times and it seems like mailing it to the repair center is always faster than leaving it at the store because the stores have such a huge backlog.

I'm not sure about Europe, but in the US, they overnight you a box, you overnight them the machine, they fix it in a day, then overnight it back to you. One time I did this right before I traveled across country and they even mailied it to my destination for me and the computer beat me there.

If there's a design flaw in the computer, they will even do this for you without AppleCare which is nice.

While I've never been an Apple customer, there are Apple stores here in the Netherlands, at least, and a (Dutch) friend of mine got his Macbook repaired pretty quickly (no idea of the details - it's his Macbook...)

These "Apple stores" in the Netherlands are official retailers, not official stores. This means that they are allowed to sell them, but they are just general stores selling Apple hardware. You'll have some knowledgeable people there most of the time, but not something like an actual Genius Bar where they can repair your laptop or ipod on the spot.

Applecare does not cover any repair done by official retailers, it has to happen at a Authorized Apple Service Provider, which almost all of the time means sending it away.

The first official Apple Store in the Netherlands is opening soon in the center of Amsterdam.

Hm, that’s not my experience in Germany. All retailers which sell only Apple products are also Authorized Apple Service Providers and there is one in every mid-sized city. They won’t do repairs on the spot, though.

What does the § key do?

It's just a section sign, used simply to refer to various sections in a document. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_sign for a little more info.

I've always understood the character to reference a section in a paper/document (eg. §249).

Not sure if there would be a different context on Euro-keyboards.

"We have also learned to be very critical of ourselves and learned to not be afraid to say when a projects sucks"

I think this is one of the key elements missing in other places. Look at Microsoft's copy of the iPod (poo flavour Zune), or RIM's copy of the iPhone (the atrocious Storm).

But here's the thing, what we never know is how many iterations went on at Apple behind closed doors and over how many years.

Everybody else does their beta testing (alpha in some cases) in public, as well as subsequent iterations. You don't see those failed products from Apple, you don't see it till it has the rough corners knocked off.

On the other hand, just because it is highly polished doesn't mean it isn't a turd. The Cube was a thing of enormous, tremendous beauty, but still a colossal failure in the market-place. It's 'spiritual successor', the Mac mini is uglier in every way (except total size perhaps), but was a much greater commercial success.

Apple's willingness to throw out or challenge everything can be a weakness too, on numerous occasions they've changed the UI of some software and made it tangibly worse, made it harder to use. or just outright removed some useful functionality.

The Cubes failure was almost entirely down to its price tag. Had it been cheaper I have no doubt it would have been a massive success. I, and everybody I know, really wanted one, but non of us could justify the massive price tag. The mini on the other hand was launched both the cheapest mac you can buy and not too unreasonably priced given it's spec.

It's hard to test price when all your testers get the hardware for free.

There were also manufacturing defects that caused "cracks" in most cubes. Also, OS X was barely usable at the time. The platform was much more robust when the Mini came out.

It can seem a bit scattered too:

iOS 3.2. It's a rotation lock switch! iOS 4.2. It's a mute switch! IOS 4.3. Oh whatever, you can pick.

Good example. I missed the rotation lock feature for a week before I discovered that you could still get that feature, just in a completely different place.

If the iPad was a website, I'd say it had a bad case of 'mystery meat' navigation.

This was the most interesting part of the article for me:

"However the thing that we pay very close attention to is user feedback after a product is released. And not the day of, knee jerk reactions, but long term. For example, I have personally gone over Applecare call data looking for trends and patterns and reviewed warrantee return information. Even requested certain units get debugged by my team so we can correctly find field issues and put processes in place so we never see it again."

I once read that the MagSafe connector was designed because Apple noticed that the number one cause of warranty returns was from laptops that had fallen after the power cord was tripped. It's awesome to know that they do this analytical design for everything. It also explains why there's something of a 'curse' to buying a first generation apple product - because they haven't been able to do real world testing on it.

Weirdest part of the whole article: there are 'music haters' at apple. Who hates music?

"Who hates music?"

The iTunes team.

I knew a couple of older, non-traditional Hmong students at my university who simply didn't listen to music. Didn't have a favorite style, didn't ever listen to music while they worked, if a radio was on and they were alone, they'd turn it off.

It must have been a combination of age and culture, because all the other Hmong students I knew (we had a large Hmong student population) who were my age were really into music.

I thought this was an interesting label to put on people as well. It reminded me of people I know that are the antithesis of "music lovers"-where a music lover looks for what is new and cool, trying to know about new music others haven't heard yet, a music hater has a narrow view, only listening to what they know they will like, deliberately not seeking out or listening to music recommended to them. It may not be accurate, but in a way it is "music hating".

I understood that as people hating certain kinds of music. Lots of people don't like electronic music, for instance.

I wonder if no one at Apple tests MacBooks with 2 USB devices plugged in at a time, one of which happens to be a fairly common USB Thumb drive.

This especially sucks when the 15" and below have only 2 USB ports on one side, right next to each other.

"Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely....to "go crazy". Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other's antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work."

It seems like a great idea to separate brainstorming and refining into two meetings. From my experience, doing them in the same meeting is hard. You don't know when to cross over from free thinking to critical thinking. Tension arises when some folks end up drilling down into one idea while others are still brainstorming new ones at a very high level.

A little anecdote on being an Apple consumer but first some caveats:

1) I own a lot of Apple kit and I love my iMac so don't take this as some weird fanboy thing

2) I hate Apple mice and I hate the Apple store, my story may explain why

My story

The introduction:

So I've bought an iMac it's awesome and I love it but I have a MightyMouse which although it sounds great is fundamentally flawed. The flaw is quite simple, if you use it then it will no longer work. What, I hear you say, that doesn't sound very Apple after all their products are both beautiful and functional. I know I'm honestly as shocked as you are, I only buy Apple computers and to be honest if someone asks me what kind of computer they should buy the answer is simple, an Apple. So anyway here I am with an Apple MightyMouse, it looks beautiful and it works for a while but then all of a sudden the scrolly ball thing doesn't scroll in the right direction. I can scroll up, yay, but down, boo, that's not allowed and I am disappointed that my beautiful iMac is now a bit shit.

Oh dear something's not working, at least I have Apple's legendary customer service to fall back on (yay - possibly):

So I do what any sensible geek does (did I mention I'm a geek, in case you're curious I am), check the apple site and the internet in general to see what might be wrong. Yay once again it turns out this is a common problem with people who don't work in a clean room environment. Apparently if the MightyMouse is exposed to any kind of dirt/skin/life then after a while its sensitive little scrolly ball stops working. This sounds bad but it's OK you just have to turn the MightyMouse upside down and rub it forcefully against a piece of clean paper until it starts working again (I believe this is called cleaning in human circles but I imagine in the world of Apple it's called, removing the reality from perfection). My MightyMouse works again for a while ...

A temporary solution turns out to not be permanent:

Oh dear, I've used the turn upside down and rub against a clean piece of paper technique once too much. No matter how many times I try I can only scroll in one direction. Never mind I think I'll pop down to my local Apple store and they'll help (oh how I love that legendary Apple service).

And so off to the Apple store I go:

Fortunately I live in a large UK conurbation, this means my Apple store is only a few miles away. On arrival I'm greeted by a security guard, then some guy in a blue shirt appears and tries to sell me an iPhone. 'Hello there I say I've got a bit of a problem in that my mouse doesn't work' (offering the MightyMouse to him), this turns out to be an error blue shirts cannot do anything but sell oops. He backs away in fear and tells me that I must go upstairs to talk to the tech people ... It's ok I'm used to dealing with sales people so I smile and amble upstairs to shat seems to be some kind of indoctrination centre flanked by desks called 'Genius bars', seriously who the hell calls tech support geniuses, but hey if it makes them happy ...

I try and get someone to fix my mouse:

So I amble up to the nearest official looking person and explain the issue to the (mouse doesn't work seems simple to me) and they helpfully inform me that I need to talk to a genius. I'm not convinced a genius is required, after all a broken mouse is simply fixed by replacing it, but this guy seems convinced and he says that I need a pre-booked slot to talk to one of these geniuses so I ask if he could maybe fit me in, what with my problem being only a broken mouse surely it's simple replace mouse make customer happy. He is so helpful he offers to allow me onto a special genius bar waiver. I just have to wait about a half hour to talk to one.

I get to talk to a genius:

I wander around the Apple store, make some phone calls, consider buying some stuff then think better of it. After killing plenty of time my name appears on the pretty screens and some 'genius' accepts my communication. 'So what seems to be the problem', this is not what I expected from a genius but hey, I explain that my mouse doesn't work (I should point out that I've already explained this to every Apple employee I've experienced so far, as well as showing them the mouse and telling them exactly what I'd done to try and fix the problem). I explain the problem again ... he takes my MightyMouse picks up a clean piece of paper and rubs the mouse against the paper. I am shocked to observe that this doesn't fix the problem, more worryingly so is he ...

I try and get a replacement mouse (you know like you would with any company if the thing they'd sold you didn't work):

My personal genius is shocked, apparently the mouse doesn't work. I am not so shocked and ask if he can replace it, what with us being in an Apple store full of Apple goodness. Oh no says my personal genius, this is an OEM mouse, comes with the iMac you bought and we don't have any of them. hmmmmm How about the Apple MightyMouse I can see in a box just over there that you'll happily sell me? Oh no we can't possibly give you that it's not the right product says he ... I am I admit at this point a little disillusioned. I turned up with a broken mouse and thought I could just replace it, turns out that's not the Apple way.

I'm palmed off with the offer of an replacement:

So the genius can't replace my mouse, he needs to put in a special order. But I don't need to worry because their next delivery is imminent and he'll have a new mouse ready for me in a few days. I thought I just needed a new mouse, turns out I need a very specific new mouse but that's ok I'm a patient man. Apparently someone will contact me the moment my new mouse is available, then I can enjoy the Apple experience once more by returning to the shop and picking it up.

I wait:

No one calls

I wait some more:

No one calls (seriously this is two weeks after I was told I'd have the mouse in a few days)

I lose patience:

So I march to the Apple store, someone tries to sell me an iPhone and I ignore them. I find someone in an orange shirt (these seem to be the be the power brokers in Apple stores) and explain my situation (I am very annoyed). Fortunately because of Apple's legendary support I am fast tracked to a genius bar appointment. I repeat my experience in a surprisingly light hearted manner (see above) and offer the offending mouse to him. I am not joking when I say that his reaction was to take a piece of clean paper and rub the ball thing against the clean paper for fully thirty seconds before uttering the immortal words 'Seems like it's broken'. I didn't kill him or anyone in the near vicinity, he did however explain that they had no OEM parts available to replace my mouse. I explained my story so far and he, I imagine breaking company policy, gave me a new mouse. I wasn't happy but at least I had a mouse that worked.

I get annoying phonecalls:

So I have a mouse that works (for now, god knows what I'm going to do when this one fails due to the fact I don't live in a reality free zone) and all of sudden I start getting messages from my local Apple store. 'Hi mister blah we've just got your apple mouse in stock we'd love it if you could make an appointment to come and pick it up' Argh, I have my mouse. It was a nightmare getting it and you don't even know that I've got it ...

I hate apple:

I used to love apple. Seriously I still love the hardware but the customer service sucks. I remember when apple would collect and return your laptops, now you're lucky if they spit in your face and tell you their mice are shit.

Seriously do I seem bitter:

I know it's only a mouse but for the love of god why not just replace it ....

Just as a counterpoint, here's my anecdote. I'm no Apple fanboy, but I like their hardware enough to buy it for work-related purposes. My trackpad for a recent MBP had lost its "click", obviously this is a rather disturbing thing on a trackpad that is 100% button. It was a few days out from warranty end. I took it to a local store (US), a black shirt takes my name and says it'll be about 15 minutes. My name goes up on the board, I replicate it for the Genius, and he is satisfied with it being a hardware failure. At this point I mentally prepare myself to lose my computer for at least a week, but no! He says not only do they have the replacement part in-store, but they also have a tech certified to do the replacement. Apparently it will take an hour.

I go out into the mall to kill an hour, eat some lunch, and come back. Just like he said, it is all set. I walk out the door with a brand-new feeling MBP--after they service it, they polish it down with some kind of cleaner that leaves everything shiny again. A nice, and appreciated, small touch. I was impressed.

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