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Comment by cbo100 | Hacker News Reader

It's the same on the Apple discussion boards. You won't ever get an official answer, only a guess of an answer from somebody with no more knowledge than yourself.

HP is the same, but occasionally you will get an employee answer, but it will be just as useless.

My assumption is all the big tech companies don't want to give support away for free when you should be paying for a support contract for it.

And yes, there is for some unknown reason, a legion of people who will give this fake support for free for internet points.

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Maybe Apple consumer forums, but I’ve had amazing support from the developer forums. Especially Quinn “the Eskimo” ... saves my butt every 6 months it seems, and isn’t the least bit offended when my questions relate to an opaque electron code signing issue. Seriously, bless this person for doing the “lord’s work.”

Ditto for the same person and similar reasons (code signing and notarization).

He's been doing it since the late 90s too... I still remember getting an answer from him regarding a dusty corner of the Mac OS 8 internet config API when I was trying to bulk provision Macs for campus internet access in 1998. It was all mailing lists then.

And the guess of an answer they give is always the same:

1. A word-for-word copy of generic support steps (e.g. try restarting, try clearing your cache, log out of iCloud and back in again, etc)

2. Have you reset your PRAM?

3. Wow you have? Then you'll need to reset your NVRAM.

And don't forget the mandatory "reset your SMC"

Real answer they don’t want to give.

   “Look we got one guy keeping the system alive, we’re not paying for another one.”

Big-vendor hardware: Sure it costs 1.5-2.0x as much as white-box equipment, but you're paying for the support!

... later...

"Can I get that support that I paid double for?"

"Oh no, for that you need enterprise support, that's extra!"

Honestly, that last line reads exactly like something from BOFH[0], right before he gets the PFY to commit some heinous act of domestic terrorism on the unsuspecting enterprise support salesman. Some things apparently never change.

[0]https://www.theregister.com/data_centre/bofh/

Apple's discussion boards are useless, but at least they have actual phone and email channels to get an answer from an employee (usually). And Apple doesn't generally charge for the phone call itself (they will charge for out-of-warranty hardware work, but generally don't for software support even out of warranty).

With Google, more often than not, community "support" through their forums is the only option. Where official phone and email channels exist to get support, they're generally restricted to paying customers only, on the business side of their business only-- users of their general consumers services have no options.

The Apple communities are next to useless, especially when it's a design flaw; butterfly keyboard. You practically have to sue companies like Apple to get them to take notice.

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