I find it… curious that the Self Service [0] website of famously brand-conscious Apple is dog-ugly, generic, and has no Apple branding whatsoever.
"Apple has partnered with CTDI for the SSR store and the fulfillment of related parts and tools. CTDI will utilize its SPOT subsidiary, including SPOT customer service agents, in support of SSR store customers."
It makes sense that Apple would offload this to someone else, but I agree it's a rather jarring experience.
Which is while Apple doesn't like them. If you care about sales, glowing reviews are always better than honest reviews. There are plenty of people willing to praise Apple and so there is no need to cater to objective reviewers.
For every new product there are thousands of reviews for which iFixit is just one. And almost all of those reviews are overwhelmingly objective and honest as you can see for the lacklustre reviews of the Studio Display.
If I were Apple I wouldn't waste any time on iFixit either since they have limited traffic and limited social reach.
Remaining objective is of course possible even with financial ties, but the suspicion is going to taint people’s perception.
On the flip side, it might be possible for a partnership to provide better first-party parts support and more complete sharing of information, but I'm just too jaded to believe it could happen that way.
Partnering with Apple who is against right to repair creates a situation where they might have to choose the money from Apple or their right to repair aspirations.
From Merriam-Webster[0]:
> lobby (v)
> to conduct activities aimed at influencing public officials and especially members of a legislative body on legislation
“Public officials” have another name: politicians.
[0] https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/...
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675180/view/4347665...
They were beyond demanding that everything had to be pixel perfect at all resolutions. Far more then any other client I’ve had.
Was good in that it upped my game, and attention to detail. So I’m grateful for that. But wow was it annoying at the time.
Surprised they let others get away with low quality.
It is certainly still a decision to do that. I would guess that for a launch they actually cared about, especially a consumer-facing one, they either would demand to build the website themselves or demand that CTDI follow some design guides. I can't imagine Apple launching their credit card and saying, "okay, Goldman Sachs, you handle everything about branding. The product page for this credit card doesn't need to have Apple in the URL, and doesn't need to follow Apple branding rules" -- because Apple actually cares about getting the word out about the existence of their card, and they actually care about encouraging people to use it.
I don't necessarily think it's some kind of conspiracy to trick people (see TurboTax's shenanigans), but it does speak a lot to their priorities that they do not care about this site looking good or even official, and that they don't think it's important for it to be a recognizable URL or for it to be obvious that it's an official Apple service. None of those things were apparently important enough to get marketing/branding departments involved in the launch.
Seems similar to Apple’s trade-in program. The trade-in website is operated by a third-party and (in my experience) notoriously ‘un-Apple’.
looks okay to me.
I'm buying parts, not partying with friends or looking at it for long periods of time. As long as the part buying experience is gucci, then I am okay.
That's exactly why it is the way it is.
You do not want a brand associated with the highest quality and seamless integration to be associated with self-repair kits. Even under the best of circumstances, with the best of expertise, one must expect self-repair kits sold to the mass market to fail 5%? 10%? of the time?