Comment by fuckmeyes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fuckmeyes | Hacker News Reader

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They are shit in RMA but as is every other company, most service centres are outsourced. I remember I just need a droid to remove the cmos battery from my zenbook to fix some weird power on race condition that prevented the whole thing from switching on - I didn’t have the silly screwdrivers - yet they wanted to rma it for two weeks - had to literally scream down the shop unrefined - losing face - until they relented albeit with sir it won’t work but calm down you idiot we’ll try, of course it worked and I was back in a taxi 20mins later with working zenbook and my data. Still better than Acer but still shit. This was bangkok

Not every other company. Apple - to name one - are often simply excellent at this because they understand the power of customer satisfaction. There are numerous stories of apple replacing failed hardware with equivalent, newer models - phones and laptops alike.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms one can make of Apple but customer satisfaction under warranty is not one of them.

Ever heard of Louis Rossmann?

He works exclusively on dead Apple products all day, every day. How does this not result in base rate neglect?

He does have stories about customers who get scammed by Apple's repair service.

Again, he only sees the bad stories.

I consider myself a fan of Louis Rossman. He's fighting the good fight and nearly every individual bad thing he says about Apple is correct. My point is that Apple is colossal and even if they were saints anointed by God -- which they aren't -- I would expect them to have enough design mistakes and negative experiences to fill ten Rossman channels. To some degree these reflect their size, and to some degree they reflect Apple's quality, and you can't tell which without making some effort to correct for base rate. Louis makes absolutely no effort to correct for base rate. That's fine for repair purposes and even for engineering feedback, but it makes his criticism completely useless for analyzing the overall quality situation.

I have a desktop PC for gaming and most of my work laptops have been PC, so an estimate from my own experiences has waaaaay less base rate bias at the cost of admittedly tiny N and much more variance. I've probably seen a dozen big issues (bezels that delaminate on flex, charger DRM broken in update, wifi cables that pull out when you tilt the screen back, ...) on the PCs that would have been twitter scandals and would have filled Rossman Repair's shelves if they had happened in the Mac world, but because of the low expectations in the PC world they just sort of float under the radar. "Dude, that's what you get for buying a Dell/Lenovo/HP/Acer, buy Lenovo/HP/Acer/Dell instead."

So yeah, if I count by twitter complaints, macs suck. If I count by how many broken computers show up at Rossman Repair, macs suck. If I count by average problems that I've personally witnessed per device, macs rule.

Agree. I had a nearly-new MacBook Air that had some weird power-on behavior. Took it to an Apple store; they ran diagnostics, found something amiss and I walked out with a brand new replacement in under an hour. (No "we have to escalate to corporate", just "You have a good TimeMachine backup? OK, here ya go...")

In summary, I got sold a defective product from a company and left with a much higher overall impression of the company.

I personally don't care for their devices, or their locked-down software. But seeing how they treat my parents, they certainly have great customer satisfaction.

> or their locked-down software

Not anymore, check out Asahi Linux.

Asahi isn't their software. Thankfully Macbooks can boot other OSs. I was mostly referring to their iDevices.

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