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Comment by scottydelta | Hacker News Reader

Apple has always tried to blame customers whenever they can.

I remember when my MacBook pro 2015 started glitching and Apple voided the warranty by saying there was liquid spillage/fluid damage.

So apparently macbooks have these small stickers inside them which change color upon contact with liquids to help detect liquid damage but the issue with those stickers are that they also change color if you live in a humid area.

They made me pay for that repair even though the customer support guy at the store agreed that the color could change because of humidity but it was company policy to charge for those repairs.

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Several years ago I brought my Macbook Air to an Apple store to get the battery replaced under warranty. The computer worked fine otherwise, it needed a new battery.

The 'genius' came back with my laptop after a few minutes saying it had water damage and trying to pitch me on a new laptop. After I refused and started insisting that the battery was under warranty he eventually relented and acted like he was doing me a favor to give me the new battery I was entitled to. Then when he finally came back with my newly batteried laptop, he mentioned my android smartphone and started trying to sell me an iphone. I'm never buying a computer from Apple again, it was a terrible experience.

Assuming he wasn't lying about the water indicators being tripped (he may well have been, for all I know), the only way I can think that would have happened is from the humidity in the air. I never dropped any drink on the laptop, never used it in the bathtub or anything like that. I don't believe it was ever in contact with liquid water at all, only water vapor.

That's a strange experience because I thought Apple Store employees weren't paid on commission.

They are not but they are encouraged to up sell.

They tried to sell me a new MacBook by suggesting that I trade this one in to get a small credit. I would rather use that macbook as a paper weight than to give it back to Apple so that they can sell it to some poor guy.

I suspect there are some differences between regions. The staffs in the Apple Store in Macau are more aggressive than the staffs in Canada, in my experience.

It was the same case with my MacBook. No water damage but the liquid damage indicator had tripped somehow. I was forced to pay for repairs.

On the other hand, there were some screen issues on 2015 MacBook Pro laptops that I ended up experiencing. I inadvertently found out that they had extended the warranty well outside the usual period and fixed it for free. The only comment from the "genius" was it was one of the more interesting patterns he'd seen.

Apple's certainly far from perfect but I've been pretty happy with their customer service.

He was being helpful by directing you towards an iPhone. They want you to have the best UX.

Heh, the punk at the Amsterdam Apple Store had the audacity to guilt trip me for a complaint I had within the mandatory EU warranty.

According to him, I had exposed an iPhone to excessive humidity despite the sensing sticker remaining white. His reasoning was that if the connector was growing copper corrosion it must have been humidity and therefore my fault (not a bad batch of connectors.)

I chuckled and asked him how could that happen if I always keep the thing in my pocket and he said “well that’s a humid environment and the phone is not designed for that.”

The fact that he also called a security guy before lecturing me about my warranty expiry was a clear indication of the sort of narrative and treatment I’d receive if I insisted, so I walked. Other times I was given red-carpet treatment and expensive replacements without a peep.

I guess it really depends on whether Cupertino acknowledges the defect, until then Genius KPIs must include how many customers they successfully subdue and kick out.

SMH… but I guess you get assholes everywhere

>I chuckled and asked him how could that happen if I always keep the thing in my pocket and he said “well that’s a humid environment and the phone is not designed for that.”

Lol.

Reminiscent of "you're holding it wrong".

I've witnessed an interaction like this in the main Apple store in Berlin, where a woman came (with a friend) because she had an issue with having forgotten her password and wanting to get her photos back, which wasn't possible. The security guard was extremely fast to show up behind her back as soon as despair could be heard in her voice.

That gave me a very different image of Apple all of sudden..

> Apple has always tried to blame customers whenever they can.

+1 to this.

Apple has never admitted fault for their shoddy MagSafe 2 charger (and older Lightning) cable insulation, many of which have ended up disintegrating and spewing blue stuff all over my furniture.

I've had multiple cables flake over the years, and every time I bring one of the chargers to a Genius bar (so far: Australia, Japan, and Singapore), they've always fallen back to "policy" and blamed it on me for not taking care of it properly.

Apple doesn't want to do proper strain relief on their cables because it's ugly and unaesthetic. Apple has basically always prioritized form over function.

Apple wasn't always like that, just the current iteration of Apple. Back in the 80s and 90s Apple was more focused on longevity and building really great user interfaces than purity of design. Their Human Interface Guidelines were some of the best in the industry and they spent a lot of time and money on human factors research.

80s Apple computer were not speced for a long, useful life.

I don't mean the specs but the quality of the hardware design itself.

80s apple computers were highly upgradeable. Multiple expansion slots and 3rd party options.

It was a completely different ecosystem, but it was when Woz was making design decisions on the apple II

While Woz certainly made some good decisions todays PCs are incomparibly more upgradeable and have longer shelf life due to also changing the CPU to a better model or use 5 years from the future graphic cards.

and apple almost went bankrupt after that.

I feel people often have pink glasses over the old period of Apple. 90s was tons of Mac product lines competing with each other. No shortage of quality problem on those hardware. A nice operating system but was falling behind in many modern OS concepts (while trying to build a new OS from scratch and failing).

I used apple all my life (including the 90s) and it was definitely not the best period of apple.

Yeah, I burned through a few new Macs in late 90s early 2000s. They all were obsoleted pretty fast. I have an old Silver Door Mac G4 that was really just crap new out of the box.

But, the Late `09 Mac Mini I bought new has been as solid as one could ever hope for. I just ordered a refurbished late `14 Mac Mini from OWC to replace it and I expect it should last a few years too.

I mostly just write code for a web app I sell so I don't need the latest or most powerful Mac and the `14 model will run the current Mac OS and the latest versions of the software I use most, mainly BBEdit and web browsers.

I know I'd be pretty disappointed if I'd bought a Macbook M1 and that happened to me.

To be fair, every computer got obsoleted fast on those years. The Moore law was strong back then.

I consider M[Int] Pro line as a solid return to form, and I bring that up here because of the braided MagSafe cable which comes with it.

I'm hard on cables, and I have an instinct for what's going to crap out on me. I expect this cable to last. That thing where they can afford to make a decent cable, know how, and just... wont? This cable isn't one of those.

It will, however, show grime. They haven't let go of Apple White Which Reveals If You're a Slob yet, and I'm dubious they ever will.

Edit: have to take that last paragraph back, they sell them in black. I did figure on having two...

> It will, however, show grime. They haven't let go of Apple White Which Reveals If You're a Slob yet, and I'm dubious they ever will.

Haha, we had an all-hands meeting in-person for the first time since Covid last week. There were about 15 of us sitting around a huge conference table. Many white Macbook chargers and their cables sprawled across the table.

I did get very self conscious when I realized all the rest were pristine white - as if they had just unwrapped them for the first time - while mine was pit-stain yellow with the connector frayed and blue. I had never noticed how gross it was until seeing it right next to the newer, clean chargers.

I blamed it on the cat - he sits on the cord when it's lying on the bed. I'm not sure they were buying it, though.

Apple offered upgrades from the IIe to IIGS. It was an in-store motherboard and lower case swap

Someone here pointed out to me, when I made a similar comment, the hockey puck mouse.

I think the Apple III is also an example of their susceptibility to letting aesthetics or marketing dictate over function

I had a MagSafe charger that the cable basically disintegrated on me and no amount of epoxy and electrical tape would keep it together.. Not good. On the other hand a new charger is a lot cheaper than having to replace the computer.

Maybe this is an urban legend, but:

Sinclair Research made early home computers, well known in the UK, not so much elsewhere. These were tricky to set up, and often returned as broken. To cut their support costs, supposedly Sinclair, on first receipt of a 'broken' computer would simply add a sticker and send it back, 'repaired'. Often the customer would get it working on this second attempt. Only when a computer was sent in with this sticker already applied, would they actually investigate to see if anything was wrong with it.

if 80% of cases were due to improper connection or EBKAC then this would actually be quite an elegant solution......

Also there was a famous media interview by clive sinclair telling customers they could fix an issue with the a ram pack upgrade falling off with the use of blu tac

Back in the days of the Toshiba laptops with the orange plasma screens (T3100 and T3200), a small batch had out of spec panels that were thicker than the right ones. These panels were under more tension in the bezel and had a tendency to shatter.

I worked for a Toshiba dealer/repair centre and the first we knew about the problem was when a Tosh came back with a screen that looked like it had taken a bullet. The owner swore that the screen just went 'bang'. The crazy thing was that it still worked!

We checked with Toshiba and they basically said 'Yep, replace it' and so it began.

We didn't see a lot of these screens, but it was a notable problem.

A warranty that can be voided just because some little sticker a user can't access indicates moisture detection doesn't even sound like it should be legal. If you've done something obviously stupid like drop your monitor in the bath then you're hardly going to need such a sticker to detect "unreasonable use". It seems pretty reasonable to expect consumer goods to tolerate small amounts of moisture. In fact a monitor I just bought recently got water on it due to some dripping house plants above it. It was fine. So far anyway!

Most electronics including Apple mention that they’re rated for 35°C while working and 40°C while off.

After a single year, most of Apple warranties void out.

You use your laptop outside a lot?

Of course, portability is the point of a laptop. Absent precipitation, I'd rather use one in a park than indoors.

So if you live in a place where it will reach 41° in the summer, you won't have warranty! Neat!

Also those seem very cool temperatures given how apple computers love to overheat.

Those liquid damage indicators might need to be made illegal - water damage that would cause the machine to fail is readily visible without any stickers, and if it isn't visible then the machine is likely to work just fine.

Apple seem to love to claim liquid damage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2r-g8EaTfY

He has more videos about it.

Apparently they trigger very easily with humidity.

Why aren't these things waterproof anyway?

My wife had a MBP with support plan years ago. The track pad started failing and it wouldn't always click even after you felt it depress and was slowly getting worse and worse. I took it in and the guy basally said there was no problem and I was just not pressing hard enough or something... It was very noticeable after using it for a while... Anyway I ended up ordering a new track pad online and replaced it myself and of course it fixed the issue. Still bothers me today.

It's impossible to do self repairs on macbooks these days.

Apple intentionally solders all the components together to prevent self repair. Even the battery is soldered to the system.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/07/12/2019-13-macbook-pro-teardown/

Technical quibble here. The batteries are glued to the case, not soldered to anything. The power cables still use connectors and can be easily popped off.

They solder components to save space and increase the reliability and power efficiency of the connections. Apple doesn’t care about self repair, but they aren’t using solder instead of connectors as part of a scheme to actively thwart it.

Apple is literally known for their anti-right-to-repair stance.

There is a youtuber named Louis Rossman(1.7 million followers) fighting Apple on this since more than a decade.

Here is his channel: https://youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup

I would argue that they aren't anti right-to-repair. They are against poor quality repairs.

The issue is if you let individuals and 3rd party stores do repairs, there is no way to validate that they are doing it in a reliable/quality fashion. This is especially problematic when phones are getting more and more resilient to various environments (Like the addition of IP68)

When a customer has a repair done poorly and issues come up, they come to Apple for support.

Rossman isn’t exactly trustworthy. Remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw3-j_RaX74

Shows the video as private. I cannot watch it.

Rossmann went on a drunken, paranoid rant about how the macbook webcam has secret hardware to spy on him. He took the video down after widespread ridicule.

Original video is mirrored on archive.org https://archive.org/details/Kat.crlouis.rossmann.backup/what...

Not sure if that link goes straight to the right video. It’s the last video of the playlist, titled “what’s up with that 4 gb man”

You’re conflating two separate issues:

(i) Is Apple anti right to repair?

(ii) Does Apple solder certain components primarily because it makes repair more difficult?

Even if the answer to (i) is yes, the answer to (ii) can be no.

Most unpluggable components in most laptops are never intentionally unplugged over the lifetime of the device. Connectors take up space, can come unplugged accidentally, and degrade signal quality. Those are the reasons for soldering components in a modern laptop.

At this point I’m thinking the 2012 I own could be the last laptop I bother buying. Its performant enough for being a day to day computer with an ssd and 16gb ram, and these days if I need more horsepower for one job I’m better off using a server. Plus the parts are so cheap on ebay and you can do most repairs with a phillips head screwdriver.

You can use heater and solvent to deal with glue. It's not impossible. Not DYI-friendly - for sure.

> DYI

Do Yourself It?

The solvent has a propensity of getting into other components and ruining them, esp. the trackpad.

> Apple intentionally solders all the components together to prevent self repair.

As much as I like to bash Apple, it could also be that they soldered/glued everything to miniaturize the product further, for example.

I know there was a class action in late 00s for that where I was compensated because I had a similar interaction with an Apple Store genius. I was of the understanding they changed their "liquid damage" policy due to that lawsuit.

Meanwhile, my Thinkpad has built-in drainage holes.

Condensation can damage electrical equipment quite easily. Bring a cold metal laptop into a humid environment at your own risk.

Yep, it took them a very long time to admit that the GPU problems on my Core 2 Duo were a design problem.

> Apple has always tried to blame customers whenever they can.

Jobs on iPhone 4 antenna: “avoid holding it in this way”

Those stickers are in nearly all of their devices.

i'm pretty sure "their" removed gives a true statement also.

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