Is Apple making implausible iPhone satisfaction claims?
perfectrec.com
perfectrec.com
Sure, 99% satisfaction rate is pretty much impossible, but if all Apple asked was "are you satisfied with iPhone 14" with "yes" & "not at all" options and only surveyed iPhone 14 owners, I can easily see the number being 99%.
Do you mean you can't take Apple seriously? The article is calling out this issue, not engaging in it.
> I can easily see the number being 99%.
No, it can't. It's utterly impossible for it to be 99% unless it's fake data.
No, it's not. Unbelievably unlikely? For sure.
iPhone has been around for 15 years so there almost isn't a person on this planet who doesn't know (a) what it is, (b) what the competition is and (c) whether it's a right fit for them.
So if you're surveying existing users you're talking to people who knew before they purchased the iPhone that it was going to be a suitable fit for them. So of course the survey is going to be highly biased in favour of a positive rating.
99% is not possible. Nothing on Earth has a 99% satisfaction rating - not even breathing.
If you reflect on it and genuinely believe that 99% seems realistic and even "very likely", well, we'll have to agree to disagree.
That said, if I had a survey that asked a couple times in different ways if someone was satisfied with the iPhone and they gave conflicting answers, I’d probably simply throw their answer out for being nonsensical. Maybe that’s what’s going on here: they’re teasing out survey anomalies.
I'd note that other seemingly innocuous things could have an impact too. For instance, if they surveyed only people who've owned their phone for 90 days or whatnot, you would eliminate the vast majority of people who didn't like it and returned it from the sample.
99% is an extraordinary claim, which is why we think Apple should be more transparent about their methodology.
I think it’s important (and probably simply ethical) for people and companies who make such extraordinary claims to explain how they obtained them, but having taken a stats class in college and doing a lot of growth-related work in my professional career I know how frustrating it is to get useful data, especially out of surveys.
I included the Google reviews as a secondary example since it is public information. Google reviews are actually more positive on the iPhone than the third party surveys, which found satisfaction rates in the low 80s for 5G iPhones.
This is not a seriously written article.
The article is entirely about a completely different firm, 451 Research, who actually is not and does not use NetPromoter. They state that they use a pool of "high wallet spend early adopters and technical people".
(For added irony, 451 Research says it's own customers are 98%+ satisfied with them...)
Apple may use NetPromoter internally, but on the earnings calls they are citing satisfaction surveys from 451 Research.
In 2018, they shared some of the response categories from the survey. They are customer satisfaction questions "Very Satisfied, Somewhat satisfied." Not recommendation questions.
> but if all Apple asked was "are you satisfied with iPhone 14" with "yes" & "not at all" options and only surveyed iPhone 14 owners, I can easily see the number being 99%.
"and only surveyed iPhone 14 owners"
451 Research's own statement on their survey mentions _nothing_ about owning the phone:
> The findings are based on a December 14th – January 22nd survey of 3,568 primarily North American consumers from 451 Research’s user insight service, Voice of the Connected User Landscape and its Leading Indicator panel of 25,000 accredited business and technology professionals whose application for inclusion identifies them as having a high wallet share being used for personal technologies, and a high readiness to try new products and services. The service captures consumer and business spending through weekly tracking studies, delivering a continuous view of user perceptions and purchase activity as new products and services enter the market.
And also, how valid would you consider a "satisfied" rating from an iPhone 14 owner who'd never owned anything but an iPhone? There's value in their ongoing satisfaction, but relatively speaking what does it mean? It could just as easily be interpreted as "not annoyed enough to change ecosystems".
Why wouldn’t it be valid? If somebody says they’re satisfied with something, take them at their word. There’s no shortage of people who complain about anything and everything, especially if they paid money for the thing in question, and especially if they paid a lot of money.
Apple is a single vendor that makes a very small number of models and earned $205.49 billion on iPhones alone in 2022. This excludes a lot of their “services” revenue of which I’m convinced the Lion’s share and then some is also basically just iPhone revenue that wouldn’t exist without specifically the iPhones tied to them. You don’t get anywhere near that for one company on one hardware product division in one year without some seriously high customer satisfaction and repeat buyers.
Very? It’s a subjective position no matter what but they know their own satisfaction level better than you do, certainly.
If you want to go really deep on online review manipulation, I'm co-author of this research paper on ratings inflation in online marketplaces: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2022.135.... If you get in touch, I can send you more papers on fake reviews that I like.
> The three most popular movies of all time on IMDB are The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather and The Dark Knight. They have ratings of 9.2, 9.2 and 9.0 respectively.
These examples are so orange and apples it’s baffling the authors even came up with them.
You compare the most advanced personal pocket computer of all time with a patriotic holiday (assuming patriotism as an absolute value) or a movie about inmates escaping a prison. Like, really?!
I think it's fair to include the ratings of the highest rated [whatever] to compare to the ratings of another [whatever].
The author is saying "even people's favorite things don't get such high ratings."
Quoted by your employee who wrote the post? At your request? To generate traffic for your site?
1. Granurality: as OC mentioned, w/ an overall satisfaction "yes or no" method can reach there.
2. Bias: Pretty sure they did the research before releasing the product to get feedback from a loyal subset base/target customers.
Why would a study include non-Apple users if they have never used or refuse to use Apple products? Wouldn't this be biased if they are included to be "representative"?
I know people who don't use Apple products yet are vocal critics...humans can be highly ignorant creatures
(Especially since a lot of people who don’t like iPhones would have gone to Androids at this point anyway, so current iPhone customers is a somewhat self selecting demographic)
> If Apple’s claims of 99% satisfaction were true, it would mean the iPhone 14 was not only the most popular mass market consumer product of all time, but it would also probably make it the most popular anything of all time.
Is it not the most popular mass market consumer product of all time? People spend their lives on their phone these days, and I've never heard anyone say anything about their iPhone. I have one and it's fine. I'm satisfied. I have end-to-end encrypted backups, the battery lasts long enough, the screen is nice to look at, etc. If I like some sort of tech product, it's probably hard to find people that don't.
I would be surprised if iPhone didn't have 90%+ customer satisfaction narrowly scoped to usage of the phone.
The product as hardware combined with software and supporting services are the best money can buy. Apple regularly pushes the smartphone category forward on fronts neglected by other companies.
That said, consumers seem to think more broadly about their experience than just the phone. For example an unexpected failure of an official or 3rd party case might influence overall satisfaction. The article mentions a 3% difference based on 5G availability, as another.
So without an explanation of the carve out, 99% does seem a bit too good to be true.
Apple should publish how these numbers are arrived at. If its a decent measurement it could help set an evolving standard for the category.
Those people aren't using other phones so they wouldn't know if they'd be satisfied by them.
It’s tough competition, but I think this is the most absurd sentence in the article. Nevermind the difference between a premium consumer good and a grocery store, my takeaway is that reported satisfaction could be much higher among TJ shoppers without the hours long waits.
This counter does not work right? I know it is a minor thing, but I immediately stopped reading further. I have a problem...
Some platforms like Gmail partially obfuscate it.
Pre-caching will sometimes mess with the counters though, making the counts lower than the actual.
Apple's Protect Mail Activity feature, which is on by default, "opens" all emails received on a server, to hide the user's IP address. This causes emails with tracker pixels to be falsely reported as read.
For a while, I was confused why all of my GitHub notifications were being marked as read!
https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/14604379978667376...
[0] https://mailtrack.io [1] https://mailtrack.io/hc/en-us/articles/360005941037-Why-is-M...
Here, I found a corroborating link from 2013: https://www.litmus.com/blog/gmail-adds-image-caching-what-yo...
How satisfied are you with your new iPhone?
* Insanely satisfied
* Extremely satisfied
* Very very satisfied
* Quite satisfied
* Satisfied
* Mostly satisfied
* Somewhat satisfied
* Neither satisfied or dissatisfied
* Neutral
* No opinion
* Dissatisfied
I’m exaggerating a little to make my point, but I suspect that’s more or less how they get these insanely high scores. Also I’m not sure they send the satisfaction surveys to everyone. Probably you have to have a history of purchasing Apple products.
I don’t think they are manipulating the data itself as this article seems to suggest though. I think the survey methodology itself is skewed.
Thank you for reading! I don't think they are manipulating the data, rather that they are surveying an unrepresentative population of tech enthusiasts, and presenting it as if representative of the entire customer base.
The piece is just clickbait.
Your final paragraph is this decontextualized “Quote”:
> “We’re not calling on the SEC to investigate these customer satisfaction claims, since they have more important cases to go after,” Golden said. “But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we believe Apple should review the survey results they trumpet on every earnings call. If they truly think they are valid, they should publish their methodology, and if not, they should issue retractions.”
Which is inherently disingenuous in the way it is written. (We’re not threatening you..) but worse, it’s a quote from your own CEO.
The piece is in far worse faith than anything Apple is doing. Please take it down.
Like if you asked Are you Human? 4% (or more) of people will reply "No" just for fun, or because they don't read.
So you can try to adjust for this by asking a silly question, and if they reply that way ignore their entire survey, but that could lead to issues where they reply correctly on most of it, but false on the "fun" question.
My last experience with an iphone was when my GPS began to malfunction and Apple's proposed solution was to have me buy a brand new iphone at no discount.
I'll sure miss sideloading certain apps, but that's the price for a walled garden and security (I guess?).
Let's see if I'm going to be one of the "99%"...
I can't measure clicks, but the pace of upvotes on this submission slowed dramatically after dang changed it: it had reached ~50 upvotes in about half an hour (~100 upvotes an hour), and now it's been here for another hour with only ~30 more upvotes (~15 upvotes an hour).
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
Family lore: My kid brother was ~5 years old when he bit into a spoonful of a breakfast cereal that he had asked for after having seen it advertised - and unhappily blurted out "it tasted good on TV!".
In short, it looks like potential-respondents first had to apply (e.g., in response to [this Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/Wristly.co/posts/apple-watch-owner-... )), and then they pre-screened potential-respondents.. and it sounds like respondents may have had some sort of a weekly commitment?, as the document includes:
> To finish, a big thank you to the 1,100+ strong members of the Wristly Inner Circle- we wouldn’t be able to learn so much so fast about the Apple Watch without your weekly contribution.
So it doesn't sound like a random sampling of Apple-product users.
Anyway, then apparently they ask if a respondent's satisfied with a product, giving 4 options: "Very Satisfied/Delighted", "Somewhat Satisfied","Neither Satisfied or Dissatisfied", and "Somewhat Dissatisfied".
Then, they add up the first 2 categories as their "key metric of customer satisfaction".
---
To note it, [this blog-post](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/04/20/iphone-x-custom... ) claims to quote "Ben Bajarin, on the result of a survey of iPhone X owners conducted last month" saying:
> When it came to overall customer satisfaction, iPhone X owners in our study gave the product an overall 97% customer satisfaction. [...] Just to contrast that with the original Apple Watch research with Wristly I was involved in, 66% of Apple Watch owners indicated they were very satisfied with Apple Watch, a product which also ranked a 97% customer satisfaction number in the first Apple Watch study we did.
Point being that, while the above PDF appears to talk about the Apple Watch, it sounds like they're strongly implying that the customer-satisfaction figures for the iPhone were largely done in a similar manner -- and, at least in the case of the above-quoted speaker, by some of the same people.
"All-new"... Pffft.
Isn't that something you should've researched before writing the post? Methodology seems like an important factor here.
If you just go out and buy a phone outright you can generally use it anywhere.
possibly one can get a phone subsidized and locked until an extortion fee is paid, though, or get a phone from work that an employer didn't pay to have unlocked.
Seem to be a common feature on most phones. Don’t like it? Bug your government to outlaw the use of the feature like “Canada,[5] Chile,[6] China, Israel,[7] and Singapore”.
iTunes backups my photos. No idea how to access them though - apart from restoring to a working phone.
You should be able to go to iCloud.com and log in. If you have the E2E encryption enabled, it will ask you to give iCloud the decryption key, so the webserver can serve you the decrypted files. (This ability can be turned off if you're really paranoid.)
Give me a 386 that's fast enough to run DOS and stop changing anything.
I'm surprised you've made it from mailing lists all the way to Hacker News.
/joking
Apple is growing market share but not massively so. Hence new revenue will need to come from it's existing user base.
Adding to that, people already have a tendency to convince themselves after the fact that an expensive purchase was a good deal, and that companies pay for fake reviews and I'm not surprised iphone reviews seem inflated.