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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

I understand why people enjoy Apple products, but I will never understand why people defend the company when we all know, often through direct personal experience or the experience of someone we know, that the wealthiest company is the world has chosen to provide insultingly miserable customer support as a business decision.

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I think it’s because the vast, vast majority of Apple users never need to deal with customer service, and those who do can usually go to the Apple Store and have a pretty good experience.

(Please don’t reply to this with your anecdotes about the time you had a bad experience at the Apple Store. I’m not saying they’re perfect. But these situations in the OP are rare.)

Just the fact that they operate in the real physical world is a huge benefit for a LOT of people who are trying to use technology they didn’t grow up with.

Putting the Genius Bar into widely accessible Apple Stores is a business decision meant to provide useful support, not insultingly miserable.

That said, not everyone needing support has access to a Genius Bar, and not every Genius Bar employee knows every possible answer to every possible question.

But, to claim they chose to be insulting is just mistaken.

My apple support experiences have been very good. I don't know that at all.

Personally, the disconnect is all the excellent customer service I've received from Apple in the 21 years I've been using their products. This includes two repairs on nine computers, and one battery replacement on an old phone. And the time that a major point release of the OS got stuck moving around my homebrew directory and hung. That, and the butterfly keyboard that needed replacing, were annoying. But the customer service was first rate.

Apple is like a religion. An Apple user told me “Apple never makes mistakes” during the Antennagate. I never forgot that, and I try not to have conversations with Apple fans after that.

>An Apple user told me “Apple never makes mistakes” during the Antennagate. I never forgot that, and I try not to have conversations with Apple fans after that.

Someone made an absurd statement to you about Apple, so you have spent the last fourteen years trying to avoid conversations with people who like Apple products?

Absurd? Yes. And common.

It's not rare to read comments to the effect of:

"Why are you, a single person, doubting the decision a trillion dollar company? Certainly they know best".

edit: Algolia for the win. Quick search [1] returned this pearl from 7 days ago [2]:

> What would you have them do? Sacrifice a trillion dollar business in token protest? You’re just a keyboard warrior with no point at all who would make the same choice and justify it the same way you imagine I do if you were ever in the position they are.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40098425

> Someone made ...

This example demonstrated to me that Apple is a religion, after many other examples. Try reading Apple's blogs, it's crazy.

I recommend not trying to talk to extremists in any area. Your life will be much better.

There are no rules in love and OS wars.

This sort of thing is present in every fandom, but Apple's is sort of legendary for how far it is willing to push it. This is rather evident even if you're just skimming through topical subreddits trying to find solution to some problem. It's very common to find a post that asks the exact question you have, followed by dozens of responses telling them that what they are trying to do is either impossible or unnecessary.

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