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Apple - Think Twice

thenbells.com

714 pointsandygeers395 comments

My perspective here is in no way Apple-specific, but I was reminded of something quite interesting in this story: if you pass a test and you still have problems, it probably means the test isn't good enough.

Worse, passing a test doesn't magically change the state of the world and make these problems disappear. Turning to the customer and explaining, "there is no problem because you passed the test" does not alter the customer's experience at all: the ghosting still exists.

This has nothing to do with whether or not Apple was smart to behave this way, or what the tolerances should be - I don't have a dog in this fight. Instead, I just wanted to highlight something I have to be reminded of from time to time, in different contexts: no one cares whether you think their problem is real, they care whether the problem still exists for them.

Obvious point: This goes for more than just computer products.

Don't forget the old adage that reality is 90% perception. If your customers "think" they have a problem, that in itself is an issue that needs to be dealt with. My customers don't care if their system issues are actually a problem in my software or not. "Not a problem" doesn't work if you want to keep paying customers around.

In these types of situations, the cliche "The Customer is always right" is apt.

This also works in personal relationships. If your SO feels hurt by something and you say "oh, grow up!", that doesn't help, even if you think some 'tough love' was needed/adequate. You have to deal with her as someone who is feeling hurt and until she perceives that you understand her, you'll just be sweeping the issue under the rug. I suppose this can be classified as listening but not really hearing.

On the other hand, sometimes tough love is indeed the adequate response and makes the SO to notice (s)he's being childish. Especially if said SO is generally mature enough to notice.

I disagree.

The reason why we are often too eager to dismiss is because kindness takes effort. Empathy, and certainly sympathy, is hard work. We get lazy, we become exhausted and our reactions become snappy. Almost always the "dry your eyes" advice is inappropriate and insensitive. And it never really achieves its intended objective.

I'm not saying we should all participate in crying orgies whenever someone shows signs of weakness (though, as I've aged, I think that is better than showing a cold shoulder) or that we readily invest in "idiot compassion". What I'm saying is: we are all trapped in this existential reality together and we all need to show kindness with all forms of suffering. Being cruel to be kind as a philanthropic philosophy has never worked (for me).

Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo (RSA Animate on "Smile or Die" a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich)

Note that I didn't say you should always be tough. Of course that being kind and compassionate is the right answer most of the time.

It's just that sometimes a figurative slap is the right thing the sufferer needs to wake up from the suffering and realize there's no actual need to suffer like that.

It's all very personal and context dependent and, most importantly, it should never be done in anger.

That's true about "customerS" but not for "a customer". There will always be a percentage of customers that expect more than the norm (for good or not so good reasons). The company cannot treat everyone's opinion the same, as they'd then need to design a product and customer support that makes the most picky person happy - which would be nice for all customers but very costly.

In the end, the company has to decide where they put the bar for "good customer support", from "making at least 50% happy" up to "making 95% happy" but never "making 100% happy". And of course, the price paid should be in relation to this, which in Apple's case, it may not be (but to be fair - I hear a lot of good stories about Apple support as well, so this one event cannot determine whether Apple does support well).

All it takes to make 100% of the customers happy at low cost is to give the other 5% special consideration when they aren't happy with the quality control that satisfies the other 95%.

Or to put it another way:

The cost to Apple's reputation of an angry blog post about ghosting problems on their flagship notebook is considerable.

On the other hand, the cost of simply swapping this fellows machine out would have been negligible.

I don't think anyone at Apple would claim that the test magically changes the state of the world. They probably wouldn't even deny that there is a ghosting problem on your machine. It's clear that the test is meant to determine whether the particular machine's ghosting problem is within Apple's acceptable limits.

It's just like the dead pixel guarantees you sometimes see on monitors, whereby you get a replacement if there are >4 dead pixels anywhere on the screen or >1 in the center of the screen. No one's denying that you have exactly 4 dead pixels, they're just not going to give you a replacement unless you have 5.

Now, obviously it's fair to argue that Apple's test is too strict, and that OP does in fact deserve a replacement. The dead pixel guarantee is disclosed to potential buyers, and likewise this ghosting test probably should be as well (and I'm assuming it's not). But your implication that Apple is making a bizarre metaphysical claim about their tests is ridiculous.

But your specs for what you repair have to be reasonable if you want to have customers think you deliver a high quality product (and if you want to actually do so).

Two dead pixels near the edge of the screen, okay, most of us think, that's still usable, I'll soon stop noticing. (How many is 'most of us'? Enough that a monitor company can do that, and still be considered to deliver a high quality product).

The ghosting OP describes and takes pictures of? I think would probably interfere with the use of most reasonable people. If those are Apple's specs, then Apple is willing to deliver a crappy product; either Apple made a mistake, their test isn't catching what they meant to catch, or Apple thinks it's going to have enough customers that keep buying Apple anyway even after getting a crappy product, I guess.

I think I agree, but there's still a tone in your and OP's words that makes it sound like you're appealing to some objective measure of a "high quality product." Obviously, there is no such thing, and different problems will frustrate different people. It's quite possible that 99% of MBP buyers would never even notice that ghosting problem. Does that still make the MBP a "low quality product," and are Apple's policies still unreasonable, or does it just mean that the product simply isn't compatible with OP's needs?

The same thing applies to my dead pixel analogy. Personally, I am extremely distracted by dead pixels (even a single one in a non-retina display drives me crazy). I have always purchased displays with very strict dead pixel tolerances. But it would be ridiculous for me to buy a low-end display then complain that the manufacturer makes crappy products and doesn't care about its customers because they refuse to replace my display that only has a single dead pixel.

> It's quite possible that 99% of MBP buyers would never even notice that ghosting problem

In general your argument makes sense, but I'm pretty sure in this case 100% of customers WOULD notice this particular ghosting problem.

How do I know that? Because it's visible in those crappy photos on a gray background with the naked eye ... and guess what, HN has a gray background.

You'd have to be blind to not notice the ghosting happening for this customer. And at least on a gray background you'd immediately notice that the display is to be blamed, because when watching pictures or something else you'd blame the noise on your crappy camera, on yourself and so on, which IMHO is far worse.

> I think I agree, but there's still a tone in your and OP's words that makes it sound like you're appealing to some objective measure of a "high quality product."

> It's quite possible that 99% of MBP buyers would never even notice that ghosting problem.

Here's my takeaway from this incident. This problem doesn't affect 99% of users. If Apple needed to ensure this particular problem (almost) never occurs, it would cost a lot of money, for something that doesn't in fact affect most people.

Having a test as described in the article is worthwhile for shooing away the x% of the 99% of people for whom it really doesn't matter. But when a professional for whom it does matter comes into your store, and it is obvious that it does matter and he has done his homework on the issue, then when that person is treated like everyone else, to me it shows Apple no longer cares about professionals.

To do a certain kind of work, you need certain performance from your hardware. In the past, you could be certain that you could get it from Apple hardware, and if there was a problem, they would make it right. This seems no longer to be the case. The "new" Apple gets such a high percentage of their revenue from the consumer market, the "casuals", that they now have the power to thumb their nose at the power users and professionals, and it will have 0 noticeable impact on their bottom line. And it would seem they are now choosing to use that power.

1. The guy who posted TFA is not a "professional"-- at least, not a professional graphics designer, professional photographer, or any other profession where ghosting would be an issue.

2. Apple has always been a consumer-focused company, not a company focused on businesses or professionals.

3. For as long as Apple has existed, there have been "Apple has jumped the shark this year because of X" posts. Always. They're almost as common as the Mac vs. PC posts, and almost as boring.

oh, and:

4. Do the words "passive matrix LCD" mean anything to you? I used to have an Apple laptop where the screen ghosted so much, even moving the pointer was like playing a game of "snake." And this was the way it was designed. Kids today really have nothing to complain about, except paying too much for something they didn't need in the first place.

1. Yes, but professional in usability have deemed Apple aesthetics as flat[1] i.e. good for beginners but not for power users/professionals. This might seem strawmany but if you design your UI for flatland, there is a good chance your hardware is designed to be flatland as well.

I assume that GP meant professionals as power users or the top percent of Apple's audience.

2. They have failed to solve a rather serious problem of their long-time customer, I don't know of better way to alienate your other customer than that.

4. And I used BASIC on commodore 64, where you had to plug it into a TV and used a cassette player. That doesn't mean you are lucky you can have a real dedicated 13 inch monitor and should stop complaining about not having a 15 inch monitor or a CD tray. It is a real problem, that would make me reconsider buying a MBP or a monitor for that matter.

[1]http://asktog.com/columns/075AppleFlatlandPart1.html

Am I weird for returning a monitor to best buy for 2 dead (glowing green) pixels?

It's not like it was a high end display. It's was a $130 1920x1080 LG that kept it's black-friday pricing for at least a week, probably because it's old.

I mean…they didn't bat an eye, they just gave me a new one. It's almost like they want their customers to be happy with their purchases.

Wow. If your company provides worse customer service than Best Buy, this is certainly a problem (especially when it's a long-term customer who paid extra for an extended warranty)!

I strongly suspect that the testing mania you get on all the technical support lines comes from a mania by companies to control/pressure their customer support people and those people more or less passing along this pressure. "You have to prove you have a problem here because I've got a lot of people I have to help". The last technical support call I had for a Windows network problem (which I had isolated to the OS before I called), I could strongly sense the guy was inching to cut me off with either "not our problem", "not a problem" or "I can't help you 'cause won't listen to me". The implicit threats were strong enough that the table turn from "I'm here to help you" to "you're here to prove there's a problem...". It seems like it's a symptom of making technical support a large, low-wage, heavy control work environment.

Edit: It doesn't help that with large systems like Windows 7 (or modern OSX), there's no "here's the explanation of the problem", it is only "try this generic solution recipe, now try this other one..."

In Australia, the test wold be irrelevant. I'd just take them to Fair Trading, who would take one look at the test and dismiss it. Problem solved.

I used to work phone support for a large auction site (your first thought is probably correct). I can confirm this notion or idea. We were given generic things that the customer could try to fix the problem. You know "Clear cache and cookies", etc.

If the issue persisted and we could not reproduce the problems on our own machine we weren't allowed to push trouble tickets to our QA team. For a lot of the lower tech users, I suspect issues were on their end. However I often got users who obviously knew what they were doing, and it was frustrating that there wasn't more we could do.

"If the issue persisted and we could not reproduce the problems on our own machine we weren't allowed to push trouble tickets to our QA team."

Yup. There's often an air gap between the grunts and the QA people, who mostly pore over trouble tickets well after the fact.

My advice is to use what the government has set out for people to use: the courts. Sue them in small claims court.

Apple has sold something that is not suitable for its intended purpose, and has breached warranties required by law such as warranty of merchantability.

Even a place like Texas has the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Under this act a consumer can sue for breach of these warranties and receive damages, AND get court costs and attorneys fees!

Take them to small claims, you will probably win, if they show up at all.

I can't imagine it's that clearcut.

What's the "intended purpose" for a general-purpose laptop?

Editing text, watching video, playing music, etc.., plus the long tail of more unusual things that may be possible depending on what software you install.

Are there any relatively common tasks that will actually be prevented by this level of ghosting? I don't mean "it's a bit annoying", I mean "this task is no longer feasible".

I've never used a computer with any ghosting that bothered me personally, so I may be missing something.

I'm not a graphic designer though; but neither is the author of the post AFAICT (PhD business student).

So my feel is that this is more in the category of a scratch on the bottom of a new laptop (doesn't actually affect the use, but annoys you each time you notice it and remember you paid full price) than, say, a space bar that only works 80% of the time (which would actively mar your ability to use the device).

So sure, Apple may not be playing this right to give their customers the appropriate warm fuzzy feelings, but I highly doubt they're doing anything illegal.

>Are there any relatively common tasks that will actually be prevented by this level of ghosting? I don't mean "it's a bit annoying", I mean "this task is no longer feasible".

Apple bills their computers as "the computers you do stuff with". They have a long history in the professional media/content creation business, and their marketing campaigns and advertizements for the last several years were based on bringing those capabilities to the mainstream.

If nothing else, iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand come with every Mac.

With those issues, two of the potential uses for the computer–which comes bundled with Apple software to do them–become infeasible for anyone who cares if they exist at all.

I know all that; but I'm looking for at least one specific use case that would become unfeasible.

Mild ghosting -- e.g., if you leave a static image up for 3 minutes with no change, then switch to a gray background you can see the outlines of the old image -- is pretty obviously not going to affect GarageBand (!).

I doubt it'd be detectable in any video work, but I don't do much of that.

I do occasional image editing, and doubt I notice it there (I don't normally have any single view of an image up unmoving for more than 30 seconds or so, max... I'm constantly changing the zoom or shifting the view).

Well said. If the customer is unhappy with the product, there is a problem.

Having worked in customer service I can tell you that sometimes you have to draw a line where boundaries are not very discrete. Customers can tell me that "their connection is too slow". The only proof I can give them is "it passes the speed test". This usually happens when the money paid for the service exceeds the service provided.

Although, what I have said is a general reply to general comment above, but i think this does not apply to apple here because they certainly charge enough.

>Turning to the customer and explaining, "there is no problem because you passed the test" does not alter the customer's experience at all: the ghosting still exists

Yes, but you don't always want to do everything the customer wants. I mean, maybe this is a defect in the screen, in which case, you are right that apple should probably fix the test.

but, maybe this is just how those displays work. Maybe this level of ghosting is simply the best you can do with the technology Apple used to have the screen made?

In that case, it's really a problem of setting expectations.

The problem is that even if you provide the exact same product and support to 100 customers, you will have 1 who will demand more support time than the rest. At some point, you need to decide how much effort you want to put in to that customer.

I mean, the problem with those 1 out of 100 customers? they do complain to their friends, like this guy did.

So yeah, you don't want those customers? but you also need to fire them in a reasonable way. "I'll give you your money back if you go away" sort of thing.

If you are a company that really values your customer service reputation? maybe you don't want to fire the 1 out of 100 customer. Maybe you want to eat that cost. but you do want to fire the 1 in 1000 customer. There is a point at which you need to say 'no, enough' just because of how much money one user can cost you.

(Again, I think the best way to handle it is to apologize sincerely (because, after all, it could very well have been an undetected defect in your product) give them a full refund, and point them at your competition. I think Apple may have a hard time doing that, though.)

> Worse, passing a test doesn't magically change the state of the world and make these problems disappear. Turning to the customer and explaining, "there is no problem because you passed the test" does not alter the customer's experience at all: the ghosting still exists.

The point of the test is to determine if your problem is with the customer, or with the product. Maybe there is a certain amount of ghosting on all of these screens, and most people just don't care? in that case, the test is a way of saying "this guy is so sensitive that we don't want him as a customer."

What I want to know is what the hell OP is doing replacing the screen? I mean, clearly, this is within apple's tolerances, so why does he think a new screen would be better?

Revision A Apple projects have had issues for as long as Apple has been making products.

Second gen Macbook Air's had Logic board issues, 2007 era RevA Macbook Pros had video card issues, dodgy graphics cards on the early Mac Pros, the iPhone4 antenna, the list is endless. Often it's taken years for the issues to be resolved and Apple to pay for repairs, if at all.

It's simple, if you want the shiniest tech, buy whatever Apple is selling today. If you want reliable hardware, wait for the first revision when the kinks have been worked out. That way we don't all get spammed with the histronics of endless bloggers who think this is a new phenomenon.

I think you missed the whole point of the article.

The point isn't with the fact that there is an issue, its that Apple is seemingly trying to sweep it under the rug.

I'm pointing out Apple have a long history of doing this with Revision A products, which the Retina MBA is. It's not new, it's not unusual and it shouldn't be unexpected.

So because they do it all the time ignoring a legitimate issue is now acceptable?

msy is not making a value judgment on Apple, he's saying this is nothing new. In contrast to the article:

>I remember an Apple that bent over backwards to understand its customers’ point of view and stretched itself to meet the high expectations it sets.

I think the thing is that the two statements aren't really at odds.

Apple has always bent over to resolve issues for customers if they acknowledge the issue. For example, I had a pre-unibody MBP that the power button pushed through the top case. Apple very promptly took it back, replaced the top case and a few other cosmetic dings I hadn't complained about, and got it back to me.

On the other hand, Apple also has a long history of refusing to acknowledge some issues and giving the customer the run around on them, which is the type of complaint in this article.

I don't think he said that. Probably he just said people should have woken up long back.

It's more along the lines that really, you shouldn't be surprised that something which has been happening for 15 years or so with no end in sight still happens.

> The point isn't with the fact that there is an issue, its that Apple is seemingly trying to sweep it under the rug.

I don't think that's quite it. Apple realises there's a problem, and that's why they have the standardised test. I think the real problem here is that Apple's test is insufficient, but they don't know that, so they don't believe their customers when they say they're having still having issues. And that's not reassuring for someone who's just spent a lot of money on a new machine.

Personally, I've never had this issue with my rMBP, but I'm sympathetic with those that do.

Possibly, you are right that its in the fact that the test is insufficient. The question is if this is known by Apple or not.

I personally can't see how they could not know, this is not the kind of issue where ppl are going to be blowing there whistle for no reason. So Apple knows there is an issue, if there own tests do not match the numbers of complains(to some degree) even more red flags should be going up.

I am no conspiracy theorist, but there seems to be some valid points in the article.

It's hard for me to believe that they don't know the test is insufficient when the protocol involves waiting 1 minute for the problem to go away.

> I think you missed the whole point of the article.

> The point isn't with the fact that there is an issue, its that Apple is seemingly trying to sweep it under the rug.

I think you missed the whole point of OP post: That is exactly what Apple has a reputation for doing. For example: The Antenna Fiasco -

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/apple-responds-over-iphon...

Yeah, 100%. Just blind commenting. Dude read it again.

When batteries for my 2006 MBP's model had problems, Apple issued a recall. I got a new one in a UPS box that I could use to send the old one back. This cost apple parts and shipping, not even a technician's time. Service like this is much harder to provide if the computers you build are not repairable at all. They created a situation where fixing one problem means exchanging the whole unit. That is their own fault. Are you seriously blaming the customer for wanting a fault fixed in his 3kUSD computer with paid warranty extension?

From my understanding of the comment, he wasn't blaming the customer. Rather, he's trying to say that people shouldn't rush to buy the revision A (or version 1 or 1st generation or whatever) of an Apple product. Instead, wait for the initial (and what are now expected) flaws to be fixed and then buy them. However, I think this is a problem that is likely to happen with any company, not just Apple.

In most markets, the law does not allow beta products and caveat emptor. Warranties against product flaws are mandatory. Personally, I would consider ghosting as shown by the OP a defect covered by warranty. In addition to that, a premium brand should treat early adopters well, especially those who bought the flagship product. This is the point OP seems to be making. However, due to their own design decisions, they have made this very expensive, which incentivizes them to provide shitty service, which is damaging their brand image.

"...Warranties against product flaws are mandatory..."

If that were true...

the software industry would be in REAL trouble.

Do you agree to an EULA when buying an MBP or another laptop, implicitly or otherwise? Serious question.

AFAIK, as a consumer, you cannot sign away these rights for physical products. For software, which you license, i.e. acquire usage rights, the situation seems to be different.

Most open source software licenses contain all-caps legalese disclaiming all forms of warranty. See [1] and [2] for example.

[1]: http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

[2]: http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause

For an example, see this summary of the baseline for warranties in the EU http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/shopping/shopping-abroa... I suppose the reason why the software industry gets around this is that you can't buy software but only license it.

I had the same issue with a 11" MBP back in the day and had the same great fix, although I was told to throw the old battery away.

I also had an issue with a 1Gen time capsule, which when it broke got replaced in store no questions asked.

I guess I have been lucky?

I hope you disposed of it in an environmental sound manner roblem.

I have no idea where it is, so guess not Mat ;)

The suggestion of avoiding gen 1 products isn't to blame the customer, but warn them of trouble before purchasing. Whether you get a timely recall/replacement or the problem is ignored still means you have to go of your way to discover, troubleshoot, and resolve the problem. It's nice in many cases they've gone out of their way to fix the issue, but I would rather not have it in the first place. So I generally avoid gen 1 Apple products.

I’m ok with first gen products having issues. I’m not ok with the way with which Apple treats their customers when those issues appear.

Issues can appear, especially with first gen products. I can totally understand that. I cannot for the life of me understand how Apple decided to handle this issue. I’m just not used to Apple treating their customers with contempt and treating them like stupid idiots.

Just pointing out that for anyone I've ever met, the antennagate was just media sites drumming up page-views.

I never had an issue, and despite everyone at my office having iPhone4s and 4Ss, the only time any of us were ever able to affect antenna-strength was having a wet hand, and then purposefully applying a lot of pressure to attempt to attenuate the case.

It could be the signal-strength display "fix" was hiding issues (actually, this is almost certainly the case), but in practice, it was never an issue, and the 4 had consistently better signal than any other device I've owned, including a GalaxyS2 since the iPhones could get a good enough signal in elevators that previous phones (both iPhone and Android) didn't.

And despite being the same basic design AFAICT, never seen a mention of the issue with the iPhone5.

I could consistently re-create antennagate on my iphone 4 every single time I "held it wrong." I was forced to completely change the way I help my phone, permanently.

You could have returned the phone, you were not forced to do anything.

Typical exchange:

Person A: Apple is amazing. Antenna-gate was mass media nonsense.

Person B: I, personally, had major problems with the antenna.

Person C: Why don't you just get rid of your phone then? No one told you to buy one.

Or, I can demand the quality and service I expect from a premium product. What's wrong with that?

If this makes you think it's not a premium product, or the best out there, go get a different product. What's so wrong with that? I want a pony, but dammit Apple doesn't offer ponies. Saying "I WANT A PONY FROM APPLE NOW" isn't going to make it so. Quit bitching and take your business elsewhere. If you happen to think the iPhone is still the best even with this problem, then get a case or hold the phone differently.

I agree with Politician A on every point except one. So since we have that one disagreement, I'm going to vote for politician B instead, with whom I disagree on every issue but this one.

One issue doesn't mean you have to hate the phone as a whole, or stop using it. The more acceptable response is to ask that the issue be fixed. Just because an iPhone has signal issues that are inconvenient doesn't mean it's not the phone that this person likes better than the others.

It's a problem with the phone. Apple offered a free solution, put a case on it. If you don't like that solution, what do you want them to do about it? Re-engineer the phone just for you and give you a replacement? It's not like this was a 1-off problem, like Joe's phone was defective so we replace Joe's phone. EVERY phone was made the same with this problem. You can't just "fix it" for Joe. It isn't a matter of customer service where they can just fix the issue.

You're missing the point. Just because there's one problem with the iPhone, no matter how many people it affects, doesn't mean it's automatically a bad choice if every other feature is what you're looking for in a smartphone. If the antenna makes a phone 90/100 but every other phone is still at best 80/100, does switching platforms make sense? It's still a valid issue to complain about, but not enough to make the decision to abandon the platform for some people.

The point is, the iPhone is what these customers were looking for. They still like it enough to keep it, and they like it enough to complain when there are quality issues rather than switch.

I think you're missing my point. What do you want Apple to do about it? They gave everyone a free case with which it works fine. It wasn't a quality issue, it was a design issue. These are different things. No amount of QA will fix a design issue.

What possible other response from a customer service perspective could you want here?

He doesn't request a "pony from apple now" but a working phone. If you don't see the difference here, then sorry, but I don't understand your point.

I believe (and some quick Googling corroborates) that the iPhone 5 has a completely different antennae setup. I believe they also tweaked it for the CDMA iPhone 4 and all the 4S models, so perhaps you've not been having a problem because they fixed it.

Antennagate was way overblown, but it was a real issue for some people. With the right combination of specific unit (varying tolerances for the antenna / radio assembly) and cell phone coverage, you would run into problems.

The iPhone 4S and 5 has a different antenna design and (i think) has some kind of coating on the metal frame to lessen the issue.

I recently removed my iPhone 4 cover because I was sick of it and suddenly it was dropping calls and losing signal when I was holding it in my hand. I never had any of these issues back in Holland either (better signal perhaps?) but here in SF the problem is very real.

I never had a problem with the antenna on my iPhone 4... Until I switched to t-mobile. Then it was a noticeable problem. I could force it into 'searching' mode just by holding it wrong.

I don't think calling Apple out on selling a faulty $3000 laptop and refusing to repair it counts as histrionics or spam.

No, but the tone and ensuing vitriol does. I'd hasten to add that this happen with other manufacturers with startling regularity too. I've been given the run around by HP on a similar spec'ed and similarly priced month old EliteBook, that is faulty to point of unsuitability for any practical use. This is replacing a Thinkpad whose screen came away from it hinges after less than 6 months use. Had I written a scathing blog post about either and linked to it here, I doubt that it would have even raised a comment, let alone a single up-vote. And rightly so because just like the OP, it's ANECDOTAL.

So the person that down-voted without explaining why either thinks that there has been a lack of vitriol or thinks that anecdotal evidence in the negative outweighs the plethora of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. We'll never know because this has developed into the usual inevitable flame fest.

First gen iPhone here, still going strong. Thanks.

Well, that one data point certainly disproves the entire argument.

I don't see it as spam, I see it as a necessary part of getting the kinks worked out ahead of when we middle-adopters buy the 2nd or 3rd gen products. The more bloggers gripe about these problems the more likely Apple will have prioritized fixing them before the next generation comes out.

So we grade Apple on a curve? We let other manufacturers get away with it because they are not Apple? Because that is what is happening. Apple aren't the only company that positions themselves as premium and they sure as heck aren't the only company that sells $3000 dollar laptops that may (or may not, mainly may not) develop faults. HP and Lenovo for instance...

You forgot iPod batteries that die after (warrantly length+1) months.

This is the reason why I bought a top end early 2011 MBP rather than the newest widget version. I knew that was the end of a long line, but should last a fair amount of abuse for some time to come.

I wouldn't buy another Apple product either. Between a MacBook Pro which caught fire, an AirPort which melted, an iMac which the backlight went on and a MacBook which had to go back 4 times (!) due to logic board problems, it scares the shit out of me parting with that sort of cash and actually depending on it. The muppets at the "genius bar" (retard shelf as we call it now) aren't exactly helpful and usher you away so other people don't hear about it as well.

I now buy OLD Lenovo machines (T61 series) and chuck Debian on them. I buy two at a time and stick a (Samsung) SSD in them for less than half the cost of an MBP. One lives in the cupboard as a backup. I have a few spare batteries (9-cell and Ultrabay) sitting around as well.

Also, I find it objectionable purchasing anything that doesn't have a way of isolating the power either i.e. removing the battery. One short on a LiPoly pack and your tech gadget turns neatly into an incendiary device, which is what happened to my 2010 MBP. It nearly burned my house down.

I genuinely don't get all these people who think they are soundly engineered. They are expensive trinkets with no engineering applied past appearance.

Although you might have requirements that aren't met by Apple's products, such as wanting a removable battery, to call them "expensive trinkets" with "no engineering" is absurd.

Apple's work on the unibody case is but one example of how they're pushing manufacturing technology as far as it can go today. Other vendors are content to stamp out the same old plastic clamshell, to fit in the same old motherboard and optical drive, whatever's cheapest and quickest.

With the exception of Sony and HP, few companies even try to do what Apple's doing.

Ahh yes the unibody which is basically a fucking big short circuit, hence why mine caught fire.

It's engineering, but it's not SOUND ENGINEERING.

I stand by my expensive trinket comment.

Buy a Lenovo T-series and you'll understand.

You're essentially saying that any computer with a metal case, or extensive metal shielding inside could suffer the same problem. HP makes a number of metal laptops, for instance, in an effort to make them more recyclable, the same reasoning behind Apple's materials decision.

Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick. I hope they've improved the trackpad because those were nearly unusable before.

I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier. The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing.

"The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing."

Maybe you should get your head out of the gutter and realize a laptop isn't deemed "good" because it's an alternative to "what Apple's doing".

Edit: And to whoever downvoted this, thank you for proving my point.

You nailed it. The pretty factor is not at all important, neither is blindly copying a vendor.

I guess I should be wearing shoes made from truck tires and old seatbelts, shirts made from recycled canvas bags, and underpants made from old rags because who cares about appearances.

No you should buy shirts made of cotton, not tinfoil is what I'm suggesting.

Realize that aesthetics are largely subjective. I personally think the Thinkpad line looks a hell of a lot BETTER than the rounded corner/aluminum macbooks.

So then appearances are important to you, but you have a different sense of what looks better. That's a lot more reasonable than insisting appearance doesn't matter.

I think people who say "appearance doesn't matter" really just mean "appearance is ranked much lower than whatever specs I am looking for", obviously at some level the look of the thing will come into play.

Until there are other vendors on the same page as Apple, there's no way to put it otherwise.

If you want to buy power tools, a watch, a car, you have many choices of first-rate products. When it comes to computers it's such a broken marketplace. It'd be a world where there's BMW and a whole bunch of Hyundai-type companies.

I have my head in the gutter because I have standards? Expectations? That appearances do matter? Sorry if I don't come from the school of function trumping form, and that I care about attention to details.

For laptops, there's Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, Sony, and more...a lot of them don't cost as much as Apple, but their benchmarks match up at a cheaper cost.

You're missing the point. It's not about benchmarks. That's like buying a car based on horsepower or quarter mile times. It doesn't matter as much as you'd think.

It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value.

"It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value."

That's fine, and that's perfectly acceptable. Unfortunately, I think you are missing the point, since Apple products don't have any of those qualities (especially vendor support, given the text of the linked article...). I might bend a bit on build quality (especially since a majority of the parts aren't manufactured by Apple to begin with, and the parts that are do generally have good durability), but I see absolutely no advantage by Apple in the other departments.

And really, how good of a metric metric is build quality when the entire computer ends up super-glued together?

Gas mileage and average life of transmission, etc. are benchmarks that do matter to the average consumer. The max horsepower isn't used at all by people purchasing cars for travel on the main roads, but max processor power is probably used at least from time to time on people purchasing computers, maybe because of running badly-written software or just trying to open a million tabs in Chrome.

Build quality/durability is quite a tough pickle to nail statstics on. Used Apple sales may still carry a higher price tag because people paid more for them in the first place, or because of the brand name. % of devices still running to their consumer's satisfaction is a statistic I haven't seen before, and might be skewed by the type of respondents. Some of the tests done here that I put stock into are actually some of the most interesting: like dropping Nintendo cartridges from 3 story buildings, or leaving a laptop in your freezer or out on the hot pavement for an hour to see what happens when you try to use them again. There are a lot of stories here about what kind of abuse their laptops take, but I would go on over to Youtube and actually look at some people who went out of their way to record this. Word of mouth and anecdotes really do dominate this area, so I can't say much about this outside of personal experience, which really comes down to "Wait at least a year, do at least an hour's research, and hope you're lucky". Even within a brand, some products are very durable while others are flimsy.

ASUS falls off that list when it comes to vendor support, but Sony, Dell and Lenovo all offer support, though I have never come across useful vendor support, so I'll have to keep quiet about that. Generally I try to buy equipment that is durable enough not to fail within that warranty period, and after that I'll move on.

Don't forget resale value. That's the part where you make up the difference in price when you sell the Macbook two years later for 75% of retail price. Not sure any other computer manufacturer's product can do that.

When it comes to cars -- the Macbooks are like BMW's. Look good, drive fast, even the door makes a solid thud when you close it. You can tell it's been well engineered.

The T-Series thinkpads -- more like a Toyota Hilux.

Yes BMWs are just like MacBooks. They catch fire too!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17514172

I wouldn't bother arguing. If people want to use other laptop hardware, for reasons partly imaginary, defending their choice by juvenile name-calling, let them.

No I'm not. I'm saying that there is no acceptable insulation in the device. The chassis for example uses air gap between the board and the base for insulation. Even condensation can bridge it, which is the theory why mine exploded.

Regarding appearance, and? Does that really matter?

Why you pick a ThinkPad: http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg

That and you can throw the damn thing across the room and it'll still work. Mine is 5 years old, has been thrown, dropped, spilled on, yanked off the table, stood on and it's as good as new.

I'm not a fanboy - the thing is just built to last which when you're spending n-thousand dollars is a shit load more important than the shiny factor which you are obviously obsessed with.

Boards usually have a transparent coating, I doubt that it's only air separating the board from the chassis. For this very reason - laptops are thrown into the water as a test, they must not explode after that. I have never had a problem with a unibody Macbook. Please don't be ridiculous.

It's called solder mask and it doesn't cover the entire board...

Compressing the bottom of the case will short.

It's badly designed.

I think he's talking about conformal coating, not solder mask. Conformal coating can help but it's mostly there to prevent shorting across component leads from condensation. If you smash the Al casing against the board there's a good chance you can chip the coating and short things out.

Exactly, that's what I meant. Good point about the chipping off!

> The chassis for example uses air gap between the board and the base for insulation. Even condensation can bridge it, which is the theory why mine exploded.

What environment are you using your laptop in that's allowing condensation to form inside the device? Electronics are typically not rated for use in condensing environments at all.

Air gaps as insulators are pretty typical in electronics. That's how it works in every desktop machine I've ever used. And it looks like the air gap inside the MBP is plenty large, and even if it weren't, the attached components would be making contact with the case, not the board itself.

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+M...

I think the "condensation inside the case" theory is incorrect. I don't know if that's your own theory or if someone working for Apple told you that, but I don't see that as feasible. You'd need a lot of liquid inside the case for a short to involve the case. And frankly, if you've got any liquid inside your laptop, the fact that the case is metal is irrelevant.

> Regarding appearance, and? Does that really matter?

Of course not. No one cares about the way their $1300 device looks any more. As a society, we moved past caring about appearances in 1992.

> "What environment are you using your laptop in that's allowing condensation to form inside the device?"

I can think of a pretty easy hypothetical--have the laptop indoors, powered down in a very cool air conditioned room for enough time to make it cool. Then take it outside in a high humidity region like Florida and turn it on. Bam, condensation inside the device.

That's a fair point, but it doesn't seem extremely likely. I could see developing "fog" on/in the device (like glasses fogging when coming in from the cold), but enough to produce a short is hard to believe. The aluminum should actually reach equilibrium with the environment faster than plastic.

So now it's that I'm "obsessed" with shiny?

The number of MacBooks in the environment that I work in that have serious dents, battle damage from severe falls, outnumbers those that don't, and they're all in functioning condition. Don't think that Lenovo laptops are the only ones that are durable.

If you look at the resale value for a MacBook it's a lot higher than a Lenovo. I'm sure there's something other than "shiny" that makes a five year old MacBook still have significant value.

"If you look at the resale value for a MacBook it's a lot higher than a Lenovo. I'm sure there's something other than "shiny" that makes a five year old MacBook still have significant value."

I rather enjoy the availability of cheap good recycled laptops such as the Lenovo Thinkpads.

I suspect the lower price compared to Apple laptops of similar vintage may have to do with the volume available, and the tendency of corporate purchasers to refresh their stock en masse.

If my hypothesis is correct, one would expect to see a drop in resale value of Apple laptops in the future as the volume increases, and as they are seen more in the corporate world in larger numbers.

Shucks.

I don't even have a dog in this fight except for the following facts

1) I am a current owner of the storied T61 and 2) I have grown fond of the stupendously neat rMBP and am mulling getting one.

  That and you can throw the damn thing across the room and
  it'll still work. Mine is 5 years old, has been thrown,
  dropped, spilled on, yanked off the table, stood on and
  it's as good as new.

Now that I've been made familiar with the fact that the T61 is in very small company of notebooks that can put up with even moderate household battery - a fact I've long suspected but never gloated about, given it's outmodedness - I am suddenly struck with angst over my limited options.

Yes, T61 is all those things that the author mentioned.

My T61 has survived falls on hardwood floors, physical shocks in poorly padded cases and other uncharitable abuse.

I just can't fathom the prospect of not being able to do all those things to my new notebook, whatever the eventual pick is.

rMBP owners: Please do share your insights into the mean level of abuse your units have handsomely survived.

> rMBP owners: Please do share your insights into the mean level of abuse your units have handsomely survived.

I do not own a rMBP, but laptops in general are not as fragile as we sometimes imagine. Most of the failures I've experienced over the years have been for things unrelated to drops. I've had a dead screen backlight, a dead trackpad (water spill), and similar one-off failures. I've also seen overheating, failed logic boards, and of course dead batteries. I've never seen a laptop that died because someone dropped it (though obviously that can happen).

However, if you drop a metal laptop, you're likely to get scratches and dents. You won't see that as much on a Thinkpad because the plastic will shrug this off better. With cheaper plastic laptops, you might see cracked plastic.

If you drop your laptop a lot, you might want something like a ThinkPad just so it won't get dinged up. But then you might want to just stop dropping your laptop so much.

I have dropped my rMBP at least three times from a coffee table or bed height or so. It seems sturdier than the regular MBP in that I haven't any noticeable dents, though I believe I got lucky in that each impact seemed spread across the edge or the bottom, and not a corner. I also have the SSD version, for what it's worth.

After using it for 4 months daily travelling cross-continent for development, presentations, and running multiple virtual machines, it's the finest laptop I've owned - by far the fastest and most aesthetically pleasing.

For background, I've owned three Dell Inspirion or Latitudes, a Thinkpad T61, three MacBook Pros, a Macbook Air, and three PowerBook G3/G4s.

I'm a continuous early adopter of first gen Apple technology - I've had some mishaps (heat on the first MBP that needed a warranty repair; poor backlight on a pre-unibody Macbook Pro, poor signal reliability on the first AirPort Extreme, and case flex on the early PowerBook G4s and MacBook Pros) but nothing that made me curse their name. I was lucky to avoid the logic board issues on the iBook G3s which was the worst experience I know of based on my friends' experiences.

I once slipped on ice and dropped my T60p from about chest height onto a steel manhole cover. It was perfectly fine. Worrying about the structural strength of a T-series Thinkpad is entirely unjustified as far as I can tell.

> rMBP owners: Please do share your insights into the mean level of abuse your units have handsomely survived.

A week or so ago, I was riding my bicycle on the comute from work and had to avoid a psychopath in a car. I'd forgotten to close the straps over the rMBP and it went flying off the back of the bike, skittered along the bitumen for a couple of metres and smashed into a gutter. It's not quite as handsome as it was, but despite landing on the screen corner everything still lines up perfectly, opens and closes perfectly and works perfectly.

> Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s

That's the point!

Thinkpad T series laptops are what apple laptops can only dream of being.

Yes - a good side effect.

I reckon my T61 wouldn't get nicked and can quite happily use it on a train out of London even at night without being fussed.

The same could not be said for a MacBook which just has "mug me" written on it.

Oh, so it's like wearing an ironic t-shirt?

I own a new W530, and I can confirm the trackpad still stinks.

After my Macbook Pro died, I switched to Lenovo because how much work and fraught with difficulty keeping Linux running on the MBP was. Installs have been easier, but now I've found I've made a whole host of different sacrifices, mainly the crappy feeling you mentioned. They are not as solid as my good old pre-unibody MBP.

> Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick.

And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are. The TrackPoint is far superior to any trackpad out there. In fact, I don't even use a mouse with my desktop - I have a USB version of the ThinkPad keyboard[0]. With the TrackPoint, you can use the mouse without ever moving your hand from the home position on the keyboard. It's more efficient than a mouse, and much, much more efficient than a trackpad.

And instead of the stupid "two-finger scrolling" you see on Macs these days, you can hold the middle mouse button and push up or down with the TrackPoint to scroll infinitely.

And the reason why the ThinkPad design has stayed the same since the 90s is because ThinkPad users aren't chasing after the latest shiny bauble - they want a device on which they can get their work done. The ThinkPad design is timeless in that it gets out of your way so that you can focus on what is important.

Apple has to make sure they regularly have shiny new product designs to keep their customer base happy because their customers are more interested in looks than functionality.

> I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier.

You really need to stop drinking the Apple Kool-aid and realize that there are far superior laptops to the MacBooks.

0: http://i.imgur.com/oVKgB.jpg

The parent comment was wrong to brand its opponents fanatics, but yours is also excessively opinionated. TrackPoint versus (Apple) trackpad is, fairly obviously, a matter of taste, not of Kool-Aid.

> TrackPoint versus (Apple) trackpad is, fairly obviously, a matter of taste

I don't see how it is. It's a simple matter of efficiency. When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches. When using the TrackPoint, you do not - the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row. All 3 mouse buttons are accessible with your thumbs while your fingers rest on the home row.

When using a trackpad to scroll, you have to keep lifting your hand off the trackpad and moving it back to the other side of the trackpad to continue scrolling. With the TrackPoint, you just hold down the middle mouse button and push the TrackPoint in the direction you want to go, for as long as you want. How is this even comparable?

In fact, I have completely disabled the trackpad on my ThinkPad in the BIOS. I have no need for it when there's the TrackPoint.

I'll bite.

Quick switching between keyboard and mouse is indeed a strength of the TrackPoint, and if you need to do that a lot, the TrackPoint might be superior. Some mitigating factors: one, imo Apple trackpads best shine when used for reading (web pages or PDFs), where it's not necessary to use the keyboard at all; two, unlike a mouse, the trackpad on my MBP is just a rotation of my right wrist away, which is certainly more than the rotation I would need to access a TrackPoint, but not unbearably disruptive. However, it's certainly true that when I'm on the keyboard, I try to stay on the keyboard (which is why I'm a vim user, heh).

For scrolling, Apple trackpads offer almost direct manipulation, which affords a sheer ease and precision that a mouse certainly cannot compete with; I'm skeptical that a TrackPoint can. Note also that you can do a quick scroll without having to actually press any buttons, just the wrist rotation and a flick; or if you're already moving the pointer, it's insanely easy to switch to a scroll. And there are other gestures: zooming, for instance, is certainly possible with other input methods, but doing it with direct manipulation on a trackpad again allows unmatched precision and doesn't require clicking any buttons. Or use three fingers to quickly flick between Spaces, if you're the kind of person that uses those; a keyboard shortcut would work, but the trackpad is very convenient.

(I never had a laptop with a TrackPoint, fwiw, so I can't personally compare both; keep in mind, though, that experience with a non-Apple trackpad is not really a good substitute for an Apple one either.)

[edited.]

> one, imo Apple trackpads best shine when used for reading (web pages or PDFs), where it's not necessary to use the keyboard at all

I don't think this is particularly true, especially for web browsing. For example, in responding to your comment, I just had to copy and paste your text to quote it. Because of the TrackPoint, I was able to easily copy and paste the text while keeping my hands in essentially one place.

If I were using a trackpad, I would have had to (a) move my hand onto the trackpad, (b) select the text, (c) move my hands back to the keyboard to hit Ctrl+c, (d) move my hands back to the trackpad to move the cursor to the input box and click in it, (e) move my hands back to the keyboard to hit Ctrl+v. That's back and forth twice. Just to copy and paste some text.

As a side note, text selection is something else I've found to be frustrating with trackpads, especially the new "clickpads" which don't have separate mouse buttons. It's hard to press down and move your finger at the same time. This isn't an issue at all with the TrackPoint, though.

> the trackpad on my MBP is just a rotation of my right wrist away

Perhaps it's because I'm not experienced with trackpads, but I have found that I really have to lift my hand up and move it down, using my arm muscles, to access any trackpad.

> For scrolling, Apple trackpads offer almost direct manipulation, which affords a sheer ease and precision that a mouse certainly cannot compete with; I'm skeptical that a TrackPoint can.

I just got a ThinkPad X1 Carbon a few days back, an ultrabook which reviews have said has a trackpad comparable to that on the MacBooks. Out of curiosity, I thought I'd try using it, but I found it to be no less precise than a TrackPoint and much more tedious to use.

I think part of the issue is that the TrackPoint has a learning curve that the trackpads do not. Most people give up on the TrackPoint before they ever learn how to use it properly. For whatever reason, when I got my first ThinkPad, I started using the TrackPoint extensively, and after a few weeks, I had the hang of it. Since you're also a Vim user, perhaps you can understand it as similar to the difference between using a plain-old text editor and Vim, in terms of the learning curve and eventual advantages.

> And there are other gestures: zooming, for instance, is certainly possible with other input methods, but doing it with direct manipulation on a trackpad again allows unmatched precision and doesn't require clicking any buttons. Or use three fingers to quickly flick between Spaces, if you're the kind of person that uses those; a keyboard shortcut would work, but the trackpad is very convenient.

I don't have much experience with zooming - it really hasn't ever been necessary on a computer for me to use it on a regular basis, so I can't comment on that.

As for window management, I've traditionally used XMonad, so keyboard shortcuts are how I get things done with respect to window management. However, I have XFCE installed instead on my new laptop, so I'll see how that goes. Of course, OS X and Windows are much less customizable than Linux, so custom shortcuts may not be an option there.

> If I were using a trackpad, I would have had to (a) move my hand onto the trackpad, (b) select the text, (c) move my hands back to the keyboard to hit Ctrl+c, (d) move my hands back to the trackpad to move the cursor to the input box and click in it, (e) move my hands back to the keyboard to hit Ctrl+v. That's back and forth twice. Just to copy and paste some text.

Well, trackpad only requires one hand, the other one can stay on the left side of the keyboard for those keyboard shortcuts. Certainly can sitll be annoying if you have to actually type something, such as in the address bar.

> As a side note, text selection is something else I've found to be frustrating with trackpads, especially the new "clickpads" which don't have separate mouse buttons. It's hard to press down and move your finger at the same time. This isn't an issue at all with the TrackPoint, though.

Indeed, which is why I emulate the old style and click with my thumb while dragging with a finger - this works fine.

> Perhaps it's because I'm not experienced with trackpads, but I have found that I really have to lift my hand up and move it down, using my arm muscles, to access any trackpad.

It helps that I have big hands.

> Since you're also a Vim user, perhaps you can understand it as similar to the difference between using a plain-old text editor and Vim, in terms of the learning curve and eventual advantages.

I wouldn't be surprised - but I'm not convinced that the result is actually better than a trackpad.

> I don't have much experience with zooming - it really hasn't ever been necessary on a computer for me to use it on a regular basis, so I can't comment on that.

It makes fitting, say, the window with the portion of a PDF document you want to read relatively easy (although PDFs don't scroll and zoom nearly as smoothly as web pages in Safari; ugh).

> As for window management, I've traditionally used XMonad, so keyboard shortcuts are how I get things done with respect to window management.

Me too, actually - I use SizeUp, which lets me move windows to predefined regions of the screen with keyboard shortcuts, and since I also use Cmd-Tab extensively, a keyboard shortcut is superior for me here - but I know many people love their Spaces.

> When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches.

~2 is not "several" in modern english usage.

More to the point: personally, I use my thumb on the trackpad, so by your standards of evidence the track point is less efficient than the trackpad; my fingers never leave their home row positions, whereas yours do to use the track point. In reality, yes, it's personal preference.

> ~2 is not "several" in modern english usage.

It looks like at least 3 to 4 inches to me from the home row to the middle of the trackpad on the 13" MacBook Air: http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/macb...

On my X1 Carbon[0] it's 4" from the home row to the middle of the trackpad. Subtracting 0.5" for the separate mouse buttons, that would be 3.5" to the middle of the trackpad.

> personally, I use my thumb on the trackpad

Can you "two-finger scroll" with your thumb on the trackpad? And from what another post said, you have to rotate your wrist to do this anyway.

> so by your standards of evidence the track point is less efficient than the trackpad; my fingers never leave their home row positions, whereas yours do to use the track point.

What are you talking about? My fingers never leave the home row to use the TrackPoint. You do realize that the TrackPoint is located between the "G", "H", and "B" keys, right?

0: http://asset3.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/08/07/ThinkP...

To "two finger" it all you have to do is rotate your hand slightly and swipe with finger and thumb. This gesture becomes effortless once you internalize it.

The problem with the "stick" is that, like a game-pad controller, it operates like a steering wheel. It doesn't move the mouse directly, but it changes the rate at which the mouse is moving. This is a degree removed from actually steering the mouse and it's why it frustrates a lot of people.

If you're a "home row" person that's fine, we all have our preferences, but you're probably in the minority and the appeal of that feature is more limited than a responsive track-pad.

"the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row"

This really, is the end of the discussion for me. After using the trackpoint for years and becoming spoiled by being able to maintain proper posture at all times, not having a trackpoint on all of my other keyboards has lead me to slowly abandon mouse use wherever possible. For me, it is a choice between either a trackpoint or nothing at all. If I had a MBP, I would disable the trackpad entirely; it would only get in my way.

You come across as an Apple hater here. You're not making objective arguments or even providing personal anecdotes. You're just pushing your personal opinion as fact.

> And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are. The TrackPoint is far superior to any trackpad out there.

When you call someone ignorant, you should typically follow up with a factual statement and not just your personal opinion. In my experience, the TrackPoint is tedious and awkward. Good for you if you like it, but everyone else in the world isn't "ignorant" for having a different opinion.

> It's more efficient than a mouse, and much, much more efficient than a trackpad.

Not in my experience, but a bigger issue is that the TrackPoint is abstracted further, which makes it less intuitive. If touching something on the screen directly is a first-level abstraction, introducing a mouse or trackpad is a second-level abstraction, because your motions are moving a proxy (the cursor) around on screen. The TrackPoint is a third-level abstraction, because you're using a joystick to move the proxy, so your motions are no longer paralleled on the screen (i.e. the cursor moves but you didn't actually move the TrackPoint).

> And the reason why the ThinkPad design has stayed the same since the 90s is because ThinkPad users aren't chasing after the latest shiny bauble - they want a device on which they can get their work done. The ThinkPad design is timeless in that it gets out of your way so that you can focus on what is important. Apple has to make sure they regularly have shiny new product designs to keep their customer base happy because their customers are more interested in looks than functionality.

This is just unadulterated Apple hate combined with some vacuous claims. This doesn't convince anyone that you're correct. It just makes you sound petty and bitter.

> When you call someone ignorant, you should typically follow up with a factual statement and not just your personal opinion.

Funny, this is what I would call "personal opinion":

> the TrackPoint is tedious and awkward

And this is what I would call a "factual statement":

> It's a simple matter of efficiency. When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches. When using the TrackPoint, you do not - the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row. All 3 mouse buttons are accessible with your thumbs while your fingers rest on the home row.

> When using a trackpad to scroll, you have to keep lifting your hand off the trackpad and moving it back to the other side of the trackpad to continue scrolling. With the TrackPoint, you just hold down the middle mouse button and push the TrackPoint in the direction you want to go, for as long as you want. How is this even comparable?

I would say that I have provided a much more factual basis for my argument than your explanation that it's "tedious and awkward".

> The TrackPoint is a third-level abstraction, because you're using a joystick to move the proxy, so your motions are no longer paralleled on the screen (i.e. the cursor moves but you didn't actually move the TrackPoint).

The fact that the TrackPoint doesn't move is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It allows you to scroll infinitely, never move your hand from the home row, etc.

Getting used to the TrackPoint is just a matter of time (a few days for me), but having to move your hands a lot when using a trackpad or mouse will never change - it's physical reality.

And if it's so difficult to use a joystick to control things, how is it that millions of people are able to play console video games without any problem? Many of the people who complain about the TrackPoint are the same people who play Wii, 360, or PS3 games that make extensive use of joysticks.

> This is just unadulterated Apple hate combined with some vacuous claims. This doesn't convince anyone that you're correct. It just makes you sound petty and bitter.

I'm sorry you feel that way, but I find no reason to return your ad hominem attack on me, so whatever.

> Funny, this is what I would call "personal opinion"

Funny, I didn't call you "ignorant" right before I posted my opinion. I also made it clear that I was posting my personal experience (hence the term "my experience") and not making some blanket claim.

> And this is what I would call a "factual statement"

Nope. It's more efficient for you, perhaps. It is considerably less efficient for someone who finds it awkward. Moving my hand to the trackpad takes less than a second. I don't consider that a high cost.

If you find yourself in a type-mouse-type-mouse loop that repeats so rapidly that moving your hand to the trackpad is actually a significant cost, then the UI you're using is terrible. Or else you need to learn to use the tab key for switching between fields, which is faster than either the trackpad or the trackpoint.

As for your scrolling example, you're missing a couple of important details. First, modern trackpads support inertial scrolling, which means you can "flick" and then stop the scrolling when you get to the point you want. This is far faster than the trackpoint for long-distance scrolling. Second, the trackpad also supports more fine-grained speed control in general. The trackpoint has a very small range of motion, which means you're trading off speed and accuracy. The large surface of a modern trackpad gives both simultaneously. I can mouse from corner to corner on screen multiple times per second with a trackpad. I can also get extremely fine-grained control. I seriously doubt your trackpoint can match both the speed and accuracy (though you can presumably match one of them). This likely more than offsets the "home row advantage". And even if you could match the speed and accuracy from a hardware standpoint, you'd be asking for either extremely fine inputs from the finger (for control), or extremely firm inputs (for speed), both of which would be very suboptimal in terms of ease of use and comfort.

> The fact that the TrackPoint doesn't move is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It allows you to scroll infinitely, never move your hand from the home row, etc.

No, it's a tradeoff. If you value keeping your hands on the home row, then it might be an advantage for you. I value the intuitive interaction of the trackpad far more.

> Getting used to the TrackPoint is just a matter of time (a few days for me), but having to move your hands a lot when using a trackpad or mouse will never change - it's physical reality.

Sure. You can get used to just about anything. Whether there's value in doing so is a different question. For most people, the answer appears to be no, given the low popularity of the trackpoint. The tradeoff between speed and accuracy in the trackpoint will also never change. That's physical reality, too.

> And if it's so difficult to use a joystick to control things, how is it that millions of people are able to play console video games without any problem? Many of the people who complain about the TrackPoint are the same people who play Wii, 360, or PS3 games that make extensive use of joysticks.

This would be a more compelling argument if interacting with game menus via joystick weren't so annoying (especially if the game gives you a "cursor" to move with said joystick). A joystick is a very useful input method for gameplay because "keep moving in this direction" is a common need there. It's frustrating for traditional interfaces because "keep moving in this direction" is not common. "Jump to this, now this, now this" is far more common.

> I'm sorry you feel that way, but I find no reason to return your ad hominem attack on me, so whatever.

It's a little late to reach for the high road when you start by calling someone ignorant for holding a different opinion, and then end by claiming that Apple users are "chasing after the latest shiny bauble". Also, nothing I posted is actually an ad hominem attack, but if it makes you feel better to think so, please continue.

"Shampoo is bettah."

"No, conditioner is bettah."

C'mon people.... they all implement INotebook.

"You really need to stop drinking the Apple Kool-aid..."

I think that you should stop using such inflammatory language and grow up a bit.

And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are

I don't have any strong opinions about either ThinkPads or MacBooks, but I do care about HN. If you're not trying to be civil, please try. If you are trying, please try harder. Thanks.

"The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing."

Not with 768 vertical pixels it isn't.

Last time I've disassembled a Lenovo laptop it still had the entire thin aluminum shield thingie inside, y'know. And desktops are made of metal instead of wood and rich corinthian leather for (a bunch of) reason(s). On the other hand, my experiences with Lenovo T-series were mostly of the "flimsy pieces of crap that only look solid" category (but maybe I was just less than lucky).

Aggregated studies of customer satisfaction seem to still be so much better for Apple than for other manufacturers, that it's a bit hard to blame it all on confirmation bias.

I think your eyes must have crap in them if you think a T-series is flimsy. The big chunk of titanium in the middle makes it rock solid:

http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg

Lenovo's relatively low score is because they shift out lots of low quality consumer grade laptops (g-series) which are to be honest, just junk but earn them a lot of money. They don't even assemble them themselves. If you took just ThinkPad series machines, there would be a very different result.

> I think your eyes must have crap in them

Stop acting like a child.

I said it looks solid, I had a T-series laptop, and I replaced it with an MBP, so I know a bit about their respective constructions. The cage and everything didn't help the T being in worse shape (loose hinges, cracks in plastic, failed display close sensor) in half the time I've used the MBP (which is still going strong). So yeah, my personal case was very different.

And as for the flex test mentioned just above, it's not really an interesting test. It doesn't matter if anything flexes, it matters whether and when it breaks, and that's a test I'm not going to make. This is what I mean by making a product look solid, not be solid.

FWIW, I tend to carry two different MBPs from different ages holding them by the display regularly, and they're still alive and well after, respectively, years and months of abuse. And the first thing I did after buying the first one was dropping it off the table, which is twice the height that killed the T completely (after it wasting its battery completely after a year, that is, another feat that MBP didn't replicate).

Also, what the sibling said: stop acting like a child. Thank you.

Have you ever done the "flex test" with an MBA and a T61? Very noticeable different with a magnesium rollcage vs. an aluminum unibody. There is no flex in a T61.

Is it fair to compare a Macbook Air to a beefy T61?

Sadly, Lenovo cannot be relied on as they once were (even for the first few years post-IBM). My W520 has been to warranty depot three times - still not fixed - for this problem that has been known for 1.5 years:

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-s...

I'm still using, and loving, my T61P. If only there was a way to get an i5 or i7 in that lovely reliable chassis :(

My wife had a Lenovo that basically disintegrated in ~11 months, but my mom has had hers for years and has survived several drops and grandkids.

Just as it has always been, the T series will be the best built laptops. You were free to purchase a T530 with any of the i5 or i7 CPUs and 1920 x 1080 screen. The only downside to them is the lack of higher end GPUs. They are just about as solidly built as the older T series.

I bought it specifically for the quadro 2000, for volume-rendering and cuda. Thanks for the heads-up, I didn't realize the W series was created post-IBM.

Ironically, I had to send my brand new Lenovo T420s back because of display issues.

I have Lenovo T420 as work laptop, it costs nearly as much as my unibody 13" MBP did in 2010, except it has a shitty trackpad, keyboard (which isn't backlit, instead they have this useless lamp at the top of the screen), the screen doesn't have auto-brightness which I consider a must now and it overall has this cheap, plastic feel to it. The top border of the display separated from it's backing after a couple months (and I'm usually gentle with my tech), the optical drive eject button is positioned in such a way that you always accidentally trigger the open action - everyone at my job has this problem, I think it's because the eject button is the right most object on the side and very easily pushed.

If I paid that much of my own money I'd be very pissed. Given my experience, I will not be buying Lenovo machines. Dell however was quite a nice workhorse, still not in the same category as MBPs though.

It sounds like you had some bad experiences, but do you really think that Apple makes products with "no engineering applied past experience"? Surely Apple's products have had faults, and it sounds like you've been bitten more than once. I don't blame you for not liking the company or its products. However, there are lots of satisfied customers, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who believed that their build process and supply chain is not top notch.

FWIW, whenever I've had any trouble with getting support for Apple products, an email to sjobs@apple.com (now tcook@) solved the problem promptly. In my experience, the company does screw up, but if you bring a problem to their attention, they'll make it right.

Yes I do - they are shit, so is their engineering and I'm not afraid to go against the grain and say it.

I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer i.e. most of the praise comes from new users with shiny toys. My father has just been screwed by his 1st gen iPad because some of the apps will no longer install and IOS6 is not available (to the trash it goes), his white iPhone 4S has proximity sensor issues to the point it's unusable and they refuse to repair it, my boss's MBP LCD inverter melted, we've got a cupboard full of 7 dead Mac Minis in the office, the old optical mice just didn't work (the one with the little ball) or the logic board fell out inside and lets not even mention the time capsule saga or the OSX update which fucked the filesystems on lots of machines (10.5.3).

There is a whole million miles of these problems out there and so far it's usually kept covered by the reality distortion field.

Build process fine. Supply chain fine. But the inputs to those is unadulterated crap.

Fuck, I don't want to have to complain - I want something to just work with no problems. Screw sjobs@ / tcook@ pandering. Just make some shit that works.

> I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer

Four MBPs, including a retina MBP. Couldn't be happier. Two iPads and two iPhones, switched to Android largely because of a new job and because I wanted a local environment for running vim.

See? Other people have anecdotes too. But I get that contrariness and the application of your own pet anecdotes over evidence is really fun, so continue, by all means.

I think what he's going for is that, had you kept your original MBP, you would be unsatisfied. Not saying he's right or wrong there.

However, I think it is fair to say that the majority of Apple fans often have a pretty frequent upgrade cycle. Consequently I don't think there are too many "long term customers" of Apple products in his sense of the word. I think Meaty is really going for "long term" customer as in - infrequent customer, keeping devices for long term.

I'd be "unsatisfied" because a slow processor, a 4GB RAM maximum, and a shitty GPU would suck, sure. I upgrade and sell my old machines on a yearly basis or so because paying a $300-$400 delta (sell the old one, buy the new one) is worth it to have something in the target area for Apple and for developers. There's no point for me in keeping older devices long-term because nobody really targets the trailing edge. I spend more on car repairs in any given year than I do on my laptop upgrades; it is just not a significant amount of money.

If "people who keep old stuff" was what he was really going for, he's doing poorly at describing it, because I don't think that "long term customer" doesn't mean "customer who refuses to upgrade for geologic eras" among reasonable folks. And I certainly don't think an ecosystem where newer devices are generally preferred is a symptom of "bad engineering"--more "engineering decisions he doesn't like." Every MBP iteration has made me much more pleased to actually use the machine, and that's the core of what matters.

You see with Windows, Microsoft targetted (or at least went WAY out of their way to accommodate) the trailing edge. hell, they even held support for many DOS programs for a long time. This pattern looks like it might be changing with Metro though.

Microsoft did, sure, but I'm referring more to application and game developers. The OS features are nice-to-haves to be sure, but if your applications are outpacing your hardware...

That's mostly fair, but gigantic multiplayer experiences have in general tried to target more modest min. reqs., like Starcraft II on the competitive side, or all of those East asian MMOs on the casual side.

Starcraft II actually really chugged on my 2009-vintage MBP. It was one of the games I was thinking of. =)

My Wife has my old MBP circa 2008. Its still runs surprisingly well - outside the new trackpad and larger size, I don't notice a difference using that compared to my current. While I like the T61 (alot), when I left my previous job I was given the choice of keeping either it or the MBP (both with similar specs). I chose the MBP and haven't regretted it once.

In my circle, I would disagree. I'm using a 6 year old Mac Pro, have a 2006 Mac mini as an HTPC, another as a fileserver in the basement. Our household has an original iPad, an iPad 3G, two iPhone 3GS used as ersatz iPod Touches for the kids. I did recently upgrade to the iPhone 5 from the iPhone 3GS, but that's because I don't want to be on a two year treadmill.

The only issue I ever had was with a balky videocard in the Mac Pro that would die after about 4 months of World of Warcraft. Apple was quick to replace the card twice without any troubles.

So everyone's mileage varies.

Since I recently upgraded to an SSD in the Mac Pro, and bumped up the memory to 32GB, I see no need to replace this machine until it suffers a serious mechanical failure. The only downside is that it'll forever be stuck running Lion.

If you have the right video card, you can get Mountain Lion running with these instructions: http://www.jabbawok.net/?p=47

This worked for me with my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 w/ an ATI HD5770 graphics card. I do have an issue where it often doesn't come back from sleep, so I never put it to sleep, but other than that it's been flawless so far. I haven't spent any time looking into the sleep issue, maybe it's a solvable problem.

By strictly hardware performance standards, the Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 did not deserve to lose support so soon, and are still more than adequate. Especially the 8-core versions, which have benchmarks higher than many 2012 Macs.

If you have a 4 core model: I researched putting in replacement CPUs a while back (but never went through with it). Replacing a CPU in a Mac Pro is not the easiest and is a bit of a pain from what I hear, but it is possible, and if you have 4 cores right now you can get a serious CPU performance boost with the right 8 core CPU upgrades (2 x 4-core CPUs, that is). There are many options that will will work. If you're interested, I can give you more details on which CPUs work.

I have the four core model; I'm not sure for my work flow that faster CPUs or more cores would really help much compared to the cost. My SSD upgrade has really given it new life in terms of responsiveness.

Thanks for the link to the workaround. Hopefully it isn't something that will get broken with updates.

Yeah, I'm a little concerned about updates breaking things. The good thing about this hack is that you don't have to modify your installed OS X system. If I understand correctly, the Chameleon bootloader emulates EFI64 and fakes OS X into thinking you booted an EFI64 system. So I think the likelihood of updates breaking things is much smaller than that of Hackintoshes, for example.

Nevertheless, I'm going to try to make sure I have a full backup before doing any major OS X updates. I also have both a Lion backup (as well as an old Snow Leopard backup) that I can boot up in case I need to.

I'm a happy long term Mac user. However, I've resisted buying first generation products, and I wouldn't buy Apple products without an option to cancel the purchase. I'm happy with the attention put into the product design, but not with their quality control. If Lenovo made laptops with touchpads that worked as well as MacBooks, I would switch. But no such luck so far.

The Thinkpad X1 Carbon has a nice touchpad with 2-finger scroll as well. The only (minor) quibble I have with it is that it only lets you go one direction with the 2-finger scroll (you have to swipe down for down--you can't reverse it like you can on a Mac.) Otherwise, it's very comparable.

Just to add to the anecdotal evidence bandwagon, I'm another very happy long term customer, with almost a decade of happy purchases. I've never had a problem nor experienced anything but excellent service. I've had iPhones replaced for free (without Apple Care), free repairs for faulty components in 2 MacBook Pro's (performed immediately and at no cost).

I don't blame you for you dislike of the Apple brand given how you've apparently been treated, but realize that your experience seems to be somewhat anomalous.

This may just be a difference in attitude. For myself, I would count having multiple iPhones and MacBook Pros replaced or repaired as a terrible experience. Good service is better than bad service, and occasional defects are unavoidable, but the iPhone is only 5 years old; multiple replacements within that span would give me doubts about a company (unless you're buying lots of them, e.g. if your at a company that supplies employees with phones).

Somewhat less anecdotally, I worked Helpdesk at a company ~3 yrs ago, and most of our employees had either Lenovo's (T61's, T400s) or MBP's. I didn't notice a significant difference in the failure rate between the two.

I would agree, but do note that one iPhone was dropped in a cup of tea, which I can't really blame on Apple, and the other on cement, which I likewise can't really blame on Apple.

The macbooks both had bad video cards, which I do blame Apple for. But one was fixed in less than an hour, the other RMA'd and returned in 48 hours. This after almost 3 years of continuous use. I can put up with 2 or 3 days of repair after that many years of trouble-free life.

This kind of service and reliability led me to buy an iMac from them as my work computer and I haven't had a single problem with it.

Had my first-gen Intel white poly MacBook for 5 years. Could've run it longer but a friend needed a new laptop so I passed it on.

Over 13 years I have purchased 8 Apple laptops, three iMacs, five iPhones, and two iPads. With the Macs I have had three or four minor problems from time to time (covered under warranty), and have also had several iPhones replaced due to accidental damage (some for free). All were first gen purchases.

During this time I've also owned three Dell laptops, an Acer, and a Thinkpad. The Dells were mostly study though one's motherboard died. The Acer was also OK but was stolen so I didn't get a full life out of it.

In short, I'm quite happy with Apple quality, and have no desire to move away from them unless there's a very compelling alternative to come.

IOS6 is not available (to the trash it goes)

It's important to dispose of iPads in an environmentally friendly manner. There are lots of toxic materials and metals in the PCB and other components, and the batteries can start fires or emit noxious gases. Rather than throwing it away in the trash, I recommend sending it to me for proper disposal.

A great example of "no engineering applied past appearance":

The strain reliefs on every power adapter they make start out horrible, they fray, they get a lawsuit, then they fix them to look "uglier" but actually work. Then they release a new power adapter that looks good but sucks again and the cycle continues.

I'm having trouble finding the lawsuit over the old powerbook connectors, so let's start with magsafe 1

Original magsafe 1: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4127 They got sued. This was the settlement. Note that every single magsafe power adapter i have frayed.

There is an article in an atlantic that quotes a supposed apple employee saying they knew this was a bad idea. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/why-apples...

(Obviously, i don't think this is reliable sourcing, but it's plausible)

Newer magsafe 1: These are the ones that are sideways and have a much larger strain relief, and look like this: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/why-apples...

Great, problem solved, less strain.

Let's look at magsafe 2: http://photos.appleinsider.com/12.06.11-MBP-3.jpg

Whoops, back to the same issue of cables mostly bent at harsh angles due to T shaped adapters, and a smaller strain relief. Admittedly, it's bigger than the original magsafe 1 strain relief, but I expect it's only a matter of time before these fray again.

But: many people have had no problem with any of these Magsafe designs, despite frequent use. Weird, huh?

It's not weird. Plenty of people have not had problems with aluminum wiring in their houses, even when screwed to copper fixtures. Others have had house fires.

The lack of a 100% instantaneous failure rate does not mean there was a good engineering design, or even any engineering design past appearance.

In the case of magsafe, the incidence and number of claims of fraying, actual wire melting, etc, was so high that it was very clearly "bad engineering". (You are talking about at least tens of thousands of adapters that were actually replaced after actual signs of failure)

The case was settled through ADR 6 months after ADR starterd, and included apple agreeing to replace all adapters that showed any signs of strain relief failure for up to three years from the date of the initial settlement.

I've been doing the exact same thing for years. I now use a T61p. It's amazing that these things are around $200 on eBay. The Linux support is fantastic, and the laptop is powerful enough to even brand new games. The 1920x1200 resolution yields 147 PPI, which is as high as laptops go without getting Apple's retina display. I like having a fast laptop that I really don't have to fiddle with and costs a small fraction of what you buy an MBP for. And my warranty plan? If a laptop breaks (this has never happened, mind you), a replacement laptop is less than the cost of AppleCare itself.

As anecdotal as anecdotal evidence ever was.

A fucking large pile of expensive broken shit that just packed in is not anecdotal - it's known as evidence.

It is evidence for you, personally, yes. However, in aggregate, for all consumers, it is anecdata. There are people who swear by the opposite experience, of years of bad issues with non-Apple tech until they switched over. The ultimate problem with this discussion is that yours is only one data point, when a full survey would be required to determine which manufacturer is best. At the same time, sympathies for your bad experiences and best of luck with the new tech.

surveys like this one: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20108336-17/apple-tops-in-...

The people have spoken.

I wonder how often these studies are taken- annually? Quarterly? It'd be neat if they were done frequently, rather like polls during campaign season. Maybe a month or two after major product launches to gauge if satisfaction has changed.

To rebut his claim though you'd need a survey asking people how many times they've had faulty components/hardware. Not how good they feel about the supplier.

Doesn't how many times a person has had faulty components/hardware from a supplier affect a person's feeling about that supplier?

Not really - basic psych says that a person who needed repairs and had them done in an emotionally pleasing way will be happier about the supplier than a person who didn't need repairs and so didn't care.

But rationally it's quite clear that it is better to not need repairs (=waste time) in the first place.

It's the same as in many jobs - saving the day in a disaster will get more praise than preventing a disaster from happening; but, of course, prevention is far more valuable.

Ah good point. Although I would agree that it's better to not need the repairs in the first place. Either way, Apple has clearly been doing a good job satisfying their customers.

Why such anger and hostility? All the profanity does is make me think that your less than rational about this.

Not only is it anecdotal, these sorts of discussions seem to bring all the outliers out of the woodwork. There are always going to be some people who have many bad experiences with a company, even if overall reliability is good. Here is the relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/882/

They are soundly engineered, but quality control leaves something to be desired. If you don't think the engineering is applied past appearance, open one up and see for yourself.

While Apple may tend to cut corners in reliability, they generally aren't doing it to out of laziness or to save money but rather to make their products smaller, lighter, and smoother. It takes a lot of effort on the part of designers to squeeze functionality into a size and weight budget, just as much as to make something reliable, and I think that saying that "no engineering was applied past appearance" is horribly unfair.

Now, not everybody is OK with trading off reliability for those things. My friend who worked on an Apple product in some capacity[1] was horrified at what they were doing and warned me never to get the Apple product they worked on for this reason. But I did anyways because of the shiny, and despite the fact that it did end up breaking down in the way they warned about I don't actually regret it.

[1] I'm being paranoidly vague here since they broke an NDA telling me this and Apple is renowned for being litigious about these things.

Don't act like the T6x series was perfect, they had plenty of issues too. They used cheap coils that would squeal when running on battery power. The heat sink fan is a cheap design and fails frequently. I had to replace mine 3 times with remaned ones because they don't sell them new anymore. The battery life is poor compared to MacBooks, even with the giant extended battery that sticks way off the back. Their weight (mid to upper 5 lbs) is heavy compared to rMBP and Airs.

This isn't even factoring in their performance vs newer laptops.

You've had four different products that have either melted, caught fire, or suffered hardware failures? Are you sure it's not an issue with the power coming out of your outlets? Perhaps the Lenovos have better power filtering, but by the sound of it, you're pretty paranoid about those failing, too.

The power is fine. Everything computer-wise comes off the back off a large APC UPS. Nothing but apple kit has ever failed on it.

Regarding owning two, its because I don't put all my eggs in one basket. Why buy one when you can have two for twice the cost.

Thus, apparently you should continue to use Lenovo T61s running off a UPS. Enjoy your path.

I can't help but think that the majority of comments here are the loud minority. Apple's products have had faults, I'll be the first to admit. But do we really think that even 5% of Apple's millions of customers are having issues with their purchases? If that were the case, we'd see class action lawsuits against the company, the NYTimes/WSJ covering Apple's shoddy manufacturing processes, and Apple's reputation taking an enormous hit. I've seen none of the above. To the contrary, articles covering Apple's manufacturing process, while critical of labor, seem to show a very well-managed ship, with little tolerance for errors or defects.

I'm also taken aback by the harsh tone of the comments:

"Ahh yes the unibody which is basically a fucking big short circuit, hence why mine caught fire."

"Fuck everything about this."

"it scares the shit out of me parting with that sort of cash and actually depending on it"

It's a little disappointing to see these hyperbolic comments on a site I normally associate with an educated, smart, logically-thinking group of people.

Seeing as you're picking my comments out, I'm rather passionate when it comes to this as I really don't want other people to go through the excruciating pain both mentally and financially that I have. Nor do I want people to be left totally in the mire by something which was marketed to me as a superior product.

Life is about sharing experiences and these are valid experiences, albeit bad ones.

To shy away from a warning and experience is illogical.

To pretend that your experience is anything other than an outlier, given aggregated data to the contrary, is also illogical.

Ah, so you're here to save all of us from Apple. The histrionic savior, loudly and annoyingly warning us of our impending doom while wearing a sandwich board with Apple crossed out on it.

The comments in this thread are ridiculous. Yours, I think, set a large part of the tone. Get passionate about something that matters; the purchasing habits of people you are never going to meet are not your concern, and the reasons you buy or don't buy something are very different from mine.

>"It's a little disappointing to see these hyperbolic comments on a site I normally associate with an educated, smart, logically-thinking group of people."

What's really disappointing is that there are educated, smart, logically-thinking people who refuse to believe that there is any hype behind the quality and customer service of Apple. Both are okay, but not exceptional.

I'm on my second MBA. I had the 2010 model, then traded it in for the 2011. The first model was good; never had a problem, but only owned it for a year. This latest version is having trackpad issues: I use real click, not tap-to-click. But my trackpad has become so sensitive to pressure that you can hardly rest your finger on the pad without a click registering. When doing anything more than web-browsing, it's nearly unusable, requiring me to carry a mouse around.

Now this sucks, because to me the Apple trackpad is the biggest reason for owning one of their laptops. I have Apple Care, but they seem to think that everything is fine. So I'm out of luck...until I get a new laptop. The next one can't be an Apple.

As the author writes, it's hard to understand being told you have no issue, when there is clearly a problem. And this tarnishes Apple's reputation for HIGH quality and GREAT customer service.

On the trackpad issue, has anyone checked to see if it is the laptop battery expanding, putting pressure on the trackpad from below?

It took me a little while to track that down as the cause on one of my MacBooks.

All companies have hype; entire departments devoted to marketing. And of course there are people who don't want to see flaws in items they purchase; this isn't limited to Apple, as much as its critics want to espouse the idea of a Reality Distortion field. Its a known psychological phenomena that people are less critical of things they have a financial investment in.

But it gets tiresome when HN has an article that shows one users poor experience, and then the boo-birds fly down with their cries of evil Apple. I'm sorry the gent had a poor experience, and Apple should fix/replace the screen or MBP itself.

There is a lot of troll feeding happening.

It's disappointing that even on HN people can't discuss the merits and otherwise of a range of computers without the thread being derailed by a couple of bickering commenters.

A lot of people probably don't even realize they have an issue, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.

I'm constantly amazed when I go to a friend or family member's house and they are watching SD television content scaled up on their HDTV and the aspect ratio is all fucked and they don't even notice, or worse after you show them how to fix it they want it back the old way because they don't want to "waste" parts of their screen with black bars.

Or they are running high gamut monitors uncalibrated with an obvious red-shift that is fucking up everything they are viewing and they don't even see it. Etc, etc.

Most people just aren't that perceptive about these sorts of details, but that's no reason to excuse real problems for people that are perceptive about them, especially when you're supposedly a "premium brand".

I've had the same experience with my own family. I tried to fix their tv only to get yelled at because I was wasting the space on the screen with the black bars. They'd rather see distorted faces than black bars, over saturated colors over calibrated.. there are many in HN who put faith in customer satisfaction surveys. I don't. There are way too many people who are satisfied with their shiny pile of turds for me to put credit in their happiness with a brand.

Who would trust the average customer over an issue like screen ghosting ? Even if 99% of rMBP's owners said that they had no screen issue it still wouldn't mean anything at all. Many could actually have the issue but lack the level of perception required to notice anything.

To speak about a competitor in a different market, Samsung has been pushing their amoled crap for a long time now in the smartphone sector, and it's still the most popular brand to this day. The S3 cost as much as something like the One X, except that the S3 has a screen that is dimmer, less sharp, worse, unnatural colors and worst of all, is that amoled screens tend to severely suffer from burn in over time. People still chose the S3 over the competition in the android market, no matter how cheap its body feels (flimsy plastic vs harder plastics), no matter how bad the screen is.. I could understand the choice if the S3 was cheaper than the competition, but it's not.

Historically, big issues with computers are related to the supply chain... poor vendor management for power supplies, defective batches of hard disks, etc.

Apple has a great supply chain, so they get dibs on the highest quality parts, etc. But, they are pushing the state of the art for manufacturing much more than they have in the past. End result: they are building difficult to repair computers. The $700 replacement of a previous gen MBP is now handing out a new, $2,500 computer from inventory at an Apple Store.

Warranty replacements reduce overall store margin, which is a key KPI for retail managers. So you're creating a situation where the local store management has an incentive to provide you with poor service. When people become victims of arbitrary and capricious behavior by a company they trust, they get angry.

Interesting. I've had the exact same problem, and yet what happened to me was the best customer service I've ever experienced.

I had bought a 15" retina MBP at launch, but only noticed the ghosting last month. After booking an appointment with a 'genius' online I arrived ready to argue my case. What actually happened was that the 'genius' agreed with me straight away that the ghosting was intolerable, and without doing any testing besides what I'd shown him recommended that they replace the screen. I left my MBP at the Apple Store and 3 hours later received a phone call to say that the repair had been completed and my machine was ready for collection.

I don't think there's another computer supplier that:-

A. I could book an appointment online to get my laptop looked at the same day.

B. Actually has a local store with support staff.

C. Could carry out the repair at said store, the very same day.

> Interesting. I've had the exact same problem, and yet what happened to me was the best customer service I've ever experienced.

Not all geniuses are created equal. Some of them are horrible. Some are great. It's like any other population of human beings. I've gotten both kinds.

That's nonsensical. Apple is marketing these staff as "geniuses". They're supposed to operate on a higher standard than the stereotypical brain-dead tech support; thus we should hold them to that standard.

If Apple's standards are as low as those of other companies then they really don't deserve to earn the price premium they charge.

> That's nonsensical.

Wow, I chime in with a on anecdote supporting your position, coupled with a universal truism, and you say I'm promulgating nonsense. Take a chill pill.

It wasn't my intention to come across as an ass, sorry. Your anecdote implies a deeper insight though: if the "genius" is just another standard tech support employee then Apple's use of the moniker is misplaced.

> then Apple's use of the moniker is misplaced

It's called marketing. Also, don't believe everything you read.

It's not unheard of. I've had Dell service people out to my office on the same day. I don't think Apple even offers on-site service.

Both Dell and Lenovo offer on-site service where a tech comes to you. It's an upgrade from their "standard" warranty service, but totally worth the extra $, especially if you rely on your computer.

In addition, they both have "accidental damage" with some of the higher-end warranties, so they'll cover you e.g. if you spill soda in your laptop.

More info:

Lenovo: http://www.lenovo.com/services_warranty/US/en/lenovo-warrant...

Dell: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/services/se...

And Dell often throw in the on-site support option for free for a year or so, if you buy their higher-end models

For what it's worth, Apple also offers on-site with AppleCare.

And then in the cases for certain quality programs, such as the iMac hard drive replacement [1], they will do on-site even if you don't have AppleCare and/or are out of your 1 year warranty.

[1]: http://www.apple.com/au/support/imac-harddrive/

Lenovo's service and support is superb. I have had screen repairs from both Lenovo and Apple this year, and Lenovo completely impressed me with their speed, courtesy, and follow through-- they sent a repairman to my office with a brand new screen, all fully covered by warranty.

My dad broke the screen on his work Dell laptop. Entirely his fault. He called up Dell and they said they'd send a tech to his office to replace the screen. My dad said he was working from home that day and Dell said fair enough and sent the tech to his house. He had the screen fixed later that afternoon.

Now obviously I'm sure my dad's company pays handsomely for that service, but my point is that many companies do a lot better than Apple if you're willing to pay for it.

UK or US? OP is in UK. Might be a significant fact, sadly.

I'm also in the UK. It was the Apple Store in Newcastle.

Then, Sir, you are blessed.

Fuck everything about this. I had two screen replaced, luckily before Apple came up with this idiotic test. On the second replacement I lucked out and got a Samsung screen that doesn’t have the issue. But that they still have not solved that problem that is plain as day fucking sucks! What is wrong with those idiots?! Why do they do stuff like that? It makes my blood boil.

Apple, fuck you! Why do you do this to your customers? Why do you torture them like that? Still!

I really believed that by now you would have solved that problem. After I got my Samsung screen I honestly stopped reading the forums because it brought down my mood. To know hear – months later – that they still haven’t solved the issue in any real way makes me just angry and sad.

This is not excusable. Excuses about this being a first gen product are obviously not valid. If you can’t sell it in a satisfactory manner, you have to give your customers their money back (or give them Samsung screen which are, unlike LG screens, not affected by the issue).

You sound like an addict.

Excuse me?

Still using/caring about their hardware even after they disappointed you so badly.

If not for this issue, the rMBP would be the best laptop for me personally by miles and miles. Of course I care! No one else makes products that get me but Apple, so this disappointment weighs extra heavy.

I'm exploring alternatives, but that is years out.

I can totally understand that. For example, the Nexus 4 looks like the perfect phone for me, if only it wasn't so ridiculously large. I'm still going to try to get it when they (hopefully) restock in the UK.

I upvoted it because it reflects my current feelings for apple. I've been waiting for a DUNS number for 40 days now, I feel like arrrrg :D

With all due respect, you have to keep in mind that Apple is producing millions of units and, for its own sake, can't be beholden to a single supplier. If they were, that supplier would have enormous leverage ("pay us $5b now, or we will stop shipping you screens for your flagship laptop."). Aside from that, they'd also be susceptible to production issues - imagine if Samsung's factory had a fire/flood/hurricane and had to stop production. Supply chain management at Apple's scale is unbelievably hard. It's certainly not excusable for the issues you're encountering, but from what I've seen / heard, Apple has a top notch supply chain management team pretty much unrivaled by any other company.

I'm sure Apple would be happy to refund you. If the Apple store won't help, try shooting an email to tcook@.

My rMBP works now because I have a Samsung screen.

If they can’t reliably make a laptop without it being defect they can’t sell it. Make a recall and stop selling rMBPs until you nail the issue down. Problem solved. Wimping out with lame excuses is not the way to go.

You have absolutely no concept of the difference between "leverage" and "extortion", the latter of which is exactly what you described. Last I checked, not only is extorting your customers bad for business, it's probably illegal. That being said, I'm going to dare throw an anti-Apple comment in here: after all the BS Apple's pulled in the past few years, I'm sure most people in the world wouldn't blink twice if Samsung did try to pull something like that (how would you feel if one of your clients tried to sue you?). Fortunately, I think Samsung is smart enough to not pull a stunt like that.

And for what it's worth - "[...] Supply chain management at Apple's scale is unbelievably hard." How do you think Samsung feels?

" How do you think Samsung feels?"

Samsung feels fine. They're making billions.

Oh by the way, Samsung deserves everything they get from Apple. Since Samsung has been down this road before; TV, business phones - it's a long list of products Samsung copied, dumps onto the market and then hides behinds it's "culture". Meanwhile Samsung now has carved a foot hold in your market. Effective strategy. And it's worked for them for years.

What I find funny is that it all goes around. Cause now Samsung is being copied by cheap Chinese knock-offs. Who are flooding the Chinese market.

The BS? Samsung copied their work...

I'm sorry, but down opting this doesn't change the facts. Neither does portraying Samsung as an entirely innocent and hard-done-by party. They screwed their own pooch.

> Supply chain management at Apple's scale is unbelievably hard. It's certainly not excusable for the issues you're encountering, but from what I've seen / heard, Apple has a top notch supply chain management team pretty much unrivaled by any other company.

Who was it at Apple who said, after you reach a certain level, there are no more excuses?

> Fuck everything about this. I had two screen replaced, luckily before Apple came up with this idiotic test.

The cost of those two replacements is probably why they came out with this test.

> But that they still have not solved that problem that is plain as day fucking sucks!

Considering that they have billed the Retina MBP as something to be used by designers and content creators, they shouldn't limit things to an arbitrary test. If the problem is perceived as a problem and can be consistently detected, double blind, then it should be replaced, period.

Had this happen to my Retina MacBook Pro too. Went to the Apple store and after some pleading was able to get them to place an order for a new one. Two weeks of glazing over staring at ghosts later I go to pick it up. They upgraded the replacement to the largest size SSD for free! It was all down hill after that.

I had to transfer my data from the lemon. The Geniuses on staff were clearly unfamiliar with some of the quirks of Migration Assistant. I offered to do the migration myself if they gave me a Thunderbolt cable. That ends up forcing me to spend another hour in the store, which of course I use to check for signs of ghosting on the new machine.

I run the following command:

  ioreg -lw0 | grep \"EDID\" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6

Like the lemon, the new one is an LG panel as well. Word on the forums is that only the LG panels have the ghosting issue. I ask the Genius if I can swap once more before leaving the store. He says no. I head home anxiously, hoping my screen is pure.

Nope. While it is still one of the best computers I have ever used, it is just unacceptable to be gambling $4000 for hardware I rely on. I will be trying for another exchange soon because there is really no other option, but the standards for "it just works" have noticeably slipped across the company.

I don't want this question to sound loaded and threaded with negative connotations for/against apple but why would you label the computer as "one of the best I have ever used" if one of the primary interfaces to the user is repeatedly faulty?

I'm not a Mac user. My work and personal desires drive me towards Windows/Linux and I would have foregone any manufacturer that pulled that type of behavior on me (as I have with numerous retailers already). Sort of a "fool me once" type scenario as I see it.

> I don't want this question to sound loaded and threaded with negative connotations for/against apple but why would you label the computer as "one of the best I have ever used" if one of the primary interfaces to the user is repeatedly faulty?

Because mac users tend to put the weight and thinness of the machine over anything else and since the rMBP is the thinnest and lightest 15" laptop it makes it the "best". Hell, Apple is doing the "thin/small and light" thing even with their "desktop" machines like the iMac and Mac Mini.

Mac and PC users just have different set of priorities. I used to own macs but I fully went back to the PC because being able to handle repairs myself in a timely manner is much more important than the niceties of OS X for me, particularly with desktop machines. The mac mini is not good enough for me, and the iMac is exactly what I don't want, if anything fails in the computer I want to be able to replace the part in five minutes and be done with it. That and the fact that the screen tends to outlive my computers in usefulness, I replace them less often than the parts of my desktop PC so buying a computer attached to the screen feels offensive to me.

The Mac Pro could've been an alternative but.. 2600 euros for a computer that is outdated in every single way out of the box is not attractive. Its GPU used to be a mid-range gamer card, used to, because it's not even mid-range in 2012, it's low end. If you build your own computer a GPU with that kind of performance will cost about ~100 to 150 euros, which is not acceptable for a 2600 eur computer. The rest (cpu, ram) is decent but still doesn't really warrant the price tag. It was good when it first launched.. that's about it.

Good question - it is something I regularly wrestle with myself as I evaluate the various hardware and software options out there. In the end though, it always is a matter of tradeoffs based on your personal value system.

For the past few years, the most valuable property that I have tried to maximize when pitting multiple hardware offerings against each other is time. For other people it may be money, gaming performance, or other intrinsic values such as freedom.

For me, buying the latest Apple hardware as default has become the easiest way to maximize time: I do not need to perform exhaustive research across the market, the shopping experience is smooth, support is same day and local, the resale value is high and selling is easy, the hardware supports the tools I have built my current workflow around (a UNIX command line, emacs shortcuts system-wide, Xcode for iOS development, Photoshop, etc.), and configuration and backup is simple (iTunes, Migration Assistant, Time Machine, and iCloud for a limited scope of data).

Now obviously a lot of this is a result of vendor lock-in, which I try to remain vigilant about. How did I get fooled into being locked in?

It is simply a result of a string of great experiences early on in my dealings with the company. All companies provide varying levels of experience across their lineup of products and services. In my opinion, Apple manages to have more peaks in more fields that matter to me. The early positive experiences in areas that resonate deeply with me, built a great deal of respect and trust in the people who create things at Apple, earning them the spot as my default hardware

Regarding the Retina MacBook Pro product specifically: it is still "one of the best [computers] I have ever used" because it hits peaks in many right spots. The performance, portability, keyboard and trackpad, how it fits in my backpack and on my desk, design, ecosystem, and OS X are all positives for me. What I believe to be low points (Wi-Fi issues, video card performance in certain situations, Mission Control, the annoying MagSafe 2 adapter, iPhoto woes, etc.), are tradeoffs I am willing to make.

The "ghosting" is the one point I cannot concede. I work with pixels and color too much to let it slide. Thus far, Apple has offered me one replacement, with a free SSD update thrown in. I consider that great support, but poor quality control.

This is an interesting tradeoff because of how the two fields are closely related. Poor quality control necessitates good support. Whether that support is good enough (or the quality control poor enough) for me to continue leaving Apple's hardware as my default depends on whether they offer me another replacement, and whether that one is satisfactory.

Times change though. Open hardware and software is more important to me than ever. We must all be able to tune the properties of our hardware and software to our liking, without sacrificing the state of the art.

Antenna causing problems? "You're holding it wrong."

Camera artifacts? "You're holding it wrong." [1]

Burn-in? "Does not compute."

Scruffing on the iPhone 5 [2]? People don't even bother to write about it. Same for the poor performance on Retina devices. Unless you're someone like Anandtech who are so meticulous many don't bother to read the fint print.

Maybe it's time we got some Apple-specific buyer's guides from people who don't grade on a curve. I still want to buy Apple products (not first-edition versions, though), but I want to know what I'm in for.

[1]: http://gizmodo.com/5947972/apple-acknowledges-iphone-5-camer...

[2]: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/17/hon-hais-explanation-...

Why is it people get all frothing at the mouth angry about Apple's mistakes when they just shrug indifferently the mis-steps of other companies?

I haven't heard people losing their shit because their $4,000 Sony laptop webcam isn't as amazing as Sony promised.

Temper tantrums only feel good if people are watching you.

This is a good point.

Few people complain about Sony laptops because few people buy them.

Because they've been told that they're paying a premium for Apple products because they'll have a better experience.

In other words: Apple is held to a higher standard. (Or Apple purport to hold themselves to a higher standard.)

Are you seriously saying you've never heard any of the voluminous complaints about Dell over the years?

If you're talking about small-time bitching in forums, then probably, but when's the last time someone's blog post about a defect on their Dell is considered newsworthy?

Apple's successes and failures often make the news. How is that the fault of anyone frothing about their complaint?

> As a loyal customer of apple for almost 11 years (iMac G4) my loyalty has been shaken.

I really hate bloggers that do shit like this. Apple isn't an airline so bringing up your Apple mileage isn't helping. Really, 11 years and this one problem shakes your loyalty? Not their DRM, custom screws, custom cables, EOLing still powerful Macbooks, making free services paid (iTools), or the $1000 price bump when they introduced the G5 towers.

I've been an Apple user for years (20+) and I have no loyalty to them whatsoever. Their products work for me and as long as they continue to work I'll continue to buy them. Also, a real Apple user would know to never buy a new version of their products. v1 is usually full of design and technical flaws. And each genius is different, keep asking or try another store until you get the satisfaction you demand. Apple Geniuses are given a surprising amount of latitude (more than most tech retail) so if you can convince just one it's a problem than for Apple it's a problem.

The goal is to show you don't already have a problem with the company in question. So, the issue must be really annoying.

True, and if the blogger doesn't have that disclaimer, he will be dismissed as an Apple hater making a big fuss about nothing. The funny thing is that even with that disclaimer, some are still accusing him of nitpicking on Apple for page hits.

The issue is annoying to him because he should have known better. Apple always does A/B testing on their v1 products. Early MB Airs came with SSDs from 2 different suppliers, iPhone 3G came with glass from Corning and a few other suppliers. He has the write to complain and I hope he gets a solution, but the writing is just so damn...smug.

I had a similar dance with Apple tech staff. I took in a 27" iMac which had a faulty video card fan which made a horrible high pitched whine at low brightness settings.

First visit they couldn't hear it (in loud store environment..), I was sent home. Second visit they agreed to take it in for testing - returned with a chipped display, scratched glass and a report that the problem didn't exist.

Finally gave up with them and called Apple USA direct (from UK), complained to anyone who would listen. Was advised to take into a 3rd party repair supplier to confirm the problem existed. I went in with an audio spectrometer to visualise the problem, had a new iMac shipped the next day.

It's hard to accept that they're no longer the specialist hardware supplier who treats every customer exceptionally well. Now we're just being farmed like any customer.

Going hackintosh/linux for all future machines.

It's hard to accept that they're no longer the specialist hardware supplier who treats every customer exceptionally well. Now we're just being farmed like any customer.

Why is this surprising? This is what you generally have to do when servicing the general public - Apple is no longer the niche specialist, but the gorilla.

If the whine correlated with what's displayed on the screen, for example, during mouse movement or when displaying high FPS content (you having said it was brightness related has me making this assumption), I think it was not the fan, but the so called "coil whine" which seems to be more apparent on ATI cards. On my desktop 7970 it's quite annoying, but considered normal. People fix it by applying nail polish on certain parts, but I'd rather play with headphones than mess up my 500 GBP kit in such a stupid way. I haven't had an nvidia whine on me, I assume all iMacs are equipped with ATIs now.

Apple haters have really come out of the woodwork today.

The fact of the matter is that every first-gen product has had and will have issues regardless of the manufacturer. Apple just gets a lot of flak because they manufacture some of the best products out there and are very vocal about it. So the moment they make a slip, they get stoned by haters who were waiting in ambush.

I, too, have had some bad experiences with a few Apple products I've owned. My first iPad had two dead pixels, and my first MBA had a keyboard key not work intermittently. The staff at the Apple Store next to my campus were absolute retards about both issues. Instead of writing an angry blog post about it, you know what I did? I took my defective items to another Apple store, where they got fixed/replaced immediately.

Then again, I'm a practical person and am generally more interested in getting shit done. I understand some people are more interested in raising a ruckus for attention.

The post has nothing to do with the fact that the screen was broken. Read it again.

The fact of the matter is that every first-gen product has had and will have issues regardless of the manufacturer.

Not just first-gen. My second generation iPad has the same problem.

And you somehow think you're a superior human being for not having 'made a ruckus' about it and going to another Apple store to fix your problem. Do you realize that by doing that you not only kept them being retard, but also promoted the culture that nothing happens to you when you act like that to your customers. You are actually paying for the most convenient service, but when you don't get it, you don't raise your voice and let the world be an ugly place. What if even the second store people were retards? You'd go to a third one (possibly in another city) right?

I thought Apple got this concept but PR is more than just spinning half-truths on TV to make the company look good. The highest calling of PR is the ability to say "it will cost more than we made selling this thing to fix it, but we need to do it anyway."

Companies that care about their reputations have guys like that head their PR departments and listen to them when they say this.

Frankly, you expect this kind of behavior from companies that are costing on autopilot with no one willing to take responsibility for anything at the helm. It is surprising to see it from Apple.

I have a Retina MacBook Pro with the same issue. It has really soured me to Macs (which I've used literally all my life). You know if this has happened to one of their more high-profile products (one that begins with an "i" and fits in your hand), it wouldn't fly. But Apple haven't had much pride in their Macs for years now, and have let really bad design flaws like this go unfixed.

Sometimes you can fix it yourself by running an animation with only 3 frames: one red, one green and one blue. Let it run all night if possible. It once fixed my Dell monitor with (as they called it) "lazy pixels".

I thought that running that animation will fix stuck pixels, not cure ghosting.

My wife and I both own retina Macbook Pros and, luck would have it, I got one with a Samsung display and she got one with an LG display which exhibits the ghosting issue. She had mentioned it to me in passing before, but after reading this post I talked to her about it again and low and behold, the ghosting effect was very visible in her open Emacs buffers!

So, irrationally empowered with the spirit of a wronged consumer thanks to this post, I immediately called Apple up and told them the issue.

They're sending a box in the mail next day for us to send the laptop in for a screen replacement, free of charge of course because it's under warranty.

All in all, it was a pretty painless customer service experience. I think it took all of five minutes, no exaggeration. There weren't really any questions asked, aside from "Where do you want us to send the box?". We've already ordered a temporary replacement computer for her while it's out for repair so she won't miss out on any work.

I bought the Macbook Pro retina back over the summer and was a little upset when a small dead pixel cluster appeared on the display after about a month of use.

I brought it back to the apple store (i did not purchase applecare). I was told that this was happening in about 1 our of every 40 MBP retinas and they happily replaced the display in less than 24 hours.

I'm not implying that my situation is "unique/new/ particularly note-worthy" but it is just as antidotal as yours and ended with a positive outcome.

our designer had the same problem: after 2 weeks of usage some dead pixels appeared right in the middle of the retina display. unfortunatly in austria we don't have a apple store - just resellers. he was told that he should try to send it back but that there is a tolerance of pixels that are allowed to be dead, so actually those few dead pixels are tolerable. he decided to send it back anyway, i wonder what will happen...

I was an Apple certified repair technician for three years until 2010 and the ghosting issue is very real, I saw it on several displays. The best thing is to just keep calling them/going to an Apple store until they fix it for free. I agree that their customer service could use some work in this department.

My four-month-old rMBP's screen failed last week and now I'm staring at replacing it out-of-pocket, or never using it as a portable machine again and leaving it hooked up to an external monitor. I'm so unhappy with Apple right now.

EDIT: I couldn't find the default warranty (sans AppleCare) and based this comment off of other similar situations (including OP). I found out this morning that it IS COVERED by the default warranty, so I'm not unhappy anymore. This is my bad.

I thought MacBooks came with a one-year warranty. Does it not cover the display or something?

2 years in Europe.

Not in the UK though.

UK is no different from the rest of Europe. 2 years - Apple just don't make it obvious.

http://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/

It has a 1 year warranty. Use it. You can also buy AppleCare any time during the first year of ownership if you decide you want a warranty longer than one year.

Why can't you get it fixed under warranty?

I have the same issue on my rMBP, and while I wish it didn't happen, I still quite like the laptop. It's not a constant thing and it hasn't interfered at all with my ability to see what's supposed to be on the screen.

As this article pertains to screen issues how about we discuss this a little bit rather than engaging in senseless rants?

The "ghosting" issue the article highlights is a known problem with certain types of LCD screens. With a caveat I'll say that LG LCD panels are known for these kinds of issues much more so than Samsung's. The caveat is that ALL OEM LCD manufacturers have issues, all of them.

The other very important idea to understand is that Apple is just another OEM customer. Yes, they are huge. And, yes, they get stuff made to their specs. But, no, they can't alter the laws of physics or magically change the current state of the art. The same is true of the warts and issues in the various technologies they use.

For example, someone mentioned Apple notebooks flaming. Well, I fly radio controlled planes and helicopters. They use LiPo battery packs. And you can bet they are stored in a metal container within fireproof bags and away from combustibles. Yes, LiPo battery cells can self-combust. This is not a secret. This is one reason I don't own any laptops with non-removable LiPo packs.

How common are LiPo fires? How easy are they to start?

They are very rare. If you go on YouTube you'd think that every other home is going up in flames due to LiPo fires. Not so. I actually blew-up a LiPo pack on purpose just to see what it would take and how big the fire might be. It actually took a lot for this three cell pack to go.

Is Apple at fault for adopting a technology that has a minuscule probability of causing a fire? I'll leave that for someone else to answer. I am not really bothered by it. That said, I made my informed choice and simply don't buy laptops with non-removable LiPo packs.

Back to displays.

LG can have ghosting or image retention problems. Fire-up photoshop and make a pattern of black and white lines one pixel wide. Try horizontal and vertical arrangements. Try flashing that pattern on an off at different rates. This can trigger the issue depending on the underlying LCD technology. Are these tests fair? Not sure.

Also, keep in mind that the test Apple is administering might come from the OEM panel manufacturer. In other words, this is what the manufacturer agreed to deliver to Apple as a performance guarantee.

LG also has had some serious display discoloration issues. The early 23 inch aluminum Cinema display had a batch of horribly pink/magenta panels. Again, LG quality control problems.

Samsung has had discoloration problems but they tend to be pretty good about image retention issues.

An interesting fact is that an LCD pixel is able to retain a "charge" --if you will-- for a very long time. I've seen an LCD panel hold a full-color image for over a day after power was removed. This panel had been modified for this particular experiment in that all drive electronics were removed very quickly after power was removed. In other words, it was just a piece of "glass" sitting in front of a separately-powered light source. Very interesting stuff.

I am not making excuses for Apple. If you pay that much for a laptop you want it to be perfect. I get it. I also get that it just won't happen. Too many moving parts.

Here's a reality of consumer product engineering today:

Companies (not just Apple, everyone) have to move very quickly. Nobody is going to have the time to test all corner cases for every component they use. Even if they did, they can't account for all corner cases. And, if you run a supply and manufacturing pipeline like Apple's, by the time the components arrive at the factory there's almost nothing you can do about it. So, yes, 100K "defective" displays might go out the door in the blink of an eye. And, another 100K might go out before you can even start to do anything about it. Component suppliers can shaft you and, frankly, the Korean LCD manufacturers are famous for this. Just talk to anyone in the OEM display business, it's brutal.

Given that, I can only imagine that at some level it becomes a carefully considered financial decision. I hate to say it, but it isn't any different from a car manufacturer discovering that 0.01% of break pedals might be defective. They probably have a meeting with the lawyers and the accountants, review their insurance and determine what course of action to take. Sometimes that's the reality of business.

I am not saying that this is what Apple is doing. I am just speaking in terms of general scenarios. I would suggest that when dealing with a large organization like Apple patience and persistence is the key. Keep at it. I think Apple, of all companies, still cares a lot. It might be harder today due to the sheer scale of the company, but if you don't loose faith you might just get to the right person and have your problem handled.

So what is the point of paying the Apple premium if they are just the same as everybody else ?

I think the fact that it is possible, it should not be the norm. As you can see in the article, the problem is not that he got a defective Monitor, is the fact that Apple is trying to avoid replacing it.

If I buy the best, I expect the best. When I buy an Apple product, just like the author, I expect to get the best. If it is defective, I expect Apple to exchange it.

We, humans, are not perfect. I think we all get that. But we do expect to get problems fixed and right away. Apple is the top dog right now in hardware, if not even them respond to problems in a timely fashion and in the right way, then yes, Apple is the same as the rest.

I don't think that Apple is just like the rest. In fact I expect a lo more from them.

In the Retina macbook's case, the premium seems worth paying because no one else has a laptop with comparable hardware. It seems like the Nexus line has similar dpi as the retina iPads, though, so hopefully this is simply a case of Apple having it first, and everyone else will have it in the next year or so.

I understand, but if the monitor fails, it ends up being worse than the rest don't you think? I get the author's feelings. He spent the money on a new laptop, that is sold with the idea that just works and that if it doesn't it will made to.

Also, there is a premium above the premium with a retina display. You get the same laptop than an basic MBP for 400 dlls more.

"I get the author's feelings."

No matter how good your customer service is there will always be people that feel just as aggrieved as the author because they fell just short of the standard for replacement.

Maybe Apple is completely falling apart and This Would Never Happen With Steve(TM)... or maybe we've seen this movie many times before. For years it was the Guy with One Bad Pixel when the standard for replacement was two but he always swore on the forums that it was Right In the Middle.

I agree. No matter how good you are you can never please everybody. And for the record I personally don't think Apple is falling apart.

The problem I see is simple to identify, and in the position Apple is in right now, it is difficult to remediate.

It is a problem of scale. I think Apple is growing too much too fast, and it is struggling to scale their operations. I obviously could be wrong since I am not an insider, but it seems that is the case.

> So what is the point of paying the Apple premium if they are just the same as everybody else ?

OS X and increased quality of some (not all) hardware. And they do have better customer support on average.

OS X is not that amazing to pay for a premium. I also use Linux, and they are pretty good as well.

Hardware-wise, they are great as long as they can honor the warranty. If I get a defective machine (like in this case) and I had to pay a higher price for a defective hardware, that doesn't make it ok.

Apple is not about better products. It is about better execution of those products. I pay the premium because of Apple's execution.

Agreed, customer support is better on average, but not that much; not enough to justify the premium.

The premium is worth it because of the overall execution of the company. I pay more, but I get an implicit insurance that everything will just work.

One of my co-workers had the same problem OP posted about. He was really excited about the Retina screen, but as compared to every other LCD he's been using for the last 5+ years, it had a significantly worse ghosting issues. In the end, after at least one display swap, Apple let him swap it out for a comparable non-retina Macbook Pro. Problem went away. I think they did good in not telling him his only option was to pay for a screen replacement, but I know he would have been far happier if he could have ended up with one of the Retina models minus the ghosting issue.

So, I don't think those first retina monitors were within the reasonable limitations of LCD technology unless this was somehow specific to the ultra high resolution displays which are relatively new. If they figured out how to fix it in a later iteration, they should pick up the slack and offer to replace the monitors with ones that don't have that issue. The ONE selling point of that computer over any other Macbook Pro is the display. For that reason, they should put every effort into ensuring that it is good as it can possibly be for anyone that pays for it, no matter the cost.

> For that reason, they should put every effort into ensuring that it is good as it can possibly be for anyone that pays for it, no matter the cost.

Every effort? No matter the cost?

They still have to run a business, I'm afraid... though the other possibility you didn't mention (but could be implied) is that they could have waited a little longer before releasing the retina displays.

I don't see tech news sites swamped with articles about the disastrous retina ghosting issues, though... so perhaps most users agree with Apple's decision. I certainly see the business reasons for it (though I was buying a MBA for my wife soon after the new retina display was released, and intentionally got the older model to avoid the first release of new tech...).

So the real test is whether Apple is still buying these known-"bad" LG panels. Anybody got a recently-manufactured rMBP with LG in it?

I think you are defending the quality of a companies products by passing blame to it's suppliers. Apple chose it's suppliers, decided the product met their standards and shipped it.

I've got 3 computers in front of me now. An 11" air, 26" iMac and 12.5 Lenovo. None of the screens have ghosting issues, I'm sure some of the screens are produced by LG or Samsung. None are retinal displays, but that was Apple's decision to sell retina MBPs. If the quality wasn't there, they should have made the decision to tell the suppliers that they needed to meet xyz standards, and not manufacture the devices until that time.

Selling a sub-par product and then trying to pass the blame on to suppliers doesn't make your product any less-sub-par, and does just as much to ruin your companies reputation.

Not defending anyone. Just explaining one possible reality of a supply and manufacturing pipeline that moves that fast.

"I am not making excuses for Apple. If you pay that much for a laptop you want it to be perfect. I get it. I also get that it just won't happen. Too many moving parts."

I'd agree if this were, say, the SD card reader or maybe the keyboard backlight. But it's the fucking display. The very thing customers are paying a premium for is the thing that's unusable on their overpriced laptops.

Apple seems to have pulled back on the whole positive customer experience in store this year, I've had issues with marking below the display surface and they instantly said "not a defect, £350 please", except it looks like the tolerance on my Air is off. It's a shame, they're starting to reduce customer satisfaction in maximisation of profits, rather than increasing profits through customer satisfaction.

Maybe it has to do with the new guy who was summarily booted from the company in a year? One can hope that Cook is course-correcting.

Don't know why you're getting down voted, it's very possible that his effect is still being felt.

I have the Macbook Pro that keeps making a constant white noise right after the machine boots up. The sound is loud enough when I am by myself that it totally distracts me. I have had 3 mac laptops before and this is the loudest one by bar. After I compared my machine with a close friend who has an exact machine (same late October last year generation), I realized that the machine had some issues.

I took it to the apple store. They said they tested it and could not "hear" the noise. So they wouldn't do anything about it. Yet when I put my macbook pro next to any laptop, everyone can tell my laptop is the loudest.

I have become one of their disappointed customers.

When I went to have it looked at, the Apple store employee was fairly sympathetic even though it failed the test (he told me that people do fail it, but that more often than not it's just below the threshold). He told me to keep trying the test at the store until it fails. Whether other Apple store employees will be as sympathetic, I don't know.

Is corporate trying to sweep it under the rug? Maybe. But this is a costly repair for a part that is in incredibly high demand. It's not right and I'm frustrated about it, but I'm not surprised.

The reaction expected from you is rage, and not frustration and helplessness. I don't know of any other company that would kick its customers in the nuts and that too the early adopters.

Remember that apple sells millions of these things and we are <200 commenters on a website filled with edge case power users.

Odds are that a good amount of buyers either don't care or haven't noticed the problem. It's not kicking their customers in the nuts. They poorly structured the evaluation method to set a threshold for repair and are having to backtrack and fix an expensive quality control mistake.

They're not kicking me in the nuts. They're a company of humans that has to deal with a problem in a way that satisfies their suppliers, shareholders, and engineers. I've found greater success in approaching problems like this with rationality. With lots of noise, maybe the test will change (only 30 seconds on the grey screen will make a metric shit-ton of the units qualify for replacement).

If the customers start sympathizing like that then they're going to stop listening to us and only act according to the other constraints you mentioned. If i go and buy a Pro Retina, the screen is the last thing i want trouble with, and if they fail in ensuring that it works, they should just replace it. Period. I don't give a damn about thresholds and whether im being 'reasonable' in whining or not. Maybe it's just me i want the best when i pay for it. Screw the shareholders and suppliers.

Yeah, screw the suppliers that get you the screen you want.

Have some common sense.

Really, I've found the case to be just the opposite. I have a friend who had a 15" MBP, prob circa 2009. He kept complaining that a pixel would be missing on the screen on occassion. He tried to point it out to me, but it's something I never noticed. He took it to the Apple store multiple times, and they said they fixed it, but nothing was ever changed according to him. Finally, when he took it back one final time, they just replaced it with the newest 15" MBP available at the time. I was a bit surprised.

This is very problematic and disconcerting. However, I feel like the true reason that this gentleman is upset that he was disillusioned after his pristine opinion of Apple was ruined. That Apple would "take care" of him. This is not the case.

Apple doesn't give the most perfunctory shit about you or your problems. The Genius Bar exists to serve purposes: to attract possible customers and to pacify people with broken products. They don't care about you personally. They do not care about your screen. They're a corporation and they care exclusively about money. They pursue this desire through standardization and implementation of bureaucracy.

It sounded like the guy did the requisite test and in doing so upheld their obligation. Evidently, the test wasn't sufficient. That sucks, but Apple is not obligated to, nor are they willing to give to you, the benefit of the doubt.

I'm sorry that you had to go through such an absurd tribulation, but Apple did not attempt to personally screw you.

Apple is unequivocally in the wrong here, but butting such prodigious trust in a huge corporation makes you predisposed to come out of stuff like this inordinately contemptuous.

I used to work in AppleCare and would advise OP to simply try again with a different genius/agent. Apple will set some guidelines but ultimately it was up to the agent's discretion. I was there for antenna-gate and almost always tried to make the customer satisfied- although I would have to run through the tests to protect myself.

Its a bureaucracy like anything else, some are more susceptible to empathy.

I had the same problem with a rMBP. Apple replaced mine at the Apple Store even though I couldn't show them the problem while I was there. They even gave me the extra charging brick that came in the new machine's box.

I have a friend with a base model rMBP who took it into the Apple Store, and they replaced his with the maxed out model because that's the only configuration they had left in stock.

"I have a friend with a base model rMBP who took it into the Apple Store, and they replaced his with the maxed out model because that's the only configuration they had left in stock."

That surprised me - I was looking at an MBP purchase at an Apple Store (fairly large one, Tacoma WA).

My options were only 4GB and various sizes of HDDs.

They "did not" stock 8GB models, or SSD models. Not "were out of", but did not.

They offered to install more memory, but at the (already extortionate Apple price) cost of the full 8GB (and give me 4GB back).

I ended up buying a Vaio Z, and have been fantastically happy with it: Carbon Fiber body, 13" 2.5lb, with a better processor (Core i7 3612), better screen (1920x1080), better graphics, and 8GB of memory. Oh, and it was cheaper.

I'm curious: do you use Linux on your Z-series? If so, how is it? Can you get the power dock thing to work?

Linux itself works fine - I installed Ubuntu 12.04 for a while, but am now back with Windows 8. To be honest, I never tried the power dock - at home I use my desktop, and only use my laptop away from the desk.

> They "did not" stock 8GB models, or SSD models. Not "were out of", but did not.

This is a Retina MacBook Pro, not the "traditional" MacBook Pros with the optical drive. All Retina MacBook Pros have SSDs, so I'm not sure what models you were looking at. In any event, Apple does carry the fully maxed out Retina MacBook Pro in the stores. I know because I bought one myself.

This was approximately two months prior to the rMBP release.

I have no doubt that varying stores have different stock policies, but at the fairly large store I was at, it was suggested I order online.

"The second mouse gets the cheese." - Since my iBook died multiple deaths via its BPGA socket, I've learned to buy rev. 2 or rev. 3 products for all my Apple purchases, when possible. It's consistent with my experience in avoiding x.0 software releases. It's really cool when a company treads new ground, but if you need reliability, it's best to let others test the first round.

I've learned to buy rev. 2 or rev. 3 products for all my Apple purchases, when possible

It's not just Apple products. A few years ago, I bought the first model year of a new car. That's not something I'll ever do again.

Yep. Toyota seems to release their Corollas in three year design cycles. I wonder what the distribution of 300 kilomile Corollas is across those years. My guess is that the 300 kilomile population is highest for the rev. 3 cars.

While I totally agree that Apple is handling this situation poorly, I'm even more worried about the lack of competition. Which of Apple's competitors offers better service? I can't think of one. Lenovo, HP, Dell? While I'd love Apple to be more generous, in a similar situation, in my experience, you're more likely to get left out to dry with any of their competitors.

I think there is two problems with Apple in this case.

1. The Services Level shown is subpar compared to what it is in US. Most of the time we see good services, free exchanges and repaired are actually stories in US. Outside US customers are treated like a second class citizen.

2. The guy bought AppleCare for Christ Sake. Why not just replace it when it is a known issues with LG display type.

I think this has been The Apple Product Cycle for ages.

1) Random problem appears on 1st iteration product 2) Some are lucky and get it repaired, some are not. 3) Lots of petitions and screaming in forums 4) Apple silently changes their policy and gives some kind of extended warranty or replacement (optional)

It's absolutely something Apple should improve, but it's certainly not new.

Are there historical contexts for comparing 1) the failure rate of Apple laptops, particularly first gen and 2) the response to these hardware failures?

I'm curious if this is something more widespread or if the author got unlucky and has simply suffered for the first time what many others have suffered previously.

So you're front page Hacker News. Why not put together a poll of people with similar issues and file a joint complaint? You purchased an expensive machine, I'd imagine anyone similarly experiencing the issue would be willing to put in some effort to get a bit more attention drawn to it.

My coworker's display retina has the same ghosting problem and it looks pretty bad. I know I would be very annoyed if mine had ghosting. I would love to use a non-mac version of a laptop with a 2560px+ display, but I'm not aware if one exists.

How are you performing this test? Are you creating an application with a plain grey window and running it?

I think this could be an OS issue/graphics driver issue. I sometimes notice things "behind" my dark grey Xcode editor window - like for example, I can see this website in Safari behind Xcode. However, sometimes, I see stuff that isn't directly behind Xcode - but it is in another Space.

If the hardware test is succeeding, and you are only seeing "ghosting" on particularly colored windows, I think it is safe to say it may not be the display. (It still may be the display. I'm just saying there are more variables here, and I don't have all of your information.)

It's the display.

If it were a software problem Apple would probably not be replacing any screens at all or even performing a screen test.

The moral of the story? Hope that your Apple computer ships with Samsung components so you get a better display and a faster SSD.

You can dodge the SSD problem by buying a laptop with some specific SSD sizes. I did the same to dodge the issue, but I can't remember which worked. Anandtech has it covered, though.

It's not just Apple. It's all companies. When was the last time you tried to repair your washing machine under the warranty? Good luck.

And it's software too. I can't remember the last time I installed a piece of software that wasn't filled with bugs. Some of them just glaring. Companies mantra, "Oh we'll fix that in an update". Six months down the road. Meanwhile they already have my money. This especially true with games.

It's the way we do business now. "Sell now! Report earnings now!" And worry about the rest later.

I mean who cares if out of 25 million customers 15,000 have bad monitors. Just make sure none of them write for the New York Times. :)

But others are not charging huge amounts on the much touted "Apple Care".

"others are not charging huge amounts"

This is completely false.

Best experience I had recently was to repair a 3 month old Lenovo laptop under warranty. At purchase I'd stumped up the $50 dollars or so for onsite service. So within a few days of the call I had an IBM technician turn up at my workplace and swap out its motherboard, no questions asked.

If my history with Apple support is any guide, good luck. My first Macbook Pro:

- Laptop starts dying hard with >20% battery remaining 16 weeks or so after purchase

- Get a replacement battery free due to recall - Replacement battery has same problem, turns out the replacement batteries have also been recalled! Lucky me.

- Get a third replacement battery

- Third replacement battery has the exact same problem. Contact Apple for warranty replacement.

- Apple's classy solution: tough shit. All the replacement batteries only have a 90-day warranty. This of course is a replacement for a battery which has a problem where failure occurs around 120 days.

I like how you start off by saying "My first Macbook Pro", which implies you have purchased more since this initial issue?

What can I say? They're the worst laptops, except for all the others.

Seriously though, the second one has been a champion and I've used it for four years straight without a hiccup. It's a wash--I don't recommend Apple hardware for everyone, but I still prefer it myself.

Wow. I would have dumped it and never used them again.

I was having a bit of a "debate" with a friend of mine who bought the new MBP a few months ago. We are both C# developers so we have no real use of the Mac features, and he was running Windows 8 in VM. His laptop cost over 3 times more than my Dell XPS, which granted is thicker and the screen is not as high res etc, all features which I did not care about to be honest. His argument was that Mac had very good hardware and would last several years. Sure, but in that same time period if my laptop broke, I could afford to buy another 2 more and still be even... MBP is a bloody nice piece of kit though! :)

Here's what make the cost easy for me to deal with: resale value. A two year old Mac will easily fetch 75% of its retail price. Paying 25% of retail price for two years of use is pretty reasonable.

That's true. I just can't justify the high price when I won't use the features, especially since by that stage things in my possession are pretty broken :-p

I use Apple products everywhere, partially because of the awesome retail and support experience -- in-person and by phone. If they screw that up, they will lose a big part of their "special-ness".

It is so great to walk into an apple store when you have an issue and have someone who actually cares take a look and try to help you. And when you call them for order or tech support, you get someone clearly intelligent, caring, and who speaks English well.

Where else can you get that great service and retail experience? Does a MSFT store do this?

Apple Bug #314159 - Display exhibits objectionable retina-like characteristics

Steps to reproduce:

1. Stare at bright checkerboard pattern on screen for 1 minute without blinking.

2. Quickly look away at blank white wall.

3. Observe persistence of image.

I returned 2 15" Retina MBPs in 3 weeks. First had dead pixels, second had a very squeaky spacebar, and now this third machine has the same ghosting effect you've mentioned.

It's really not that much of an annoyance because it goes away quickly, but you do think they would have corrected it.

To protect my MBP, I rock this classic black briefcase, which fits the laptop and cables perfectly: http://refer.ly/agTA

See, this is exactly why I'd like a service to make feature requests (or slightly negative complaints), in order to rally a critical mass around it. This is not just a shameless plug for the app I just posted to HN (pvshapp.com), though I know it seems that way. I really think you've demonstrated perfectly why there needs to be a standardized platform for consumer product requests--as unlikely as improvements seem.

What you've just done with this post is build 334 affirmations of a change that Apple needs to hear and make. Perhaps it's deeper, more pervasive than a single feature request, but it still highlights a dimension of the company Apple needs to pay attention to. It may seem futile, and it may seem like hundreds of these requests have been made directly through Apple's customer support website, but the fact is that it's not powerful persuasion unless you have public support. That's why PvshApp has 2 objectives: 1) Make it as easy as a Tweet to create a request, and 2) add a public audience to actualize support if there is any.

For Apple, the value of this input is that they can condense customer feedback into one single request that they can focus on (if they so desire) OR here's a dumb idea: If Apple doesn't want to implement the feature, then who's stopping a third party producer from adding the feature? Seriously, it may seem like an IP nightmare at first, and I'm certainly no expert, but if a 3rd-party producer actually wanted to purchase the Apple products at full price, then augment them and sell the added features for a premium, who's to stop them? (This is a question, I'd love to know the answer!) Maybe Apple casts too large of a legal shadow, but I'm sure there are all sorts of other products for which users would be willing to pay a premium for augmented features.

Without a doubt it's true that Apple's support services fail on many levels. When corporations lose sight of innovation and mainly focus energy on profits these things are inevitable. I've dealt with many such issues and can relate to the frustrations you have experienced. I personally try and solve every such problem myself; an absolute last resort would be having to get 'help' from someone else before expiring all other possibilities.

As far as your screen issues are concerned, It's quite common – and not specific to your particular display. I have a Cinema Display which does the exact same thing, and I've basically become immune to really noticing it much anymore. When I first became aware of it I tried just about everything to resolve the 'problem'. I was able to find a way to clear ghosting almost completely, and it's as simple as running a particular screensaver for the extended periods of time you're not using your system. The name of it is "LCD Scrub", and although I was skeptical it really does work. It doesn't get rid of the ghosting instantly, so you have to leave it running quite a while before you see any results. Good luck!

I had the exact same issue ("ghosting"), found it was an LG screen (which are known to have this issue), went to the Apple Store, and got it replaced under the guarantee. Just had to show the issue once, no further questions asked. Got it back with new screen after 3 days.

This was in Switzerland. Would be surprised, though, if they had such drastically different replacement or repair policies for such an obvious issue.

I hope this goes viral. Apple was starting to actually gain a little bit of market share in the home computer space and IMO support was a big reason. I know I can have a better spec for less money but I felt like more effort and care was put into Apple products. No one is going to be interested in paying the "Apple tax" if you get the same shitty support you get from most PC makers.

You do realize they sell truckloads of these products and any flaws in them will be publicized due to the staggering volumes involved, right?

Companies like Dell can hide behind several factors, like their notebooks are usually priced a lot lower, quality expectations aren't as high, and they make such a dizzying number of models that any problems are diluted.

I do hope it gets more press so that the problem can be properly addressed, Apple does pay attention to the squeaky wheels after all, but don't get all crazy now. Nobody's dying because their screen has a ghosting issue.

I had a different experience with apple. my 27" imac screen had some strong ghosting and i got it replaced near the end of the 3 years of apple care. i did this without ever visiting an apple store.

when i first phoned them, i had some low quality photos of the screen and the guy said he wasn't sure if it was really a problem. i didn't want to take a 27" imac to a store b/c i have no car and apple wouldn't send me a box. so he gave me his email address and said i could contact him any time in the future with better photos.

months later i got a new ios device with a better camera, took a larger number of pictures, emailed him the link, and he sent an on-site repair guy to give me a new screen. no problem.

i think it depends on which customer service people you talk to. some are great, some are not so good.

(the on site repair guy was great too, btw. he gave me a lesson on how to open up imacs, change stuff, and put them back together)

I'm typing this on my second Macbook Pro retina screen (bought mine day of release). I've been through this "test" before. Both times I didn't have an issue demonstrating it. I'm not overly pleased that the retina displays apparently have an "acceptable" ghosting rate, my experiences haven't been as bad as this bloggers.

Just to contrast the problems. That said, I agree the test is crap, the first time I tested it with a genius the test was rather vague as to what they were supposed to do. That and to be honest the JJ Abrams Star Trek lighting in the apple store didn't help when looking for ghosting in the store.

All in all, its not much different from most of Apples first gen "revolutionary" products. This being the first real "retina" 15" display likely means teething issues. That said, no i'm not excited about being a beta tester. But whatever, the machine has made me despise low dpi screens.

I've bought a MBP every year for 6 years. I spend so much time on them that it's absolutely worth it to get increased performance and space. My current rMBP has 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD -- more than enough.

But I'll get the next rMBP for one reason: improved graphics performance. At the 1920x1200 resolution, even things as mundane as scrolling webpages is pretty low-FPS. Also, Google Chrome's aggressive GPU use seemed to be locking the whole OS about once a day, forcing a hard reboot.

Aside from the locking, which now seems to have been resolved with 10.8.2 12C60, I'd say it's been worth it to have phenomenal screen resolution over my previous MBP. Nearly two whole browser windows side-by-side is terrific. I've seen mild ghosting, but I wouldn't say it's affected my day to day operation.

This is what has put me off buying the 13" Retina- people were complaining about the 15, then they left the 13 with integrated graphics only. Can't bode well.

The UI performance was so abysmal for me that it didn't make up for the higher resolution.

Spending 4k on the maxed out spec system, and having to deal with sub 20 fps while scrolling a web page is just ridiculous (and one of the main reasons I returned it.) Even the notes app would slow to a crawl when scrolling through large amounts of text and nearly stop responding.

I'm really surprised that there haven't been more people complaining about this issue. I'm all for high resolution screens, but please, for the love of all that is holy, put a graphics card in there that is capable of pushing out those pixels!

>even things as mundane as scrolling webpages is pretty low-FPS I mean, if you bought a $1300+ computer THIS YEAR shouldn't you expect better performance? OS X is pretty good, but I personally am tired of not being able to run intensive things without shelling out thousands.

They're all about earning money by ANY unethical means possible. We should already boycott it for not only suing big companies for ridiculous patents, but for trying to EXTORT money from small coffee shops and online grocery shops who have nothing to do with electronics business!

Can you substantiate this claim at all? I'd love to hear how Apple is trying to extort money from coffee shops and grocery stores.

Sure! Though I'd love if people would ask this question before giving negative votes. Anyway, before you read these, just try to be a bit impartial towards any side, which is generally difficult for Apple fans.

(Tell me very honestly, if you think the logo of this small coffee shop in Germany has really any similarity with Apple's logo, except the fact that both of them are derived from the fruit apple!) http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1231539-Apple-sues-small...

That poor woman just sold coffee, not electronic devices. Any sane mind would not find any 'infringement', unless they believe Apple 'owns' the fruit itself now.

Second, they sue an online GROCERY shop from Poland since its website name is "a.pl". ".pl" is the top level domain code for Poland, a is the first alphabet. Even they are not competing with Apple in any manner, but it claims "they are using our reputation". WTF! http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409669,00.asp

They always know that small businesses can't fight back, so they are easy targets. No, please don't come up with arguments like "What's wrong with defending your brand?". This is NOT defending your brand. There's no brand name getting hurt here. You just think you own the fruit.

Apple is using trademark law to ensure that no one can do to Apple what Apple did to the Beatles.

You mean what Apple Records did to Apple Inc?

There is still a difference between what Apple Records did to Apple Inc. and what Apple Inc. is doing to these small shop owners for something not even remotely same. That coffee house logo is a "pure, unadulterated picture" of the fruit apple, in a natural red color - and a child's head inside. Everyone who thinks it's infringement should be declared insane.

Oh wow. This is amazing. Is this what it has all come to? Your multi-billion dollar company is gonna sue some small time grocery store in Poland claiming to 'use their reputation?'

Yeah, will be discouraging anyone I know from buying their products (not that I liked them to begin with)

These lawsuits are an unfortunate business practice, but Apple is not alone here. I'm not a big fan of them, but that's the way the game is played.

Other corporations do this all the time, but apart from the Olympic Committee, which sues anyone and anything with "Olympic" in their name, most don't have a regular English word as their name. This leads to more conflict in practice, and Apple must, according to the law, work harder to "defend" their brand or have it weakened.

You should read this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_dilution

Different standards apply to famous marks vs. regular trademarks. Imagine if a company which made heavy mining equipment had a logo of a swoosh with a hardhat inside. Would Nike be justified in claiming trademark dilution? Absolutely. Or if that same heavy mining equipment manufacturer had a logo of a big rounded arching M with a hardhat on it. McDonalds would legitimately claim dilution there as well, even though the restaurant has no plans to get into the mining industry. These situations would not be dissimilar to an apple logo with a child's head inside.

It's easy to say "poor woman" but the cafe owner must comply with trademark law, imperfect as it is. I hope she prevails actually. However, the process must be allowed to continue. She filed for a trademark application. Apple has apparently contested the trademark registration and sent the cafe owner a cease & desist letter on the side, hoping she'll voluntarily withdraw the application. She doesn't want to withdraw, so now it's in the hands of the German trademark office to sort out.

You really think the only thing different in those two logos is that there's a child's head inside right? How would you draw a real red apple fruit? If I was good in drawing, this is the closest I'd get to a real apple. It's definitely saying no one can use the fruit anymore, since a company chose to keep it's own name by that. She filed for a trademark application, but there must be someone insane sitting in Cupertino who thought they'd milk her on that.

The funniest part is who would have even known someone was using another logo with an apple, in Germany. If not for Apple itself making a bid deal about it.

Are you referring to the usual trademark protection racket?

Any multi-national brand will do this and I wouldn't call it extortion when they're not asking for money.

You can argue it's heavy handed or even bullying, but it's not extortion.

That's not restricted to Apple. It's a feature of trademark law; you have to try to protect it, or you risk losing it.

Google used to ask people to not use Google as a verb; Bic pens write letters if bic is used as a generic instead of ballpoint; everyone does it because they have to do it.

Sure, it's annoying that a huge multinational company spends money on lawyers against a teeny tiny company. But it's not Apple, it's the system.

Isn't the fundamental problem here about communicating a product's quality guarantee to potential buyers? Apple never guarantees that you won't have a problem that annoys you or interrupts your work. Is there a detailed warranty for the computer that makes Apple liable to fix this specific problem? OP's problem obviously looks very real and quite annoying, but why should OP claim that Apple is obligated fix it? What if the problem was "the fan is too loud" or "I don't like the keyboard," or something more obviously frivolous like "I hate the OS X window manager" or "my PC games won't run on it"? Obviously, Apple won't fix those if the fan is working at normal volumes and the keyboard is completely within their specs.

Two examples of bad service I've had from Apple recently:

a) ordered an iPod nano. Apple missed the delivery date by nearly a week, because they had outsourced the delivery to some unreliable company in Glasgow. I had left the country by the time it arrived.

b) I want to purchase a new 21.5" iMac. Store here in Zurich doesn't know when they'll have stock and suggest I phone each day. I said if I order online could I deliver it to the store. No was the answer. Then I said I would miss the delivery as I work - so asked which courier would be used and would I be able to visit their base to pick the iMac up. The guy in the store was unable to answer. I can't find anyone to contact via e-mail either.

I don't see Apple as a customer focused company.

I just thought I'd throw this out there... I've had this issue with every other IPS display I've ever used. I had three 21" HP IPS displays connected to a Mac Pro for a few years and all three of them exhibited tho exact same condition. The 23" Apple Cinema Displays we had at my university also did the same thing. I just chock it up to the IPS display technology, and assume all IPS displays do that to some degree. IPS is not known for having particularly great pixel twist times, and thats probably related. That said, I'd still use an IPS display in a heartbeat for the color accuracy. It's truly phenomenal. The after-image is annoying, but I'm happy to trade it for the color accuracy.

My perception of Apple has pretty much been like this guy's for 10 years now, ever since I shelled out 250GBP on a 20G iPod whose battery ran out just over a year later.

I went to an Apple store and asked whether I could have the battery replaced, presumably for a price. "Just buy a new one, man!" was the response.

I'd taken a gamble buying the iPod (I didn't have much money at the time), was prepared to pay to replace the replaceable part. The sheer arrogance and condescension of the response, and the assumption that Apple consumers had money to burn made my blood boil. I haven't bought anything Apple since.

I have an iphone 3gs I stopped using this summer just due to the battery dying off. Wasn't going to pay the absurd rates Apple charges to get new batteries, especially when I could just get an iPhone 4 if I really wanted to for like $30 more.

I still try to use the thing as a groupon screen. The Android groupon app requires a persistent network connection to maintain the barcode, the iphone version downloads the page entirely and you can keep reopening it without a connection just fine.

One day I charged it for 6 hours from complete dead battery (I just let the battery die now rather than let it eat up electricity for no reason, I rarely use it) turn it on, put it in standby once I have the groupon loaded, and by the time I whip it out 3 hours later to show the barcode the screen blips on before the thing shuts off due to critical low battery. Had to sit in the parking lot for 15 minutes with a car charger to get the thing to hold the screen long enough to scan it.

The phone is only 3 years old, and the battery doesn't last 3 hours in standby anymore.

I hear you man. I'm writing this on a cheap 5 year old netbook. Haven't replaced so much as a key. It was 250GBP then and has seen plenty of use.

This reminds me of HP. Eons ago at a shop, I purchased an HP IPAQ Palmtop. As we opened it inside the store to check, it had a blue dead pixel. The store clerk, promptly closed the box and picked another one for me. We opened it and boom, another dead pixel. We tried five IPAQs, they all had 1 dead pixel. He phoned HP and told them that. HP answered that 1 dead pixel was okay by their quality standard. The clerk made an ugly face and turned to me and said: "at least you can choose the location of your dead pixel from these five available choices".

I have a retina iPad (version 3) and since 2 months regularly I've got a full white screen when I turn it on and I have to make some voodoo incantations in order to make it disappear. So finally I sent it to Apple and they returned me without any repair after having concluded they could not reproduce this issue. So now I'm back with an iPad that is not working correctly half of the time. I'm disappointed at Apple, I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. I'd live near an Apple store I'd brought the iPad to show them the issue but it's not the case.

It's very easy to fake the test and then say - look, your screen is within tolerance:

- provide a black & white pattern for 3 minutes

- provide a gray pattern _with compensation_ for the black&white for 1 minute

If your gray compensation doesn't fall through the minute, you are within tolerance. If not, then the compensation was not enough and your screen is way off.

Either way, your screen is toast.

Since, by definition, only people with defective screens will waste time to go to service, only they will see the test and risk to see the compensation on a good screen.

in my experience, it takes a few tries to successfully roll the hard six to get a sympathetic genius. it's not exactly social engineering, but there are some folks who are more likely to take your side especially if you can show that the problem is happening while you're sitting there with them.

still, the fact that the applecare universe works like that at all is a bit disheartening especially if you have a legitimate hardware issue but an unsympathetic genius.

Apple has had all sorts of screen problems for many years now. Most customers don't notice them, but if you're keen to such things, you probably don't approach powering up a new Apple device with the joy that's supposed to come with it. You hold your breath and scan the screen with great anxiety for dead pixels, yellow stripes, pink and green splotches, uneven backlighting, ghosting, and light leakage.

Apple has always been pretty much rigid about results of their tests during repairs or replacements.

To be fair, I got almost every single part of my Macbook replaced after a surge incident that was caused internally - but I have never been able to negotiate even a repair of something trivial in cases where Apple tests fail.

They do bend over backwards for helping us out - but their tests could be very unrealistic some times.

There is a new MacBook Retina clamshell that was pushed out a month before the 13" MBPr hit the shelves.

I had mine replaced due to pretty intense ghosting after just 2 minutes, and when I went in to the Genius Bar, they found the clamshell part had a new model number (vs the one they had seen a week before). This one does not ghost.

It'd be nice if these discussions actually came with large scale customer surveys to determine how the public as a whole feels. Perhaps Consumer Reports has looked into this. Right now all of this is just a lot of heat and emotion in both directions, coupled with stirring but useless anecdata.

I was just about to buy MacBook Pro Retina 15, 16GB, 512GB, when I found out about this ghosting problem. I could not take the risk of getting faulty screen (I would have buy it on trip to US). I am surprised that Apple is not doing anything about it. This problem is known for months

Can someone posts some pictures showing how the ghosting interferes with regular applications (Safari, iTunes, XCode etc)? Maybe it is something one can live with, especially considering how primitive the existing displays are compared to the retina display.

apple have had their day. Their going downhill FAST.

I'm glad I got to experience apple when they were great, it was the tail end of their greatness but they created beautiful products and cared about the consumer.

Now their all about the money.

I recently had to book a genius appt and wait a week to get a new charger. w-t-f apple. In the old days any staff would try out your charger, realise it didn't work and then replace it (assuming it was under warrenty) now I have to spend £65 and then get a refund the week after. and they gave me ANOTHER new charger. Why not let me keep the one I paid for and not create more waste.

already left the iphone fold but unfortunately osx (snow leopard at least) is a great OS :(

I bought a macbook pro late '11 from almost the same reasons: apple's good, shiny etc...sorry was. Even if some will call me a traitor, I am thinking to switch my iPhone for a Lumia :)

After using Xcode for a full day I can see my immortal soul stuck in the desktop background.

I avoid using iMacs with any kind of glue near the LCD for obvious reasons.

I'm so glad this issue is finally getting some attention.

I returned my rMBP after experiencing the issue. It looks that getting a Samsung screen is a game of chance.

Doesn't Apple have a reasonable no-questions-asked return policy? 14 days, or maybe 30? I wonder why the OP didn't take advantage.

Same issue.

Thanks for posting this. I thought about buying one before the end of the year, but now I'll wait for the second generation.

We all had a tiny intuition that apple is not going to be the same after Steve Jobs death. Apple is gone for good!

thank you for posting this!! looks like i ran into in just the knick of time. i just recently purchased a new macbook pro with a retina display for my brother how lives out of the country. will make sure i have a samsung display so he doesn't have ghosting issues or apple care issues in the future!

My two year old £200 24" LCD showed no signs of ghosting at all.

How is that relevant?

You're right. It's not really. I just that fully expected it to fail, and was pleasantly suprised when it didn't.

I've had similar issues with Cinema Displays in mid 2000-s.

rMBP here and yup ghosting issue

Glad I got a Lenovo. I was mulling over getting a macbook for the longest time since I wanted the option to develop iPhone apps. After thinking it over I realized that I was disgusted with Apple's practices and didn't want to support them beyond what I absolutely had to, so I'm getting a Thinkpad and I'm quite content with that. Any phone dev will have Android first and I'll get a second hand mini or something when I need to do iPhone work.

So you're going the route of "get it a little cheaper and expect little or no support"?

Sorry, not sure if you're talking about grabbing the second-hand mini when the time comes or talking about my laptop purchase.

In both cases it's not an issue of price it's an issue of Apple doesn't deserve my money and any transactions that I have to do with them will be solely based on accessing iOS users.

Support? It's a laptop, not an API. The only real support I expect after purchase is warranty replacement for faulty hardware.

Blind faith in anything is bad. Do you really think only Apple products have (considerable) support?

>I'm writing this because I think Apple may have changed.

Really? How it's different from, say, the constantly failing logic boards on iBooks G3? Or overheating on MBP circa 2007. Or the problems with the G4 Cube. Or the green goo from G5 Mac Pros' liquid cooling.

Shit happened with Apple before AND after Jobs. Especially when you buy a first generation model, like the Retina was. Wait it out till they iron the problems.

I've had similar things happen to my PC machines. On them at a much bigger rate than in Apple gear. I had IBM "Death"star disk drives failing in 3 machines on my small company. I checked the webs, and they had issued a note that the disks were problematic and suggested not running them for more than 700 consecutive hours (!!!). And that's from IBM. Another time I had an AMD machine that overheated and stopped working (processor shutdown). Or a Toshiba laptop that lost 3 keys in 2 years and the DVD never wrote a disk correctly.

The difference is, a company like Toshiba or Acer, ships less units and more models (and far more variations), so a faulty run at them affects, say, 50,000 people, whereas a faulty Apple run affects one or two million.

Not to mention that most models from those companies rarely stray of the "proven and boring" road, so they get things like Retina, thunderbolt etc after all the quirks have been ironed out by more forward moving companies (Apple, sometimes Sony, etc).

Apple is greedy? No way!

Ah, $500B+ market cap company problems...

I think the OP should apply for a patent on this test.

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