Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

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.

>"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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