Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department
lessig.tumblr.com
lessig.tumblr.com
I deeply dislike it when companies attitude to helping their customer is sending them in a loop through a series of FAQ pages without an actual human you can talk to within a thousand miles.
Apple have been doing this for the last 5 years at least.
I support a large fleet of Macpros (Ha, yeah "fast" and "magical" with 5 year old procs in them) Everytime an OS upgrade comes along something is silently broken. Trying to get support is a nightmare. For example when they changed which version of kerberos they used without any warning. Or changing the syntax of automount.
Apple are shits and have always been. Just like google[1].
[1]don't get me started on them. they keep on pissing about with the admin console for paid google apps, without warning.
Not trying to defend anyone here, but with so many customers, products, software versions, it's no surprise problems will occur, which are sometimes inappropriately handled. This goes for any company, Apple is no exception here. I have years of anecdotal evidence of only positive experiences with Apple products and customer service, the only difference between me and the people affected by this WiFi bug is that I don't feel the need to start a blog to praise Apple for the joy I get using their products.
Guess what? For one, I appreciate hearing the negatives since in the Apple world all we get is 'how great it all is'. You may not feel the need to praise Apple but other's have gladly taken your place many times over.
My ISP uses their mail service as their web mail access. Through many updates to Yahoo's web mail app, I always neglected not to update and was able to continue using my more than 10 year old mail interface, until recently when I finally decided to agree to update.
Unfortunately Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.
We had a weird issue with something on Azure, raised the issue and got not only somebody very knowledgeable replying quickly who pointed us in the right direction but also had the docs updated a day or two later.
Contrast to the utter crap "support" we got when an IntelliPoint update had a fight with the Alps software on Dell Latitude laptops and randomly triggered a gazillion consecutive UAC elevation prompts. After being told by "support" for the third time to do something stupid like disable UAC or turn it off and on again we just nuked IntelliPoint from orbit and voila, problem fixed. The next update of IntelliPoint fixed the issue so I'm sure someone managed to report it correctly.
When a new OS X release broke something that killed some 40 products at a company I used to work for, they simply made the bug report "private" so that others couldn't see it. Some of the products that they broke had to be rewritten to use a completely different technology, the breakage was so bad.
Google....has its own issues, but at least doesn't delete public bug reports. Sorry, I do have my own issues with Google, but Apple's behavior is a step beyond "poor customer support practices" and full into "dishonest and deceptive practices," which in my book is worse.
At Microsoft (at least on my team) we are encouraged to be active in our forums. We use them to keep a pulse on the issues we are having, identify bugs out in the wild, and get feedback on our products. We may sometimes sound a little robotic, since we're not going to divulge insider info or participate in arguments, but we are listening and trying to help (and attempting to figure out what is actually happening on peoples machine's, which is tough). We also provide feedback to our customer service folks in the forums, giving them answers to common problems we do know about and identifying when they provide misinformation and correct that.
I suspect that Apple reads their own forums but doesn't respond. The optimist in me says they're investigating this Wi-Fi issue due to the noise in the forums. They may not have or know a good workaround or at-home fix at this point. And frankly, it's really difficult to get any useful diagnostic information from folks in the forums (especially angry ones who turn to personal attacks on engineers - been there, done that for me on answers.microsoft.com).
As Lessig notes, they're engaging actively in censorship. That's certainly their right, but it's not the same thing as not participating.
Censorship is exactly what it is. I understand it's an emotionally or ethically charged term for some, but there is no doubt about what they're doing:
"to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable"
We all understand that there are terms of service. They're enforcing them via censorship. Whether it's the censorship or the ToS that the censorship is meant to serve which are particularly objectionable is a pretty uninteresting argument.
Exercising your warranty rights is a perfectly valid solution to a technical problem.
It's always been common to suggest to people that they try restarting their devices to fix a problem or going as far as reinstalling the software in question. When neither of those work, replacing the device if it is non-functional is the next step and exercising your warranty rights is a legit way to implement that technical fix.
On the other hand, censorship/terms-of-service removal is a grey area and by removing the information you're removing the ability of readers to make judgement calls for themselves.
Really, it would be nice if there was a way to filter/optimize the noise of normal forum spew into just the useful bits, while still having context/links to the original ginormous piles. Seems to get the best of both worlds.
1) Thank you for copying that message, here I sit with a 16g White 4s and now I certainly do not want the upgrade.
2) Welcome to Apple Support. That site is much more useful to me for figuring out how to use my Apple product than to fix it. I remember the woes of Wi-Fi being lost on my iMac. Having posts deleted, and watching a thread morph into a years long thousand post monstrosity. All without a chirp from Apple, but yeah they do take down posts. Especially anything where people posted about taking their iMacs into the store.
if you have Applecare, call them. Make it cost them money. Get enough people to swamp their phones or stores might wake them up
That said, it would be moronic of them to allow comments/threads which are advocating people to take legal action against the company on their own boards. It doesn't matter if the customer is right or not, those kinds of posts are only going to result in more angry, pitchfork wielding customers. I expect pretty much any company, even ones much more customer friendly than Apple, would remove such posts.
How is trading in your non-working phone for a working phone an "unrelated legality?"
The known fix for the early 2011 MBP's with the discrete GPU glitch is to stick in a fresh version of the same motherboard with the same glitch.
I replaced my board under Applecare for free a few months ago, so I'm a lot less pissed that the issue came back than I would had I paid the non-Applecare repair price of $500. Now I'm debating whether I want to replace my logic board yet again only to have the issue come back a few months later.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/14/apples-2011-macboo...
A forum use posted information about how to get an issue resolved by exercising one's warranty rights; that post was removed. Lessig reposted that info; it was also removed, and Lessig was informed that the forum does not allow for "polls or petitions."
Most? Really? I would have thought that there would have been very few (no?) countries where the product being broken by a software update would not have entitled the buyer to some remedy.
Creator of Creative Commons, Rootstrikers, friend and lawyer of Aaron Swartz... Lawrence Lessing is a name that should be respected in every online community.
Again, this seems to be just one of the low-key blog posts that he makes, so don't assign it too much. But for those wondering "who the hell is this guy?"... well... you definitely should know him.
I want to see him dealing with Google or other big company via community forums, I remember a story on HN when a nexus was released and people could not get the phone for months after they paid for it, they could not even get a phone number to call and ask a question. Apple has a genius bar at their stores and a phone support, you can not seriously expect a reply from apple representative on a community forum.
It's actually consistent and reasonable when you look at Apple's obsession with quality.
I find it surprising you are defending this forum behavior by Apple via their obsession with quality. I see it as the exact opposite.
If Apple was obsessed with quality they would not leave user's hanging dry in a forum. As I can imagine, the forum is a at resort for a lot of people. At a minimum Apple should have some type of escalation policy to help with issues that are not just single data points but seem systematic (as this WiFi issue seems to be).
Your statement basically boils down to if you cannot afford to get Apple's attention (via Apple Care) than don't bother. Also, having the inability to downgrade puts users in a unreasonable situation with no options. I am sure you are not suggesting that users with older phones and out of warranty just don't matter. At a minimum, when Apple offers iOS upgrades, don't dismantle functionality that is already there.
Tech support over a forum is "cheap" or "free". So they don't do it. This behaviour is perfectly consistent with everything else Apple does, and it protects their brand image that way - with Apple, you either get The Good Stuff or it doesn't exist. Forum-based support? Doesn't exist.
Which is one of the many reasons that I don't buy Apple products. Want Apple support? Pay for Apple Care. Don't like that kind of arrangement? Don't buy Apple.
Can you give me an example of another big company that offers better support then Apple does? From your comment it looks like you are on Android, so according to you - you can just call Google directly and ask a question if your android phone got a wifi issue?
Apple offers the best. I totally agree, Apple does the best. You just have to pay for it.
(Edit: Not that you're wrong, just that it sucks.)
If they allowed rollback this problem would solve itself until a fix was created and pushed out. Instead, they get angry users.
About rollbacks, I'm told that this will leave the baseband modem (not downgradable) in a version not tested with main OS. I can imagine Apple (or any corporation) not willing to support it (if it's true, it seems reasonable, but I really don't know). It can be done, btw, only it's not easy, not for end-users, and, AFAIK, must be planned before upgrade (I know many people that did it).
Lawrence Lessing needs to ask Joel Spolsky about this.
Edit: as mentioned below, the site already exists. So people need to be using it instead of an Apple forum where the most useful posts get deleted by The Firm...
I wish company forums did have more interaction than they do, but it's certainly not an Apple thing. They are universally "community" run and company censored.
ex: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/blizztracker/
And even in more "traditional" and supposedly conservative industries... I could find some references for you but I don't think I'd need to given how widely-covered some of these have been, of the customer support PR coups that have been achieved over social media in general (primarily Twitter and Reddit; at least in my personal experience). It is obviously less structured than an archived, time-ordered, hierarchical, and easily-searchable forum designed for permanence, and I don't have the slightest sense of the proportion of customer issues that go /un/-addressed in this manner.
But viewed through this lens... customer support is public politics. It's totally understandable that Apple would want to both maintain their image of aloofness from non-visionary matters, and deliberately avoid validating the existence of problems with their products in a public forum, which would also contradict a decades-long and painstakingly-crafted image. But it's also totally okay if the community or some segment of it makes a stink in the hopes of shifting the PR calculation.
I understand helping others with a startup's product that you like. You want it to succeed and an increased customer base will most likely lead to product improvements. But billion dollar businesses have the resources to provide support themselves. Why would you do it for them for free?
You help that person get up.
That doesn't absolve anyone of their rightful responsibilities, but it does make for a nicer world.
I replaced my mobo this past summer under Applecare ($500 if you don't have coverage). Guess what they replaced it with? A logic board that exhibited the same issues two months later.
A friend of mine just started experiencing the glitches on his 2011 MBP.
My current workaround is to make sure that I unplug all external monitors, and shut down with the setting that no app windows get reopen. If you have an application that forces the discrete GPU to be used (Coda, for example), it can cause startup hangs.
I understand that they have a support offering they want people to buy, but it seems to me that creating official forums that never get official responses and removing posts that espouse actions that, while not beneficial to Apple, are legal and to help customers, Apple are holding paid for usefulness of their devices ransom.
That may seem like a fairly uncharitable view, but their actions in this instance don't seem particularly charitable either.
Geeze, that was easy.
This sort of activity reminds me of the actions Apple took to try and hide the mess of the roll-out of Open Transport and all the network mess it caused for folks.
If the only solution is to purchase a better warranty, then it seems that creates a perverse incentive for Apple to break devices which each upgrade, and only provide fixes and service to people who pay more money, in order to bilk customers to maximize profits.
I wouldn't consider this an ethical or honest way to do business with users. It is a completely valid criticism of a way of doing business.
For emphasis, this isn't a unique user-created problem, this is a problem that is originated with Apple.
It's also issues like this that will ensure that my current and first set of Apple devices will be my last Apple devices.
It's cheap because they waive these responsibilities, it would be/is more expensive to have them not waived, that's just how it is.
There are also a few manufacturers of smartphones who guarantee against this sort of thing.
Also, the only way to maximize profits is to satisfy the customer: they offer the devices at a consumer price which is enticing to a mass market who may or may not have these issues, rather than expecting everyone to have these issues all the time, and pricing it to accommodate that. This is exactly what consumers want, cheap phones that at least typically do what is expected of them.