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> Support from Apple was pretty straightforward for my friend: "Your phone is out of warranty, sorry, we will not help you." The fact that this warranty is illegal under EU law is left out

In most EU countries, it's the responsibility of the store that you bought it from, not the manufacturer. http://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/

Which, for apple, is a distinction without a difference, no ?

Apple products and services are not exclusively sold by Apple and its network of official resellers etc. On the other hand, most manufacturers offer warranty in addition to the legally mandatory seller's warranty obligations.

There's plenty of places besides Apple that you can buy Apple products from.

Yes there is. There are 'certified' resellers.

I am not sure the EU law regarding the mandatory two years of availability for computer parts apply to the UK.

In my experience (happened twice), even if you buy the device from an Apple Store on some other European country (thus having the 2-y warranty) Apple Stores in the UK won't fix it. I had to wait for the flight home to have it fixed in my home country (and it was).

I own all categories of Apple devices but I never had a good experience at an Apple Store, not even when buying stuff. I realise I'm an exception though.

I agree this bug is annoying.

But Apple censoring it's forums is nothing new. They've been doing it for years. And frankly, most companies do censor their forums.

No one likes it. And Apple is infamous for not responding until an issue reaches the mainstream press. So the best thing anyone can do is reach out to the mainstream press. Get this issue on the evening news programs and trust, it'll be fixed in a couple of days.

It's not "censorship" if it's Apple's own forums. A censor is a _third party_ who acts as an arbiter of what is morally acceptable elsewhere (OED definition: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/censor). Apple are entirely within their rights to remove stuff from their own website... even if they're being dicks by doing so.

A censor is a _third party_

The definition you linked to says nothing about 3rd parties, only officials without specifying who they work for. In fact, one of the examples given in that definition is film censors which is within scope here - in the US film censorship is done by the MPAA which is an organization composed of movie studios. Most of the films they censor are produced by their own members.

The use of the word censor in this discussion is entirely within the common and technical definitions of the term.

OT, and sharing only because I learned this week: MPAA ratings are an opt-in guideline and can be ignored by movie theaters.

http://variety.com/2013/film/news/new-york-theater-will-admi...

Though most theaters do abide by the ratings, and therefore movies will continue to modify their content until they get at least an 'R' rating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_of_...

If you want to learn about how bonkers the MPAA ratings process is, check out this documentary: This Film Is Not Yet Rated http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493459/

Each to their own, but I wouldn't call what the MPAA does "censorship" (to my limited knowledge, that is; I'm not an American).

The MPAA issues ratings; it's up to the studio to decide whether to make cuts to a film in order to attain a particular rating. No-one forces the studio to make the cuts (Wikipedia: "The MPAA rating system is a voluntary scheme not enforced by law and films can be exhibited without a rating").

Sure, it might be commercial suicide to issue a film with a particular rating, but the right to free speech != the right to make lots of money.

The rating system is only "voluntary" in the sense that the government will decline to impose its own rating system as long as the private one meets the government's goals.

It definitely should have been caught in Quality Checks. There's another interesting angle to this. My boss always tells me to emulate Apple and Google engineers. He says "If they can create a phone or a search engine without glitches, I should be able to create a mediocre form without a defect".

In your face, boss!!!

This is a triumph of marketing over QA - the oft-quoted Apple reality distortion field...

A senior electronics engineer where I used to work 'had to have' an iPhone, so one was duly supplied. He immediately had problems connecting reliably to Exchange to pick up his emails and after the IT support guys had tried several times to make it work more reliably, the phone was handed back with the (valid) comment that this was currently a 'known problem'.

The engineer's reply was that he didn't accept that response because it was an Apple product and they'd not have problems making something as simple as email 'just work'.

That doesn't sound like a very good engineer. I don't want to use a product from an engineer that decides by fiat that it works.

Yes, the infamous RDF is a known fact.

You must be new to apple products: launchd had problems running scheduled tasks for years, people resorted to installing anacron, when the Cisco VPS connection was released in snow leopard it was utterly broken, the first iteration of time capsule had thermal problems, most of those units are probably dead by now.

Why don't you tell your boss to provide you with the same perks and working conditions Apple or Google employees receive?

I would love to. But that might end up with me being fired :) Ego is a big thing to surmount.

You need to forward this comment to Scott Adams. He is always looking for PHB quotes.

If I'd be your boss I'd simply tell you to code like every single bit no matter how small will be used in a space shuttle, airplane or submarine. Forget about trying to be like some Google/Apple guy, just trying not to be the cause of the next Challenger-like disaster shoud be a nice starting point to produce quality code.

iOS 7 feels extremely rushed to me, as well. I have found several easily reproducible crashes in stock and freshly restored systems in MobileSafari (on top 100 sites) and elsewhere.

I really hope Apple abandons their overly-rigid release schedules in favor of quality once again.

Anyone else have the bug where flipping off bluetooth doesn't turn on the software keyboard? If I forget to hit 'eject' before I leave the house, my only options are to either hard reset or spend the day in read-only mode.

Yes, I've had that one too. I have a Logitech keyboard case, but if I'm not writing long-form, I find it more comfortable to have the "bare" iPad, and tap out any shorter text. Unless I specifically disconnect the keyboard through the iOS settings panel first, I don't get the software keyboard back.

By contrast, in iOS 6, if the BT keyboard disconnected for any reason, (i.e. power-off/range) the software keyboard would instantly reappear.

My cousin had this issue on her iPhone 4S and Apple replaced it with a new one when she took it to the store. It seemed like a very straightforward exchange for her.

I think the key is that this was probably under warranty for her. The 4S, for many people, is more than a year old.

Most people expect that their new phone will be built to last more than one year, but understand that if something breaks after that period they will need to pay to fix it, even if it is a factory defect (say, a home button or battery which should last 2 years, but in some cases doesn't). They also expect to benefit from software updates after their warranty period, but understand new features may not always be available.

What they aren't expecting is that Apple will pro-actively break a core feature of their phone with an update, which can't be reversed, and can't be repaired, without replacing the whole device.

If a phone is available on a 24-month contract, I would damn well expect the manufacturer to stand by that hardware for 2 years.

It was not under warranty at the time (she has had it since soon after the 4S was released, and the bug came about with iOS 7).

Edit: that said, the warranty in Australia is legally probably two years, though Apple advertises only one year.

This is a widely known Apple issue. They constantly release new products with complete disregard for the previous version. Just look at the iPhone 3G. iOS 4 made it completely unusable. Did Apple ever do anything to help? Nope!