Yet, not a single word in this thread about how silent they tend to be about issues effecting thousands of users (which is a common trend with them)...
I wonder how they manage to pull that off, it's magic.
I have a Logitech gaming keyboard. Their drivers are shockingly bad and freeze up every so often requiring me to re-plug the keyboard to get them to to work again. This is mentioned in the forums for at least 6 months, no fix has been announced.
I'm not defending Apple here, they should at least comment on their own forums, but they're not alone.
To me the change most likely came around 1981 when the IBM PC came out and was sold to consumers who basically believed that it was them that was stupid and not something wrong with the machine. Manufacturers then learned that they could shove things into the pipeline and fix them later and that they actually got a fair amount of slack in the marketplace from the "stupid" end users. People who knew their shit using these machines were totally outnumbered by computer illiterate people. In other cases the ubiquitous "tech guy" made money because things didn't work so who was he to complain? That's what kept Microsoft in power. The tech guy ecosystem.
I'm curious if anyone else agrees at all with my take. Strictly my opinion having been around computers so many years.
If you have 1 million $10 customers and 10,000 have a problem the cost of losing their business isn't amazingly huge, especially as most of them probably won't switch vendors.
When you have ten $1,000,000 customers you might listen more if one has a problem.
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/8...
I've had issues which I've posted in newsgroups and forums, that have been turned into bug tickets.
Some teams appear better at this than others mind.
* On a new machine (or maybe a new profile, I haven't checked), enable PowerShell's AllSigned option
* Open Visual Studio and open an MVC4 project, bonus points if it's close to the template in terms of installed NuGet packages
* Watch as Visual Studio hangs indefinitely.
This has been reported a number of times to Microsoft, but I don't think it was fixed in Update 4.
What's happening is PowerShell, running inside Visual Studio is prompting for something to do with a signed PowerShell Script, but Visual Studio hasn't loaded enough of the UI to let you accept the warning/prompt.
Apple gets my repeat business (read: magic) by solving my hardware and software problems reliably and quick when I present them through the appropriate channels, go well over a decade now. For one particular repair, I was given a loaner machine, and another resulted in being updated to newer hardware - common stories amongst people who use their AppleCare.
Also unlike other companies all the bugs are hidden so you can't actually see whether other people have the issue, how they've solved it etc.
Apple is probably one of the most unfriendly companies to deal will as they seem obsessed with secrecy even when none is needed.
If there are 10 million installations of Mavericks (and I've got no idea how many there really are) and 5,000 people reporting a particular problem, that's only .05% of users - which is well within the expected proportion of users you'd expect to have problems with any upgrades. Note, for comparison the recent PS4 release problems and Sony's statement about the 0.4% of users experiencing problems - "This is within our expectations for a new product introduction"
I'm also not sure how you explain a CPU pegged by a kernel process on a machine which should be doing almost nothing as "shear chance". That's a bug.
Completely ignore? Like several public statements, recall programs, warranty extensions and other such stuff they have done for problems in the past?
They have the bug in their radar bug tracking system, they close duplicate reports (which means they know about it specifically), and they are obviously working on solving it. What can they say before a fix is ready? "We're working on it"? Of course they are.
Perhaps you missed the fact that they top the user satisfaction ratings almost every year.
Try dealing with some other companies...
I recently picked up an old MBP and the logic board die on me. Turns out the faulty GPU unit was a known issue, but they never did a recall. Instead they extended the warranty portion for this part by four years.
This is the first real issue aside from iPhone battery woes a few years back.
The mmore I look through forums and such, the more I find Apple not shipping products that meet the market perception of a superiority.
The issue was vpn behind nat wasn't working as expected, copying raccoon over from 10.8 server fixed the issue (not ideal but it took all of 5 mins).
With the prices Mac devices cost, I would expect zero percent failure rates with high attention to quality.
You would think someone on HN would know the difference.
Prices are at their fairest the moment they release new hardware. The later you buy their hardware the bigger the difference with their competitors (They only lower the price of older hardware when releasing a new model and not that much either).
But superior hardware, no, that is a bridge too far. Decent hardware, yes, but not all hardware from Apple is equal.
If you wish I can also link to failure reports of the said superior hardware, like the recent GPU failures or the iPhone superior quality antenas.
When you buy a product you are paying for the whole package, not parts of it.
So if Apple intends to play the role of Ferrarri, Bang and Olufsen, Montblanc of the computer world, then their products should act accordingly.