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Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

DOA probably isn't the right term here. Neither machine was DOA. Anyway the point of advance replace is a good one. Apple also doesn't have on-site service which is a major issue for big heavy computers that are typically used as professional workstations. Apple, as a company, seems rather clueless about enterprise level support. They're missing out on a small but insanely profitable part of the market. People will pay a premium for the best support possible. This goes for computers and software developers. How many iPhone developers would pay a few thousand dollars a year to get A list treatment? (a lot I think)

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"DOA" was Apple's term when I called in both machines (I'm the author of the blog.) I think they intend it to mean that the machine arrived "flawed", rather than developed a problem at some point post-delivery.

Apple applies the same principles to customer service that they do to their products.

Rather than tier service -- and by design treat some people badly and some people amazingly -- like many companies do, they work hard to find a good middle ground where everyone is sufficiently happy and receives almost the same level of service. Necessarily, this means some people used to amazing support will get worse support and those used to shitty support get better support.

Whether you like it or not, it seems very strange to me that someone would say Apple is "clueless about enterprise level support." Of course Apple understands how the industry standard is for enterprise support. They most likely consciously do not copy it.

Enterprise support is what you need when you're selling $3,500 towers because that's the where most of the sales come from. Not many consumers drop that on a PC.

And an Apple MP3 player must have an FM radio built-in because all the other companies put them in their players.

I don't see the connection. Not all statements about Apple are wrong because one is. Apple sells about as many desktops to enterprise in a year as the average Best Buy and this is probably part of why.

My point is that most companies, like Dell, sell their consumer machines at a horrendously low profit margin. They make it up in enterprise sales.

Apple, however, sells consumer machines at a tremendous profit. The value you think Apple should see in enterprise is negated by their own business model being different from the industry norms.

My Apple MP3 player does have a FM radio built-in.

It's a less good example now they've added one to the nano.

No, they're completely clueless about it. There's no doubt about that.

I attended a mac users' group meeting once in which an Apple rep tried to convince us that their SAN system was better than Dell's because of the price... I looked on with contempt because he was ignoring the thing that you're getting from Dell: support.

Sure enough, when Apple started hyping their big mac installation, they obsessed with their price compared to Dell's... completely ignoring the fact that Dell's price included installation, a 3-year on-site support contract, a building release, and even network setup (hardware).

And then when I worked for a company that made MacBook Pros an option for developers, the IT staff ended up hating them. Their prices were 2x that of the Dell laptops with comparable configurations, and Apple couldn't handle support at all -- when the IT guys contacted support for a recall, the support staff at Apple were lost when our guys had 50 laptops to send back...

Naturally, when I heard that Dell was outsourcing customer service to India, I stopped buying Dell. (They couldn't outsource their corporate support to India... fortunately for them -- I suspect that if they had, they'd have lost a lot of bids to IBM and HP.)

I hadn't thought of it that way but I do see your point. It does makes me wonder how their bigger customers interact with Apple Support and how that differs from an individual customers.

I think the reality right now is that, for the most part, they don't. IT centers that have to support hundreds or thousands of users aren't going to buy macs, because they'd run themselves ragged supporting them.

That's not meant to imply that macs fail more often, but if you have 500 computers under constant use, you'll get some form of technical problem pretty much all the time.

Configuration issues are solvable by getting the IT staff to learn how to work with Linux, but hardware problems would become untenable very quickly because IT can't keep taking machines to a mac store to get new parts for it.

Imagine the same situation with 5000 macs... you'd have to have an IT staff of 500 people just to keep up with hardware failures that you can't escape from simply because we live in the real world, and physical things break, especially when they're under constant use.

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