
Apple Sent Two Men to My House - glhaynes
https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/17/apple-sent-two-men-to-my-house-no-they-werent-assassins/
======
citruspi
Context[0], since I didn't see a link in the article. Also, the discussion[1].

[0]: [https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-
mus...](https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-
seriously/)

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11634600](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11634600)

~~~
flashm
Thanks. I think perhaps the article should link to some context...

------
madeofpalk
This whole saga has been a pretty interested set of events, amusing to watch
as a bystander who's been observing Apple for a long time while they go
through many changes.

Regardless, reminds me of Eddy Cue driving over to Federighi's house late one
night to report a bug[0]:

    
    
        When Cue ran into a problem installing a new build of OS X on that iMac,
        in fact, he could tell as a veteran software tester that the bug might
        be hard to reproduce, plus he was scheduled to take a trip the very
        next day. “I called Craig up, said have your guys look at it, I think it
        would be hard to re-create. He said sure, so I put the iMac in my car
        and drove it over,” as in, to Federighi’s house. Cue went on his
        business trip, Federighi’s team fixed the problem, and Cue got his iMac
        back when he returned—kind of like a Genius Bar for the C-suite.
    
    

[0]: [http://www.macworld.com/article/3033057/ios/eddy-cue-and-
cra...](http://www.macworld.com/article/3033057/ios/eddy-cue-and-craig-
federighi-discuss-the-state-of-apple-software-with-john-gruber.html)

------
JarvisSong
It's great that this happened. It's annoying that it indicates the best way to
get support from Apple is to make a prominent blog post.

~~~
fenomas
"Reaching out via social" seems to be the new "can I speak to a supervisor".

True story - a month ago my credit card bill showed a mysterious $100 charge
from Amazon. Phone support found the charge but couldn't figure out why it had
been made, and eventually asked me to call my bank and dispute it(!!). That
sounded like crazy talk, but rather than arguing I just said thanks and
tweeted @amazon. Their social people referred me to someone who wound up
figuring out how to cancel the charge.

~~~
rahoulb
My bank (NatWest) kept sending me my bank statements in Braille, even though I
had opted out of paper statements completely. Six months of calling them up on
the phone or going into branch; each time I was told it was sorted, only for
the next month another braille statement to arrive. Complained about it on
twitter and within four hours it was fixed.

They don't seem to care unless there's a chance of other people noticing.

~~~
mseebach
I don't think it's malice, or at least as cynical as you make it. It might as
well be as simple as the social customer service department being younger and
thus not having been subject to the iron law of bureaucracy for so long. Their
budget possibly comes out of marketing, not customer service, and thus isn't
subject to being considered a pure cost centre. Social media is sexy, when
someone from that department makes a call, they are more likely to reach
someone who think it's fun to dig into an issue that when someone from the
phone bank (to the extent they're encouraged or even allowed to) reaches out.
Finally, both volume and S/N of social media pings are much better for many
firms as long as the people contacting you through those channels tend towards
being young and savvy, but that will change quickly as people catch on, and
the canned "Oh I'm sorry to hear that, please call our customer service
department on ...." responses that we're already starting to see will become
much more prevalent.

When thinking about customer service in big companies, it's important to
remember that the vast majority of calls legitimately are of the sort that
only require a very simple action to be taken, and then to be disconnected as
quickly as possible. However frustrating, it's not irrational hatred of
customers that makes it difficult to break through that assumption when you do
have a more complicated issue.

~~~
gglitch
That's like telling someone upset about a cold meal not to blame the waiter
because it could be the cook's fault. Who's at fault is not at issue. What's
at issue is that the customer can only get problems solved when the company's
reputation is at stake, which is a failure of integrity.

------
Steko
The other day I played one of my "Jedi Mind Tricks" albums on iTunes (yes this
happened in 2016, because reasons) and as each song played it disappeared from
the album list. Apparently the songs were being repopulated in another album
under "Army of the Pharaohs" because either iTunes (or I?) had decided to
rename the artist at some point.

Probably related, possibly dated: you might want your albums from "The
Dwarves" and "Dwarves" (don't judge me man) to be listed together because they
are the same band and it's not my fault ITMS has it wrong but if you rename
one, good old iCloud will happily download a new copy of the one you renamed.

~~~
Loughla
The Dwarves. I just. I. Who. Why?

I honestly never thought I would talk to someone who would actually own and
listen to their albums. Why would you do that? Are you a masochist? The
'music' is just awful, the shows are (at least they used to be) amazing.

But the 'music' is just so bad. Why do you do that to yourself?

~~~
Steko
> Why would you do that?

Nostalgia?

> Are you a masochist?

I hope not.

> The 'music' is just awful,

Some is sure but on the whole melodic/surf punk is far from the worst genre,
I've heard a lot worse and I only listen to certain tracks.

Also I gave explicit instructions not to judge me, man :)

------
Cheyana
About 20 years ago, when MASM was still for sale on the retail shelf, I called
Microsoft with a problem when the help files wouldn't install (from floppy).
The person on the other end showed me how to extract them manually, then later
in the week I had not one, but two calls back on my answering machine
following up and hoping everything was going okay with my installation and if
I had any issues to please call them back. Those were the days.

~~~
huhtenberg
Aye.

Around the same time a friend of mine sent a physical letter to Microsoft
reporting some minor bug with DOS 3.x. Not a couple of months after they
replied thanking for the report, confirming the bug and saying that it was now
fixed. On an official letterhead with watermark, signed by a real person.

~~~
brianwawok
You can get that kind of support (but in email over paper) for many smalltime
webapps now. Just doesn't scale well for a million customers ;)

------
megablast
This was originally from an article titles "Apple stole my music", whereas
iTunes deleted music from his computer.

I doubt the old Apple would have gone to so much trouble, good to see the new
Apple appearing to be more concerned and open.

~~~
dvhh
Probably trying to find a solution for the PR issue

------
mirimir
A couple years ago, Amazon deleted _Animal Farm_ and _1984_ from customers'
devices ;)

~~~
rpgmaker
Yeah but it was intentional while this ITMS issue seems to be because of a
bug.

~~~
mirimir
No, Apple was deleting stuff intentionally. That's clear from the articles and
cited Apple boilerplate. The bug just caused unintended deletion.

My point is that _any_ deletion is dangerous and unwarranted. If for no other
reason, because it increases the risk of catastrophic bugs like this one.
Sure, people should be backing up their stuff. But in this case, Apple acted
like filecrypter malware. Worse, in fact, because there's no recovery key.

~~~
rpgmaker
You don't have to tell me. I don't trust _any_ streaming service. Whatever
streaming I have to do I do it from own "cloud".

------
tomc1985
The deletion thing has been known for months. Now Apple does something?

And a special version of itunes? Does nobody over there collect mp3s?

~~~
themartorana
Have you ever written software? Do you know what the acronym WFM stands for?
Do I cringe every time I shrug sheepishly at the person in charge of customer
service? My company's software is used by millions of people and man do they
run into some of the most esoteric shit that we cannot produce in the lab.
Once I got lucky and my sister's off-brand Android was displaying an edge-case
bug we weren't even sure was real. Side-loaded a severely over-logging build
and finally found the sucker.

Special iTunes build just means it dumps logs faster than... Never mind. The
images that just popped into my mind weren't where I thought that was going as
I typed it.

~~~
seandougall
Exactly -- the broader the user base, the more likely it is you'll run into
people with really bizarre and difficult-to-replicate issues. I've seen our
main product grow from nothing to an industry standard, and darned if we
aren't still seeing bugs crop up that had gone undetected for years.

~~~
tomc1985
People have been grumbling on blogs about this for some time -- google trends
for "apple music deletes library" spike for about the last year or so. Wasn't
it posted on HN?

Given Apple's original, incredulous response to Vellum (see links elsewhere in
this thread), its 'known issue' status, the seemingly tepid response up-until-
now, and the amount of time they have had to solve this most arrogant of bugs,
my money is on the their appearance being some bright-eyed PR fix. I'd bet
Apple's management doesn't give a shit about your files when they compete
against Apple's pay service.

Edit: and good lord people! Empathize with me long enough to think about how,
possibly -- just possibly -- someone might have a different interpretation!
This is about tardiness and arrogance, not an insult to engineering. Sheesh

------
AJRF
I bet the guy turned on iCloud Music Library and hit replace.

------
internaut
That's one way to solve edge cases I suppose.

If your assassins tell you to watch Firefly they can finish their work before
Season 2. It shows there are good people everywhere.

~~~
themartorana
We came within moments of buying a customer a new phone in exchange for
shipping us her old phone with a non-reproducible bug. Got lucky and found the
issue just prior, so sent her a little something nice for the trouble.

~~~
ChrisDutrow
Compared to the cost of extra developer time, this seems like a reasonable
cost solution.

------
corndoge
I fail to see how this is interesting

------
anjc
I'm confused by this article. The engineers both do not dispute what their rep
said on the phone, and also admit that it was not user error. But they have
not said that it should not have happened.

Maybe I'm misreading? Has anybody said that this was _not_ meant to happen?
They've accepted that it deleted their files, but was it a bug or not?

------
arcticfox
Apple sent two engineers out to look at something that couldn't be repro'd?
Super unproductive.

Sounds like solely a PR move. A good one, I think, but a little strange.
Basically just "let's listen to some tunes while we score these PR points."

~~~
lallysingh
If paying customers are losing data and you can't reproduce locally, yeah,
it's worth a few plane tickets.

