
Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department - mxfh
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/65338904338/wow-or-from-the-when-apple-became-the-borg-department
======
revelation
Google has a better approach here. In their forums, they will promote power
users to semi-moderators. These people then, drunk on the (useless) power
bestowed upon them by Google, do their best to fend off and send into nirvana
actual problems, or just shower askers with pointless routine stuff
(reinstall, turn it off and on again) until they give up.

~~~
smrtinsert
If you buy a consumer electronics device from Google this is what you'd expect
though. Apple users are promised to never have to think for themselves again.
Apparently it takes Geniuses to do that, available at your nearest over priced
retail center.

~~~
nemof
It's pretty depressing to admit that yeah, I buy google products _despite_
their customer service, not because of it.

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.

~~~
alextingle
...or within 10,000 miles, in Google's case.

------
KaiserPro
Sadly this isn't news.

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.

~~~
w0utert
Apple is shit, Google is shit, Microsoft is shit, and the list continues...

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.

~~~
scrabble
I like Yahoo.

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.

~~~
vdaniuk
You like Yahoo, but the technical debt of supporting legacy systems is
mounting every year. Is that a sustainable strategy? I would rather be
inconvenienced by consntant change than risk a decline in the rate of
innovation. I want to see singularity happen, you know?

------
caryme
Forums are tough. I can see why Apple opts not to participate, although I
disagree with their decision. It also seems to be consistent with the Apple
ethos to remove overly negative posts and calls to action from the apple.com
domain. Again, I don't like this, but I'm not surprised.

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).

~~~
justin66
> I can see why Apple opts not to participate

As Lessig notes, they're engaging actively in censorship. That's certainly
their right, but it's not the same thing as not participating.

~~~
Perceval
Requiring that posts stay on topic isn't censorship. Terms of Service are
Terms of Service. There are lots and lots of other Apple/Mac/iPhone forums
around the web.

~~~
justin66
> Requiring that posts stay on topic isn't censorship.

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.

------
Shivetya
Two notes.

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

------
ebbv
Apple and Google do take very cold, inhuman approaches toward customer service
(or lack of it.) Except in the case of the Apple Store where the employees are
generally quite friendly, even if their actual helpfulness varies greatly from
individual to individual.

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.

~~~
ctdonath
Yup. The _problem_ seems a small matter of an OTA software update. The
_solution_ being posted - and deleted - is demanding a replacement of >US$500
of hardware. Whatever the reason for not fixing the actual problem, what's
being advocated as a solution isn't: it's just a way of counter-irritating the
company into (one hopes) releasing an actual fix. Abusive behavior is not
corrected by abusive behavior in return. There's some reason the correct fix
hasn't been released (whether you agree with the reason or not), Apple doesn't
want to talk about it for whatever reason makes sense to them, and of course
will stop any advocacy of malicious behavior on _their_ servers designed to
manipulate the company into doing something they have reason not to.

~~~
pja
It's hardly "malicious behaviour" to expect a company to deliver the service
their product advertising claimed.

~~~
ctdonath
Responding to that lack of delivery by abusing an unrelated legality, as a
means to raise the stakes until a fix occurs, is. It's like screaming at
someone until they do what you want, even if they think there's a good reason
not to and you don't know what the reason is.

~~~
pessimizer
>abusing an unrelated legality

How is trading in your non-working phone for a working phone an "unrelated
legality?"

------
post_break
Since 2006 when I first switched I don't remember Apple ever officially
posting in those forums. This isn't something new. Their support channels are
the phone number, and employees at the store. The forums are just their for
archive really.

~~~
jamesbritt
The key point of Lessig's post is not that Apple reps do not post there, it is
that Apple reps _remove_ posts that offer tangible, actionable, information,
for flimsy reasons.

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."

~~~
epo
One problem is that warranty rights vary around the world, so any advice
relating to specific rights will be irrelevant to most people.

~~~
PMan74
> so any advice relating to specific rights will be irrelevant to _most_
> people.

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.

------
dragontamer
I know its a typical blog post... but this is _the_ Lawrence Lessing. I hate
to hype him up (especially since this post of his is just a "humble blog post"
about one annoying issue), but Lawrence Lessing has a huge following.

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.

~~~
pit
It's astounding how rudely he's being treated in his own comments section.

------
usaphp
Why did not he just call apple or visit their store?

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.

~~~
skwirl
You only get 90 days of phone support with new Apple products unless you buy
AppleCare. I don't know about the person who wrote this article, but many
people do not live near Apple stores. Even where I live in metro Boston, it
takes 40 minutes to get to one from my home (red line to green line, ugh).
Where I grew up in Upstate NY, the nearest is 70 miles away.

~~~
Pxtl
The AppleCare might explain things. They want people to pay for Apple's high-
quality care and get the great Apple experience that way, not get low-quality
crappy free support from a forum. So the forum is only operated out of
necessity - if Apple didn't run one, somebody else would - and it can't be a
support avenue because Apple must always control the quality of the experience
and you have to pay Apple for that.

It's actually consistent and reasonable when you look at Apple's obsession
with quality.

~~~
avenger123
Apple's obsession with quality should not include leaving user's in a lurch.

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.

~~~
Pxtl
Apple offers two streams for any product - "good" and "perfect".

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.

~~~
usaphp
> 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?

~~~
Pxtl
That's the exact opposite of my point.

Apple offers the best. I totally agree, Apple does the best. You just have to
pay for it.

------
brador
The worst part is no rollback on IOS without root combined with unstoppable
upgrades. The only way I stop my devices updating is keeping them under 1GB
free space so the update can't download. This is terrible for an enterprise
environment where software stability is a key criteria.

If they allowed rollback this problem would solve itself until a fix was
created and pushed out. Instead, they get angry users.

~~~
gtufano
Automatic upgrades stop is only one switch in preferences away. I use it to
preserve iOS versions I have to test with.

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).

------
bambax
Why isn't there a forum for Apple products not controlled by Apple? Shouldn't
there be a stackexchange site for this?

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...

~~~
nathan_long
You mean this one?
[http://apple.stackexchange.com/](http://apple.stackexchange.com/)

------
conception
I'm not sure how this is a particularly different policy from any mega-
corporation. I've never seen any great support on online forums from the
company in question. If you're having a wi-fi problem, follow the company's
support potocol, which in this case is probably go to the genius bar and get
it fixed. Where you'll probably have a better experience than if you tried to
get help for a competing product.

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.

~~~
GuiA
This is only the first point of his post. The second, and more important,
point being that Apple employees are actively deleting messages in which users
explain how one can exerce their warranty rights to get the iPhone replaced.

------
driverdan
To those who help others on Apple, Google, or other big multinational business
discussion groups / forums, why do you do so?

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?

~~~
akbiggs
I see the point you're making here, but I feel like the motivations you're
pointing at for why people post on discussion groups and forums isn't correct
in most cases. At least in my experience, people tend to post helpful advice
because helping people out feels good. It also provides an ego boost when
people view you as an expert at something.

~~~
jamesbritt
Right. If someone slips on ice on the sidewalk in front of a store, you don't
ignore them and think, hey, the store owner is on the hook here; not my
problem.

You help that person get up.

That doesn't absolve anyone of their rightful responsibilities, but it does
make for a nicer world.

------
daraosn
Same story for 2011 Q1 MBP, it seems like the Graphics are defect for several
models and suddenly started to fail for several customers about now... +800
posts, NO RESPONSE FROM APPLE!!

[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577)

~~~
slantyyz
I had this issue pop up in late 2012/early 2013 on my 2011 MBP. It was just
visual at first but after a few months, it turned into system crippling hangs.

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.

------
kbenson
Am I the only one that sees this forum as a honeypot to suck useful posts into
a location that apple can curate and prune away anything they deem likely to
be detrimental?

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.

------
cormullion
Apple Discussions moderators have been deleting dozens of messages from the
iWork threads too (I had a similar email :). Nothing new, though.

------
wtdominey
As others have pointed out, this isn't anything new. Apple has never been
comfortable with public feedback and has pruned comments (and sometimes entire
threads) from their discussions for as long as I can remember (and that's a
pretty long time). Even when Apple was on-the-ropes in the mid-to-late 90s
they behaved like "the Borg". Nothing has changed.

------
jimhefferon
There is something about perceiving yourself as unassailable that makes a
tremendous temptation to be the borg, to be an asshole. Surely everyone has
observed that many times, from _Mean Girls_ to MicroSoft a decade ago?

------
mahyarm
What stops these mega companies from hiring a 120 people online forum support
team and removing a lot of bad will? Even if most of the posts were 'we will
help you with your problem, just call this phone number'.

------
brudgers
Assimilation means buying an iPhone 5s or 5c, not upgrading an old one.

Geeze, that was easy.

------
mergy
Anyone old enough to remember Apple back in the 90s?

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.

------
mumbi
losethos, you're dead. just thought you should know.

~~~
teddyh
He knows. Check out his comment history to see why he is.

------
microcolonel
Blaming regulations for your decision to get a crappier warranty or SLA than
you could demand elsewhere is like blaming your car manufacturer for the
availability and price of fuel.

~~~
TheCowboy
It's more like the car manufacturer is providing updates and bug fixes for
your car, which then renders your windshield wipers or some other significant
feature useless, and this problem occurs for a large number of users, then
attempting to use the support forums provided by the manufacturer only to find
the manufacturer not only does not respond to posts but also deletes useful
posts, and also does not provide an easy way for users to downgrade so it
fixes the problem.

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.

~~~
microcolonel
I'm talking about the absurdity of expecting explicitly-disclaimed benefits to
just rain from the sky because you bought something.

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.

