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Why Everyone Loves Apple

Posted by CowboyNeal on Fri Mar 31, 2006 07:37 AM
from the or-at-least-apple-users dept.
Media Media (Apple) Businesses Apple
realtorperson writes "Why, at least the Apple users, love Apple? According to a recent article, the pure and simple reason is customer service and overall experience. The author writes, 'When Apple competitors are focused on cost reduction to increase profitability, Apple is investing resources to enhance its relationship with its customers. To me, that's impressive. Unfortunately, there are too many companies in the market that could care less about their customers, but Apple is determined and committed in delivering the experience and not just the product. It's regrettably amusing that Apple competitors are working hastily to develop iPod clones to reap in success, but what many of them fail to comprehend is that it's not necessarily the iPod that makes Apple successful, but rather its customer service.'"
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  • Spelling error (Score:5, Insightful)

    by minginqunt (225413) on Friday March 31 2006, @07:41AM (#15032999) Homepage Journal
    It's spelt A S T R O T U R F.

  • Best customer service (Score:5, Interesting)

    by noelmarkham (714160) * on Friday March 31 2006, @07:42AM (#15033002)
    I recently had to take my Intel Mac Mini back to the London Regent Street store after a problem booting up. Unfortunately it was one day after the 14-day refund and replace guarantee had expired. They said, 'oh well, 15 days is close enough', and they replaced it there and then on the spot, and transferred all my data on to the new machine on the same day. I don't think I've ever experienced anything like that with any other company ever.

      • Re:Idiot - that was the store (Score:4, Insightful)

        by wootest (694923) on Friday March 31 2006, @09:30AM (#15033616)

        Last time I checked, Apple owned their own store on Regent Street [apple.com], as do they every single one of their other stores (not even through a subsidary), so that had very much to do with Apple. That said, this kind of customer service - including transferring stuff over to the new box - shouldn't be surprising, and I think it's sad that it is. I know of only one local chain that would help out with stuff like that, and they'd likely charge you for that hour and not even know what to do with the Mac in the first place (even though they sell them).

  • it's so simple (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cowscows (103644) on Friday March 31 2006, @07:42AM (#15033006) Journal
    Yeah, cause it couldn't be a combination of a lot of things, including solid hardware, a useful interface/software, thoughtful design, good marketing, adequate customer service, and having the right product at the right time...it couldn't simply be that complex.

    Nope, Apple must have some special secret. And all it'll take for some other company to pull the rug out from under them is to find that magic bullet, that one key aspect of their success, and then an iPod killer can truly be born.

    Dammit, some people are stupid.
  • If you have a problem with one of their systems or an iPod (like I did) you can damn well forget it unless the problem becomes widespread enough to hit popular tech pages.

    Apple is a corporation, it is not Steve Jobs, it is not warm and cuddly. If Apple loved their customers then Apple would not charge such a premium for their systems. The fact is, Apple loves to exploit, and rightfully so, their position with their customers. They have worked long and hard to create their image and they sure as hell ain't going to let the profit it generates slip by.
    • I myself have found that running a business is tough, not because of all the strenous work, not because of having to support customers, but in trying to sway customers your way and get them to stick with you. You can have the best intentions in the world and explain that you are on the customer's side and do all these great things for open source, but in the end customers will still treat your business like its the enemy and just go for the cheapest.

      What Apple has is amazing and is not easy to get. Its no

  • Apple's service is not that great. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tgd (2822) on Friday March 31 2006, @07:44AM (#15033013)
    I have two dead iPods and a dead iBook to show for my experiment with Apple. One died just out of warranty, the replacement I bought had the drive go with less than a month left on the warranty. The replacement came, and turns out had a bad dock connector. Unfortunately they wouldn't honor a warranty on the replacement and in the two remaining weeks of the warranty, I didn't happen to use the replacement. So now I've got two dead iPods.

    I also have a iBook that died with the extremely common logic board failure two months out of warranty... a problem that they extended the warranty coverage for on the G3 iBooks, but didn't do on the G4 even though its a very common problem.

    Apple was the reason I left ten years of Linux use as my primary desktop OS behind, and Apple is the reason I'll be going back.

  • For the love of God... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zenmojodaddy (754377) on Friday March 31 2006, @07:44AM (#15033016)
    ... the phrase is 'could NOT care less'. If you COULD care less, that means you do care and have room for treating your customers worse, doesn't it?

    Please allow me to utter a short yelp of annoyance.

  • Absolutely True (Score:4, Informative)

    by BladesP9 (722608) on Friday March 31 2006, @07:46AM (#15033025)
    This is absolutely true. I've bought many macintosh computers for the companies I have owned and worked for.

    During lean times we would use eBay to buy computers and equipment for employees. One occasion in particular I bought a strawberry iMac as a work station for a designer advertised as new in the box only to find out the machine was two years past the date of manufacture. As a matter of policy, Apple only honors the warranty within I believe 90 days of the date of manufacture. After a few attempts to repair the machine unsuccessfully, Apple replace it with a new (at the time) iMac that had much better specifications at no charge. Just recently, they gave me a lot of good advice and support on a lemon iMac I received from MacMall.

    I value customer service primarily because I pride myself on giving it - and it's nice to deal with a company then genuinely seems to care about it's customers. I'm an Apple customer for life partially because I prefer their product, but mostly because they treat me like a human being instead of a credit card number.

  • Customers Service at Apple is awful! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Manip (656104) on Friday March 31 2006, @07:50AM (#15033043)
    I had a problem with a recent iTunes patch, long story short it broke all DRM-ed music playback on my PC but not on the iPod. Tried all the standard bits, uninstall, reinstall, looked up help page...

    Sure Apple did have a help page for the problem but it didn't help one tiny bit.

    So I contacted them. Said something like "DRM protection music is distorted during playback as suggested by an apple help page(URL); MP3, WMA, and CD Audio playback works just fine ..." and they sent back a cookie cutter "You can't convert to WMA" ...

    This is just yet another company that doesn't give too hoots enough to read what you send them or to respond on their forums. The article is talking a whole load of bull from my experiences with apple up to this point.

    If you ask me, the company with the single best customer service is Amzon(.co.uk). They don't bull you... They are MORE than fair, and don't make you jump though hoops.

  • Customer Service was out to lunch (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rocjoe71 (545053) on Friday March 31 2006, @07:56AM (#15033073) Homepage
    So when Apple initially refused to acknowledge that their new iPod Nanos would scratch easily, where exactly was good customer service being practised?

  • Why? It's simple: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Junior J. Junior III (192702) on Friday March 31 2006, @07:57AM (#15033077) Homepage
    Apple's Steve throws frisbees, not chairs.

  • Trademark (Score:5, Funny)

    by szembek (948327) on Friday March 31 2006, @08:09AM (#15033142) Homepage
    Gee, I was confused, I thought you were talking about Apple records!

  • That meay be true in US but.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DenDave (700621) * on Friday March 31 2006, @08:29AM (#15033228)
    Having just called the local Apple Center in my town to ask about a Superdrive replacement to my MacMini all I got was "that will cost 500-600 Euro", appalled I replied that I would be better off buying a new one, the reply "that's the way we like it"... some service buddy...

    I like the product but the retailers (in EU) have to learn that this is not the way to keep me coming. For what it's worth, I just ordered the damn drive myself online for significantly less and will end up installing it myself. I hope an Apple (EU) rep will read this thread and get the message. This is the last time I am fixing it myself. I am perfectly happy to switch back to *nix systems that I service myself, if the supposed convenience of Apple fails me, I will.

  • Why people really love Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rbnsncrusoe (959286) on Friday March 31 2006, @09:25AM (#15033585)
    It's not the customer service. Apple cares as much about their customers as Steve Jobs cares about a diverse wardrobe. Apple is beloved for these reasons.... 1. Style. It makes people feel cool, cause it looks cool. 2. Intuitive use. Especially for the less computer savvy, the Apple experience is simply more coherent to how people "think" things should work. 3. When you own an Apple, you are immediately inducted into the "club". Everyone want to feel their apart of the cool crowd. Owning an Apple gives some that illusion.

  • How I Hate Corporate Fanboys (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pandrijeczko (588093) on Friday March 31 2006, @09:41AM (#15033696)
    Look, I've never owned an Apple product, never had the need for one, so I'm certainly not qualified to comment on whether their products/service are any good or not. From what others tell me, I suspect they're probably okay so that's it.

    But can we PLEASE get it into our heads ONCE AND FOR ALL that the purpose of any big corporation is JUST to make money for its shareholders - END OF STORY!!! Whether or not you, the consumer, thinks they make good or bad products is pretty much irrelevant to them once they have your money. And if they give you a good customer service and/or a good feeling every time you deal with them, it is not because they're feeling nice, warm or friendly about you but because it is profitable to do so.

    If you love your Mac or your iPod then great - good luck to you. But PLEASE get it out of your thick skull that wearing a corporate logo of ANY sort is cool - it isn't because it just goes to show the rest of the world that you are insecure enough to want to belong to one (or more) exclusive little cliques that makes you feel special because you can look down on those that aren't members of those same cliques.

    Buy an article of clothing because it looks nice on you or feels good on you, buy an iPod because it sounds good or fits well in your jeans pocket - but don't just buy something because it's made by "Gap" or "Apple" because then you really are showing the rest of the world only how much of a corporate puppet you really are...

    • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:4, Informative)

      by zoeblade (600058) on Friday March 31 2006, @07:53AM (#15033060) Homepage

      Really, portable music players that use lossy codecs are only designed to play finished songs. If you want to record bits of solo work and glue them together, you should save them in a lossless format such as .aif, and copy them across to your fellow group members by putting them onto a portable drive (such as the iPod can be, but there are better ones that aren't also music players) as regular files rather than as songs they should play.

      Unless you just want to listen to each other's noodlings as they are, without futher modification, in which case, you can put your iPod in any computer running OS X, close iTunes back down when it automatically pops up, go into the Terminal, cd on over to /Volumes/[The name of your iPod] and cp the files across.

      • cd on over to /Volumes/[The name of your iPod] and cp the files across.

        That sort of solution might be OK for the linux fanboys - but this is Apple (and I would like my filenames preserved, rather then have weird ipod db names)

        When I plug in an iPod that is not the one that is usually synced with iTunes, it would be trivial for Apple to offer a "Add these files to your itunes collection" option.

        But they don't - because their corporate partners are more important then their customers wishes.

        • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by croddy (659025) on Friday March 31 2006, @08:20AM (#15033185)
          Not to mention the dialog that pops up essentially says, "Hey! It looks like you've plugged your iPod into someone else's computer. I'd better erase all of your music, is that OK?"

          Don't think for a moment that this isn't specifically designed to cultivate a fear of plugging your iPod into someone else's computer. After all, if people share music, Apple can't take a cut of the transaction.

          • Not to mention the dialog that pops up essentially says, "Hey! It looks like you've plugged your iPod into someone else's computer. I'd better erase all of your music, is that OK?"

            Don't think for a moment that this isn't specifically designed to cultivate a fear of plugging your iPod into someone else's computer. After all, if people share music, Apple can't take a cut of the transaction. the RIAA will stop letting Apple run the iTMS, and we're back to where we started - having to buy entire albums to get one good track.

            I agree with you, they're trying to encourage people to not copy their friends' music libraries. And yes, there are cases - the garage band with personal noodling tracks that GP mentioned - where this is completely legal. However, the vast majority of cases are people copying tracks that they don't have distribution rights for. I think it's better to slightly inconvenience the few people (and it is slight - you can copy the tracks in the Terminal, using a shell script, using Automator, using freeware utilities, etc.) in order to make the appearance of compliance to the RIAA.

            • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:4, Insightful)

              by CastrTroy (595695) on Friday March 31 2006, @09:15AM (#15033507) Homepage
              But that just proves the point. Your inconveniencing the users who aren't 'uber computer gawds', and at the same time not really providing any real protection against pirates. It's like the CD Copy protection used by Sony, EMI, et al. It's annoys the regular users who just want to play the songs on their mp3 player, while the real pirates just use linux of disable cd autorun.
              • I think you're missing the point. If the iPod didn't provide some semblance of copy protection, if it didn't create the appearance of protecting copyrighted music, and if Apple as a company didn't pretend to give a shit about the RIAA, then the iPod could not exist as a consumer product in the way it does today.

                Nobody likes the RIAA, except for the record labels. I doubt even the people who work at Apple like them, or like having to basically cripple their hardware and software because of them. But it just doesn't make any sense, if you wanted to produce a useful product -- and useful requires that you not get sued and get an injunction placed against distributing the product, or get run out of business by billion-dollar DMCA lawsuits, groundless as they may be -- you don't go taking a baseball bat to the hornet's nest that is the RIAA.

                Instead, you blow some smoke at them. Appease them, if you will. You throw some trivial copy protection on there, enough so you can say "hey, we told them not to steal music," but which makes it easy for anybody with half a brain to download Senuti (or any of the other dozen utilities that are out there) and share their music with anyone else.

                It's a good compromise, and I much prefer it to the alternative, which is that they wait for the RIAA to either sue them into the ground, or use their pet politicians to pass some bullshit law requiring really onerous DRM. Because that's the alternative.

        • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by jc42 (318812) on Friday March 31 2006, @08:45AM (#15033311) Homepage Journal
          That sort of solution might be OK for the linux fanboys - but this is Apple (and I would like my filenames preserved, rather then have weird ipod db names)

          Heh. Just the sort of know-nothingness that Apple (and MS) depend on to keep you in their thrall.

          If you wanna know how it works and how to get it to do what you want, well, you gotta learn how it works. You must look behind the public mask, grasshopper, and see the reality throuth the lens of the CLI. You must learn to call things by their True Names, which can't be spoken by the mouse.

          Not to mix a metaphor or anything ...

        • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:5, Informative)

          by sh00z (206503) <sh00z&yahoo,com> on Friday March 31 2006, @09:09AM (#15033450) Journal
          But they don't - because their corporate partners are more important then their customers wishes.
          This is an oversimplistic way of looking at the situation, and one that lays entirely too much blame at the feet of Apple. Go and look back to the very first pocket mp3 players. The RIAA vs Diamond Rio lawsuit (references here [pcworld.com], here [findlaw.com], and here [riaa.com] is now the legal precedent that Apple and everyone else is following. They are simply not legally allowed to make it trivial to transfer files back off of an iPod. If portable, transferrable music is your goal, just to buy your favorite flavor of Flash-based memopry card (Compact Flash, SD, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, etc., $US 40 for 1 GB) and a USB reader ($US 7-8). Do not accuse Apple of being unfriendly to consumers when it's been demonstrated that if they were to take your approach, they would soon be faced with an injunction that would PREVENT them from selling ANYTHING to consumers.

          • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by CastrTroy (595695) on Friday March 31 2006, @09:11AM (#15033474) Homepage
            The only difference between the iPod and any other MP3 player is that iPods can play music off iTunes. There's many more mp3 players out that that don't have all this DRM BS on them, and are actually much easier to use because of this. Just rip your cd's the way you regularly would, or download mp3s off irc (if the cd is copy protected, and you misplaced your shift key), and drag and drop the files on there. About as easy as you can get.
      • A lot of non-professional multitrack music recorders use lossy compression (mp2, mp3 or proprietary) nowadays. It uses less disk space and less disk I/O. Good A/D converters are much more important. Most of the time you can even bounce (merge) tracks a couple of times before you actually hear the difference....

        Of course there are companies (like Tascam) that market low-budget multitrackers with lossless recording, but the tradeoff is that there wasn't enough money left to include good A/D converters and the

    • Exactly - it is about customer service (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 31 2006, @08:18AM (#15033175)
      What's the easiest default configuration for most people?

      That's right - sync to the library on my computer! I'll bet this exceeds the 80/20 rule, but let's stick to that - if more than 20% of iPod users ever plug their iPod into more than one computer, I'll eat my iPod.

      As for hiding the music directory on the iPod, what do novice users do all the time? clean up files! So I don't blame Apple from hiding the music files on the iPod either. I can't tell you how many windows and Mac computers both I have had to fix over the years from users who didn't know what they were doing, but just had to "tidy up"....

      And if you do plug your iPod into a new computer, iTunes prompts you as to what to do, and warns you that if you sync it will wipe out all the existing music on your iPod. Heck, my mother figured it out when she plugged her iPod into my laptop so I could copy some files off of it.

      So stop spreading the FUD... if Apple really cared about the "interests of large corporations" they would have gone to greater effort to prevent you from copying music files off than just hiding the directory :/ All it takes is two minutes of reading around to figure out how to get music files back off your iPod. If you are advanced enough to want to do that manually, you should be advanced enough to search around and figure out how.

      Unless you are trolling on slashdot :p

    • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Brian Kendig (1959) on Friday March 31 2006, @08:26AM (#15033211) Homepage
      Now - we should be able to pool all our music together. But try doing it using iTunes - its on the verge of impossible.

      Turn on your iPod's disk mode, through the preferences in iTunes. Copy your sound clips to the iPod. Bring your iPod to your friend's house and copy the sound clips off it. No problem.

      Are you complaining that there's no GUI way to copy sound clips directly out of the iPod's music repository? That's like complaining there's no easy way to get at your toaster's heating coils. You're taking an appliance that does a specific job very well, and complaining that it doesn't give you a lot of options for doing something it's not intended to do. iPod is designed to sync up with the iTunes library, and I like that degree of simplicity. It's not designed to let you copy music in and out of its library by hand.

      Yes, if you connect your iPod to someone else's computer and you're not paying attention, you might accidentally let the other person's iTunes replace your song library with his. I don't like the eagerness with which iTunes does this. But the fix is simple: bring your iPod back to your computer and plug it in and sync it up again.

    • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jcr (53032) <[jcr] [at] [mac.com]> on Friday March 31 2006, @08:42AM (#15033298) Journal
      its customer is RIAA, not us the people who buy & use their products.

      How fashionably militant of you.

      We are the customers. The RIAA is a cartel of suppliers.

      -jcr

      • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:4, Funny)

        by tpgp (48001) on Friday March 31 2006, @10:07AM (#15033892) Homepage
        How fashionably militant of you.

        Gosh! Fashionably militant? I'm not sure what you mean, but it sounds exciting.

        We are the customers. The RIAA is a cartel of suppliers.

        Oh - right, thanks for clearing that up. God I was stupid for getting them the wrong way round. Or perhaps I was making a point and you're just more literal minded then the rest of the human race.

    • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mr. Underbridge (666784) on Friday March 31 2006, @08:57AM (#15033367)
      Unfortunately - its customer is RIAA, not us the people who buy & use their products.

      Reality check - Apple has fought the RIAA pretty hard to keep iTMS prices 1)lower, and 2) uniform.

      We all go round to the drummer's house to have a jam, we all have our ipods with us. Now - we should be able to pool all our music together. But try doing it using iTunes - its on the verge of impossible (in fact most ipod owners are afraid to plug their ipod in to someone's computer in case all the files are delete)

      I can't help it you and your friends 1) don't know how to use an iPod, and 2) are incapable of using flash drives, which are specifically made for that sort of thing. You *can* use the iPod as a drive. However, it's not the default mode because - *gasp* - the iPod is a music player!

      If you're trying to use a device for a use that isn't its reason for existance, be prepared to do some legwork to figure out how to make it do what you want. An iPod isn't a replacement for a recording studio.

      Ironically, Apple makes a great product intended *just for you.* It's called GarageBand. Get a laptop.

    • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:4, Informative)

      by eclectic4 (665330) on Friday March 31 2006, @09:42AM (#15033712)
      "But try doing it using iTunes - its on the verge of impossible (in fact most ipod owners are afraid to plug their ipod in to someone's computer in case all the files are delete)."

      You should be modded down, because this is user error... on your part. You will be prompted by iTunes which will say (paraphrased), "This iPod is synched with a different iTunes, would you like to erase this iPod and use this new iTunes to synch with?" You then have the option to click "No". If you want to grab music from othe people's iTunes, just set your iPod to manually update, and you can grab music from 100 different iTunes. If you wish to give your friends your music, just plop the actual mp3's onto your iPod as data and give it to them. Your entire beef is due to you not knowing how to use your iPod.

      Mod him down, now...

          • Re:Apple's Customer service is great. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by the argonaut (676260) on Friday March 31 2006, @09:07AM (#15033436) Homepage Journal
            And without the RIAA willing to play ball, Apple has nothing with the iPod. The design of the hardware/software interfaces and the business model revolves around having iTunes/iTMS.

            Executive summary: RIAA bad, Apple in bed with RIAA for business purposes, best chance of RIAA extracting stick from ass is iTMS/Fairplay model.

            Why do people keep playing this same sorry tune over and over again? First off , get it straight, it's the record companies, not the RIAA. Without the record companies "playing ball", Apple would most likely still have the #1 selling digital music player, but not the #1 online music store. The success of the iPod has almost nothing to do with the iTMS, and without licensing from the labels, Apple would still have the "seamless integration" of the iPod/iTunes.

            And also, the whole "business model" of the iTMS isn't revolutionary at all. People keep making such a big fucking deal about how it's soooooo cutting edge and innovative just because it's the first truly successful online music store, but in reality it's the exact same business model that the recording industry has been using forever: X amount of money to record company to split up as it chooses, generally keeping most for itself and giving a pittance to the person or persons who actually created the music, and Y amount of markup to the retailer (Apple) to cover overhead (storage, software development, bandwidth, credit card fees etc.) and maybe make a little bit of profit. At best what Apple has done is evolutionary, not revolutionary. The iTMS is nothing more than Amazon without any physical product.

            Executive Summary:

            1) Apple has no relationship with the RIAA, so will you idiots please stop saying that, Apple is in bed with the record companies, which is NOT the same thing
            2) Apple derives little to no benefit from their business relationship with the record companies
            3) The best chance of further entrenching and extending the current music industry model in the online world is the iTMS/Fairplay model.
    • I don't love Apple.

      Like you said, the customers service is nothing special, and arguably worse than companies like Dell, which operate in a market with more severe competition (the windows PC).

      The Apple II was pretty cool, but the 25 years of unjustified media hype and the attitude of Mac fanatics have really spoiled the Apple brand for me

    • Apple is in the image and style biz. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by AnonymousPrick (956548) on Friday March 31 2006, @08:07AM (#15033126)
      Buy Apple and you'll look and be cool!

      Don't believe me? Why is that people were actually wearing just the ear buds when the iPod was becoming popular? Image. During the switch campaign, all of the folks that I saw in the adds were the all blck wearing, pierced noses, and other younger folks who looked really cool. I didn't see any folks in business suits talking about ROI or how it made their organization much more profitable - like you see in IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc... ads.

      Is Apple really that much better than any other computer out there? I haven't seen any compelling evidence for that. I would agree that as recent as the mid-90's, Apple was superior, but now, I don't see it. Prove me wrong - please. I have to say that Apples are much nicer looking than anything out there. And I think Jobs knows this. Jobs is a genius when it comes to marketing. He made a brilliant move with the "flavor" iMacs years ago. I thought those machines were crap to use - it was slow and OS 9 crashed and hung a lot. OS X works much better on them, but it's still slow. But they sure looked great!

      I haven't tried the new machines, yet. I'm not in the market for a new machine, but when I am, beleive me, I will look at Apple again. I do like the fact that all of the dev tools are free! Unlike the other OS company.

      • The people that were wearing just the ear buds are just like the easily-led people who follow any other trend. Have no doubt about it, there are a lot of followers and a lot of stupid people in the world, but it's not Apple's fault for making products about which people become passionate.

        Think about it this way- how many fads have you seen come and go within a year? 6 months? 3 months? Now think about the fact that the iPod is in its 5th or 6th generation (too lazy to look it up exactly right now) and has

    • Re:Tripe (Score:5, Informative)

      by revscat (35618) on Friday March 31 2006, @08:14AM (#15033161) Homepage Journal

      This article is simple shilling for Apple. Anyone who has actually had an encounter with Apple's customer service would know that they're exactly the same as any other manufacturer.

      My experiences have been different.

      A few weeks ago I needed to order a battery for my wife's laptop, a slightly older Powerbook. I had ordered one from their website, but it was the wrong one, so I called them to replace it. Well, they had a hard time figuring out which battery I needed, and so after being put on hold for 15 minutes I hung up with the intention of calling them back the next Monday (this was on a Saturday.)

      Well, about 10 minutes later they called me back to tell me my battery was on its way. FedEx delivered it that coming *Monday*. I have never had a company call me back, and I think that ranks right up there with the best customer services experiences I have ever had.

      • Re:Tripe (Score:5, Funny)

        by JourneyExpertApe (906162) on Friday March 31 2006, @09:17AM (#15033521)
        That's nothing new for me. Shortly after I got my iMac, I got a call asking if everything worked as expected and if I was happy with my purchase. Of course, I said yes, I was happy with it. Then one evening a few days later, I got another call asking if they had included all the cables in the package and if my iMac still worked OK. At first, I was flattered by this hands on customer care, but then the calls started coming every day while I was at work or late at night, sometimes three or four times a day. Was I still satisfied? Had I been looking at other brands lately? Did I think the hard drive was getting fat? I ended up selling it because it was just too high maintenance. If you're reading this, Apple, it's not you, it's me. And quit calling my friends trying to get my new number.

    • Re:complete tripe (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jcr (53032) <[jcr] [at] [mac.com]> on Friday March 31 2006, @08:52AM (#15033347) Journal
      Most Apple customers never even deal with Apple customer service.

      Which is, of course, the best service of all.

      Apple pays very close attention to the issues that drive their support calls, and they get prioritized accordingly. The MagSafe power connector, for example, was developed because Apple knows exactly how many times they've fixed a machine because their users have damaged a laptop by snagging the power cable and dragging it off a table.

      -jcr

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