Does Apple take Responsibility when it messes up?
 

Ok - this is not a tech question post, but rather about Apple's response to Tech Issues.

There seems to be a tremendous number of people having issues with iTunes 7.6. People are seeing libraries wiped out, iPod's wiped out, system hanging, and a persistant issue related to accessing the iTunes Store. This issue seems to be affecting both Window's users and Mac users alike. I'm on a Mac myself, but like I say - this isn't about resolving my tech issue. If you want to learn more about the 100's of users having issues, check out http://discussions.apple.com/forum.j...ID=783&start=0 or do a google search. It's pretty widespread.

But the reason I'm posting is Apples response to this. For my part, I contacted iTunes Store support and have an ongoing series of emails with them. They have offered absolutely no workable solution to my particular problem with 7.6, and have said they are not aware of anyone having issues with 7.6. I have 23 purchased TV shows waiting download, and their only solution for me is to contact Apple Support which they say is chargeable. I don't find this an acceptable solution.

Searching the forums at the link above I saw many users who also spoke with Apple support, online, on the phone and at genius bars - and in all cases it's the same message from Apple - "really?! we haven't heard about anyone else with problems" - and yet their own forums are filled with frustrated users.

I posted on the Apple Forum - it was basically a "me too - I'm having similar problems, any solutions?" posting - like many others that were there. But I took it a step further and told users they should write to Apple and tell them that if this isn't resolved they will withdraw their business from iTunes store. Apple moderators promptly deleted this posting, saying that I was commenting on "Apple Policies", something they forbid in their forum.

All I'd like to see is Apple stepping up and saying - yes we recognize there is a major problem with this release, and we're working on a solution. Instead they are censoring my posts and claiming that they haven't heard anyone else having an issue, and more importantly not offering anyone any solutions.

I urge anyone who's having a problem to write to Apple and let them know how they feel! I've spent well over $1000 with iTunes Store in just the past few months - a drop in the bucket. But if there are 1000 other users out there that write in, we're suddenly talking about over $1M in revenue at stake, or even more if you consider "lifetime value".

What do others think?

Rob

I think you have every right to complain. And I think you make an excellent point, Apple is really hurting itself in the end, they need the revenue, it's not like their company can function on wistful thinking.

What bugs me is I seem to see this happening more and more lately, which is a bit disconcerting. Apple seems to have put a lot of effort into creating brand loyalty, as most of us here can attest to, why screw that up with bad customer support? This isn't the first time I've seen Apple in flat out denial of an obvious problem. There's a thread some where on this site called "Where is my Airport Card" or something similar. It details a huge problem that old PB12" and iBook 12" had with their Airport cards, and it caused Kernal panics left and right. What did Apple do? Ignore it.

This problem needs to be solved, and pronto. And I'm referring to more than iTunes 7.6. Apple must start taking feedback and admitting mistakes, or they will miss out on a plethora of opportunities for growth.

You know what the irony is - Apple fans are still rabidly loyal, and will suffer a lot that Microsoft gets called on.

In this case, simply telling customers that "Yes this is a big problem, we're working on it" would be enough - and with most issues. But yes - I get the feeling they don't want to take responsibility for these issues.

Hear...Hear...

Stupid question:

Is there anything anyone could say about the situation that would change anyone's perception here? I mean, I don't think the criticism is fair for a set of reasons, but I honestly don't want to burn time writing a post about it if there's no point.

I think relevant to this thread are the recent upgrades of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote -- did anyone read Adam Engst's latest column in which he says (among other things):

.
I couldn't agree more. Baaad policy. I want to know what's been changed, and as Engst says, it's not necessary to attach it to the update, but it should least be available on the Apple site.

Engst is right about that.

http://mikey-san.net/damage/archives...7/opacity.html

You don't want to flood people with all kinds of potentially misleading technical info in these kinds of update notes, but you shouldn't be completely opaque like some of Apple's update notes tend to be. (Apple's not alone here, but this thread is about them, not others.)

And this is also an important point, least we forget. If we called Dell, HP or (shiver) a cell phone carrier--we would end up with a lot of the same problems.

So, this leads me to an introspective question. I don't really get mad at other companies when they do this, why? Two reasons come to mind. One, I depend on Apple products. Two, I really have bought into the idea that Apple products are superior, and I expect the same from their tech support.

In reality, that's what I am getting at when I rag on Apple's Support. I want it to be as simple and intuitive as using their product, and I can't see any reason why I should expect otherwise. Perhaps they should spend some of their cash on researching this?

I do get mad when other companies do this, but it makes me angrier when Apple does it, and I think it should. I'm willing to buy a better product, but part of what makes a product better is customer service and tech support.

Unfortunately, we live in a disposable, cheaper-box-is-better world, and Apple hires people from that world. There will always be some within the company that want to take the cheapest, laziest route. It's good that people are complaining about it, so that it will filter up to the top and something will be done about the problem.

I have learned a big lesson after upgrading to Leopard--that is, never upgrade without a few months of issue settling. I spent more time trying to iron out OS issues than I did being productive. Now, I am getting to the point where I will just turn off the automatic software update and wait until the proverbial dust settles on updates. I mean really, I'm updating iTunes mostly to bloat it with iPhone and movies on demand stuff. I don't need it. I don't want it. All this to say, the past year has done more to make me paranoid of what Apple is doing rather than confident.

Now, I can understand the desire and need for the above new technologies. But my goodness, what was iTunes originally for anyhow--"iTunes". They need to have "iMedia" with an extension set that includes iPod, iPhone, Movies on Demand, etc. That way if there is an issue, an extension can be deactivated until it is cleared up.

In my book, Schneb, it's called bloat. Like you, I spent too much time fiddling with Leopard, particularly as I had done a clean install on a new disk and had to migrate stuff from the Tiger disk which is still connected. Result: a lot of aliases got screwed up, as did a bunch of Quicksilver triggers on scripts.

I own an iPod nano which I use with a Belkin FM device to listen to it on the car radio, and can't imagine watching a video on its 2" screen. I don't own an iPhone. I don't use half the features of the Sony Ericsson I have -- strangely enough, I use it to make phone calls, but not as the MP3 player or crappy camera it also is. What it has going for it is excellent GSM connectivity and clarity plus Bluetooth for loading my Address Book and Calendars.

In another thread, I've mentioned that I've abandonned Spaces -- it was in my view broken, and I use a conventional dock on the left side of my screen with HierarchicalDock running to give me full depth folder contents instead of Stacks.

Yeah I just took the plunge on my macbook pro with leopard and well, I wasn't thinking properly hahahaha. I still have several macbooks and an iMac at my disposal as well as a dual G5 tower which all run Tiger. So, I am not totally screwed, and I have upgraded some Apps to Leopard status, and I am like 99% operational now, maybe 90% but no lower than that.

The problem with Apple is they are re-inventing the wheel with every OS release, which is why you see developers release versions for 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.4 and now 10.5. This makes some developers mad, which is one of the reasons for very little third party support. With 10.5 it seems they are happy enough with their OS to start standardizing it for once. At least that is the impression I have gotten from several Apple engineers which I have met in person during trainings.

As for iTunes, I wish they would just open the door and release the source for it. There is a HUGE media player open source community that make some really good products. Winamp, VLC, songbird just to name three. I would love to see those products have full on support for iPods, the ITMS, etc.

I'm a developer, and I am not really sure what you mean here. Examples?

why does everything break from release to release then? Why does Apple shift things around, change the names of apps/utilities, change the process or how certain things work, make things like netinfo manager and then scrap it, so on and so forth. Their OS changes more with each release than any other I have worked with.

Granted, that is not always a bad thing, but there are down sides to it.

The changes have got to be troublesome for some developers, Mikey -- a few indies haven't posted Leopard updates yet.

Everything doesn't break.

This is what happens with almost any major upgrade. When Firefox 2 came out, people were complaining that some 1.0 extensions didn't work properly. When MS released Vista, many programs didn't work either. There's dozens of other examples of things like this happening.

*sigh*

At the same time I am running software from the windows 95 era on my XP box no problems.

Of course it happens and you are right some things DO work. However, that doesn't change everything I have stated about OS X. Just go back and look at 10.0 and then go up to 10.5. You will see how they drastically changed things, which hurts some development aspects.

Standards are a good thing to have.

Now, now, TL -- there's no arguing with a flat contradiction. For me, they're conversation stoppers.

I'll give you my example. I had several Workflows and Apps for Automator that really made my work a whole lot easier. Here comes Leopard and my eagerly anticipated Automator 2. Now, all my Workflows no longer work. They are not upward compatible to Automator 2 and must therefore all be rebuilt from scratch. The problem is, the developers of the OS were not talking to the developers of Automator 2. The result? Simple Actions (such as Spotlight Comment input and Renamer) do not work AT ALL. To this day they have not been fixed. So all my Workflows that helped me at my work are no longer available unless I go back to Tiger.

This is one of several examples how things that worked in Tiger are no longer available, or broken in Leopard. I am less productive in Leopard than I was in Tiger. Unfortunately, because of the way I backed up, there is no easy path back to Tiger. I have to wait for a fix--something I hoped would come at MacWorld.

NovaScotian - I would not classify it as "bloat". That is something Microsoft does best. However, you are correct that they are "moving thing around". They seem to be programming like the cinematography of the Bourne series--Here... no here... there... no, here again... look there... not there... there... swish here... now swish there... I'm dizzy... **barf**

I have to chime in and say that while I agree on principle with many of points that have been made in this thread (mostly regarding the need for better focus on customer support and more thorough beta testing), I also have not had any of the problems mentioned in this thread. I upgraded to iTunes 7.6 without a hitch. I installed Leopard at 10.5.0 (gasp!) and only encountered one problem.

My problem with Leopard was quite specific, and likely had to do with printer driver implementation. I have a Canon multifunction printer that is capable of printing duplex, and it did so perfectly under Tiger. However, under Leopard, the print manager would hang whenever I sent a duplex job (other jobs would print fine!). The problem has since been resolved. Aside from that relatively minor issue, I have had no problems with Leopard.

Incidentally, Canon's customer support is no better than Apple's. They give you the run around too. In fact, with stuff like peripherals, I find the customer support reps for Apple and the third party company are usually happy to send you calling back and forth between them!

There's a lot of hyperbole here. "Everything" doesn't break from release to release. I can name more apps that worked correctly after 10.5 than apps that did not. At the same time, I know that there were little bugs in many apps after release. (I'll comment as to why in a few moments here, cough cough ADC seeds . . .)

I don't think they shift as much these days as you seem to imply. Definitely in the earlier years of Mac OS X. Things do change from release to release still, of course, and sometimes it does affect developers adversely. Not always, but sometimes.

What does renaming an application have to do with "reinventing the wheel"? Renaming an application is a pretty trivial thing.

It's not really clear to me what you mean here.

Yay! NetInfo is finally dead, long live Directory Services!

In all seriousness, it looks like it was a good engineering decision moving forward. These articles come to mind:

http://www.macgeekery.com/hacks/software/netinfo_dead
http://www.afp548.com/article.php?st...LocalDirectory

There's a very, very good chance that Apple's long-term engineering strategy isn't very compatible with the older NetInfo technology, and when they finally saw an opportunity to move, they did. (And provided a ton of tools to help people use the new kit.)

That's definitely true. Mac OS X is very nimble platform and Apple makes the most of it by improving wherever they can. The downside of this is that in earlier releases of Mac OS X, there was a ton of API flux. Apple acknowledged this in the lead up to Tiger, and things have settled down since. The APIs don't shift like tectonic plates anymore, except when an older API doesn't meet the needs of current designs and it (or portions of it) become deprecated in favour of something designed to improve things.

Of course, but the sentiment of this statement is very different than what you said before, isn't it?

It's definitely a trade-off, and Apple's done well not to shake things as much as earlier versions did.

Oh, changes are always troublesome (though to what degree is always dependent on what kind of change and how you relied on the technology prior). But to imply that Apple is drastically altering everything left and right these days is way, way different than simply acknowledging that they do replace older with newer from time to time or that developers may have to update their software in response to changes made by Apple.

I was affected, too: Sandbox isn't Leopard-ready. I just haven't had the time to work on it. There isn't much I need to fix to bring it into Leopard, but I really need to fix some other things that will take a little more time when I go back into the source, so it's been pushed aside by other things.

The following statement doesn't apply to everyone, but it applies to a lot of developers:

The most common causes of incompatibilities when moving from one release to the next are incorrect assumptions or otherwise faulty designs on the part of the developer that become a problem when the underlying technology changes.

It's totally true that it's not easy for the indie devs. A big problem that they have is a lack of resources. One or two guys making the app, limited hardware configuration resources, and not enough QA resources. The indie guys do have it tough. So when Apple does change something that affects them, it might hurt indie dev A more than indie dev B.

Apple's pretty good at letting us know when things are being deprecated and providing new paths (the deprecation of FSSpec and introduction of FSRef, for example), and their documentation is typically sharp (unless you're a QuickTime C API developer, oops, sucks to be you guys) . . . but where third-party devs ran into problems during the push toward Tiger and Leopard was not getting the golden masters soon enough. For some unknown reason, Apple sat on the GM seed and it affected us sorely. This sucked.

I'm not saying that Mac OS X hasn't changed in ways that have affected developers, and I'm not saying that Apple's developer relations are perfect; I simply think that there was a level of hyperbole in TL's post that needed expanding on.

Yeah, I heard a bunch of people complaining about that one. That's a good example of when Apple does drop the ball.

I'm first going to say this--you people all seem to be on the same page, are you reading each others posts? Mikey-San? tlarkin was actually fairly balanced in his posts if you read the whole thing, he was just a bit dramatic at times. Using worlds like "everything" and "always" when "some" and "at times" probably would have worked better.

One thing I do take issue with:

I remember having a hard time running some Windows 95 programs on Windows 95, quite honestly. And most of the Windows 95 programs I have will not function on XP (granted, I don't exactly go out of my way to fix them and I don't have all that many.)

But, as Tlarkin said, change is good in some ways, and bad in others. It's absolutely true that the easiest development platform will be one that never changes. It's more stable, and it's easier to know all the tricks. But the again, how badly do we want to be programming on Windows 3.1? So a balance must be struck.

For my part, I like the constant evolution of OSX, but I'm not in IT, nor do I deploy OSX in a business setting. I have it for personally use, and the gadgets intrigue me, it's the same reason I like Linux, if I am to be honest.

But, the point of this thread is that Apple sometimes has a hard time owning up to the mistakes it makes. If it wants to be evolving all the time, then it needs to expect problems, and thus tech support must be top notch. And not just for developers, for all users.

Hey Zalister - I think you are right. There is a lot of commonality in what people are saying. We can complain about a lot of stuff of course with every company, and there will be good and bad people in every organization. It's not fair for me to presume because I had one bad experience its a "common problem".

And Apple is generally pretty good - their stores, their genius bars, and their products of course do stand out above many other options (ever try to get your Microsoft machine serviced or solve some technical problem?). But I do think that Apple grows bigger and more popular their service is suffering, which is probably inevitable.

But the reason I posted this originally is in taking responsibility - which is not a hard thing to do. Sure, not every tech support will know every problem - but when you raise the problem to them they sure as heck can do a search and see that 100's or 1000's of others are having similar problems.

In this particular case, iTunes 7.6 is causing a lot of problems for a lot of people - and in my case, and many other postings Apple staff have claimed it's the first they've heard of it.

Why can't they simply step up and say "there is a big problem, and we're working on it"?

AND: why does this denial extend to deleting questions about it from the Apple user forums?

OK, yes, I was using hyperboles. It is true. However, as a hobby I like to write and well, I can get carried away when doing so. However, I digress, what I stated is true to what OS X is, what it has become, and perhaps the future of what it will be.

netinfo is a pain, I know it, and everyone in my field (network administration) is rejoicing. I was using it as an example. To me, after learning netinfo and using it from 10.2 to 10.4 and relying on it, they just up and took it out. I haven't had to bound too many Leopard machines to my domain controllers except for a few and for the most part it is easy. However, using the dscl isn't the most intuitive way of configuring the directory. Also, they changed lots of utilities from 10.2 to 10.3. Again making administration a bit hard. It seems once I learn a method that is proven to work for me Apple up and changes it.

Just to give you an idea right now about what I am dealing with currently with all my Apple products I am supporting.

I have had about 300 macbook batteries die on me in the last month. Right now I have over 150 macbooks shipped out for repair. Over half of them being a failed hard drive. I white listed CS3 in the directory so all users could use the application, and when doing so the directory for some odd ass reason on three groups (three sets of 4 groups actually) it disabled every application but whitelisted only CS3. Not a huge deal and easy to fix, but it took about an hour for the ODRs to finally sync up with the ODM.

All of this is nominal in my opinion with the exception of the batteries and the HDs. I am stationed at one building in particular as well as the other mac IT staff. Overall, we have like 300ish batteries and 300ish HDs fail. To me that should send up a flag at Apple, however they seem to think it is normal behavior. 300 failures of out 6,000 macbooks isn't all that bad either. Everything has a failure rate, everything. Yes, Apples have flaws.

RE: Apple stores

I have had very mixed feelings about their "genius bar". Not only does it come off as sounding arrogant, they are arrogant. I have had to swap out products that were defective with them and they sit there and argue with me, and then treat me like I am some off the street customer that has no idea what I am talking about. Then I explain them that I admin over 6,000 macs and our organization spends millions with Apple. I hate having to explain that to get them to listen to me. I just hate retail stores in general though as well, so I am sure there is a bit of bias there.

I am thinking that it might be the same way that you are told not to say "I am sorry." when involved in a car accident. It's an admission of guilt that now makes you liable when the hungry lawyers come around.

It's safer for the wallet to say: "We fixed a big problem."

Controlling perceptions and protecting the brand.
Albeit in a very misguided manner...

I don't know the specifics of this case, but in general, Apple deletes posts from the forums when they diverge from the stated terms of use. The Apple forums are stated clearly to be for help requests, not for complaints, so as soon as someone starts to complain, they are violating the terms of use for those forums.

I was penning a reply to this, but the reply became extremely long and in-depth, so I'm reconfiguring it as a blog post. I'll post a link in the thread when it's ready. :)

It will cover this. :)

apparently, apple does give at least an idea of what fixes it's making when it seeds copies to beta testers. see this...