State of Apple Support

The manager got fed up I guess. My appointment was supposed to take 30mins to an hour, but the Genius schedule is getting disrupted and I wouldn’t agree with what they wanted to happen. My voice is getting louder as I keep repeating the same thing over and over showing them the Apple documents that I have. It was supposed to be, hand over the dead iPad Pro, get a new one. So the line keeps getting longer and I’m holding up her as a manager and two other technicians from a busy Apple Store HK on a Friday afternoon. She gave me the number to sort it out. Not even let me use their phone to call for free. I wish I could remember his name and position at the company but my patience already run out from having to deal with everyone with a dead device that is still under warranty.

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By right, if your device is under warranty, it is pretty clear cut. I am glad you got a replacement device. I am guessing this experience left a bad taste to you also, right?

Update on my end, Apple didn’t call me and so, I called them this morning. Gave them the incident number and the guy on the other end asked me to turn on certain diagnostics switches on the iPhone, which sent them the logs over the air (I am pretty impress by this, to be honest). He looked at the logs and confirmed that my Face ID component is faulty. If it were the front facing camera, they can just replaced the camera. This, according to him, is some part of the motherboard and so it is a device replacement and without a warranty, it’s like paying for a new device. What a shame that nothing else could be done. We discussed a trade in and he said that the value of the trade in will be much lower on a ‘faulty’ device. Looks like I am shit out of luck and will fall back on the older iPhone 6S at this moment. Couldn’t bring myself to buy a new phone, knowing that it might not last more than 3 years.

Yes, the experience was so bad, I didn’t call or tried having my FaceID camera checked as well. It stopped working as we were at a music festival, it was freezing cold and raining most of the time. I take photos and videos with my iPhone. I felt that it was okay as I have experience shooting underwater pool pics with my iPhone 7, X, and XS and didn’t have any problem. I got a warning of water damage so I had it turned off, made sure it’s dry. Turned it back on my FaceID no longer works.

This is the reason why I keep an old iPhone just in case something goes wrong with the current device. So far, all of my past iPhones is working past the three years mark and I still have most of my old ones.

The older phones are all top notch. I have a 5S, 6 Plus, 6S and SE (1st Generation) which are still working today (used by the younger kids). I also have a MacBook Air 11" (2011), Air 13" (2013), 15" Pro (2012) that are still running Google Meet. Sadly, the quality does not translate well into modern Apple devices. I had change two work issued MacBook Pros (2016 onwards) which had various issues from auto reboot and getting hot when using too long. If Apple plans to sell their products at such a high price moving forward, they need to have better QC.

I find they are usually very helpful and personable. Occasionally I run across someone obstinate but I wish more businesses would model themselves on Apple’s supportive services.

There has been a tendency of late to have far more people who are struggling with the language working for Apple Care. It is my pet peeve. The hardest skill a second language learner is going to obtain is the ability to converse on the phone. That is not to say that these people are not of value to the company. But rather it is often counterproductive to put them on the phones.

The last time I called I encountered a man who obviously was not understanding me. And to exacerbate matters, he had a heavy accent. And due to my career background, I’m trained in handling people learning English.

I found out later he had given me a totally wrong answer!

I love encountering Apple Support teams from different countries. There’s an Australian guy who helped fix my iTunes Library because I have Apple Music and iTunes Match enabled. He was having the same issue. He keeps calling me back for updates and connected me with someone who’s working on iTunes.

There’s a woman from France, which we have to sort our schedules because of the time difference. There are Support team from India and a woman from Bagladesh. There’s also from Singapore and China. My fave is from the Philippines. She went above and beyond just knowing that we have the same ethnicity. All of them are pleasant to talk to.

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I do too. I often call the Spanish line. Texas, California, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica. I encountered one guy originally from an Arabic nation who had an Irish brogue! His girlfriend was from Ireland. To me that is just about the hardest accent to understand and, with my background, should be among the easiest!

Don’t get me wrong. I know what it is like to learn a second language. And I appreciate how difficult and marvelous it can be. Americans are spoiled in that we don’t really have second languages much, quite unlike the Europeans. Geography, basically.

I, by no means, expect them to speak free of errors. I make errors in my first language. We are not as patient as we could be. But talking on the phone is THE hardest way to communicate. There are no facial expressions, no talking with your hands. Ahh!!! Video chats!

I often ask people where they are from because it is so interesting to talk to them. And these are bright bright people.

But I sensed the man I spoke to recently would have gotten offended had I explained he wasn’t following me.

Incidentally, I just bought a present for a nurse friend of mine from the Philippines. He’s half Chinese. I picked up a book of idioms for him. He wants to learn Spanish and already is well on his way!

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I think, as always, it depends on many things. Phone support can be the worst, especially where the company is exceptionally busy.

I have to admit that most of my support has been face to face at the genius bar (or it’s more modern alternative the Cyprus grove).

I also find it surprising so many have had consistently bad experiences (besides those who only have third party options), but it makes sense that people who don’t find support reliable would end up on a community support forum (besides the fact that it’s just a fun place!)

I’m guessing not all are equally adept at verbally negotiating or at evaluating which support paths have the least risk, too.

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Sometimes, I prefer chatting as I can clarify stuff and not deal with accents. Not bashing any heavy accents though, we speak English differently too. Our F becomes P, our hard G becomes D, and so on and so forth. Sometimes, our English is a mix of British and American (verbal and written).

Your friend can learn a language so much faster. Most Filipino-Chinese attended Chinese school at an early age. Spanish is structurally the same as English and Filipino. Chinese is hard and the difficuly depends if its Mandarin, Fokien, Cantonese, or any other dialect. I won’t be surprised if he also speak another local Philippine language besides Filipino.

I wonder if this is due to the pandemic as most Apple Support or the BPO industries is outsourced in a developing countries that are still dealing with Covid. Their situation is appalling. They have to stay in dorms within their workplace. If they plan to come home for a bit, they need to do a 14-day quarantine. Most have no option of working-from-home. If they are allowed, most don’t have access to a fast connection or none at all. They also have no space at home to work. There was a news program where they featured a Customer rep who built her office outside her second-story window onto the aluminum roof because that’s the only place in her house where she can get mobile signal. High turnovers because of the limitation and fear of infection. These companies probably don’t have time to properly train their people.

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You are so right! He’s already trilingual at least. Spanish should be easy. The phonics couldn’t be any simpler, any more regular. He said the vowel sounds are the same as in Filipino.

A lot of the US textbook manufacturers take English Reading texts and translate them into Spanish. Phonetically English is a mess at least comparatively.

I’m not sure which Chinese dialect he speaks. I always wanted to learn Russian but never considered learning Chinese although I love to draw! HA!

The strangest language is Portuguese. It inevitably stumps me because it is a mixture of so many languages. I can never identify it other than figuring that it has to be Portuguese because I cannot identify it.

I met a lady online from Portugal. I told her that although I do not speak a single word of it, I can read Portuguese fairly well. She was skeptical. So I asked her to write a few paragraphs and to make them fairly simple. She did and was amazed that I did a pretty good job of translating it.

That is a shame these people are having such a difficult time because of co-vid! I’ll try to “shelter” my English more when I am speaking to them. Or I’ll stick to Spanish. I learned mostly from Mexican people and I am readily understood. The Mexicans speak clearly and don’t eat their letters. Sometimes I have a hard time with the various Spanish accents but if they are patient it works out better and, besides, it is fun!

You can try Shufa, Chinese calligraphy. I learned how to draw Hiragana, Katakana, and a bit of Kanji through Shojo (Japanese calligraphy). I also draw one of our Filipino ancient writing called Baybayin with brush calligraphy. It’s a fun way to learn a new (or dead) language.

I love that our conversation shifts to cultural discussions. But it should be, Tech has huge effect on different cultures, languages, and ethnicity but is still largely viewed within a Western lens.

As much as my eye rolls at Apple’s small roll-out of countries with products that revolve around Siri, nuances in language are difficult to develop and predict. Maybe they should use their Apple Support team around the world and study how they interact and speak as additional data to help develop Siri.

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Fascinating!

I happen to enjoy calligraphy. It is a great way to get your mind off your problems- the rhythm, the repetition.

That is a terrific idea for Siri! You ought to submit it to Apple. That might even be a great idea for some creative kids to pick up along with the teams. Junior think tanks. Apple has always been super encouraging for education.

I often hear that kids pick up languages faster but it may be more a matter that they are willing to make mistakes.

Gates may pay lip service to education but I suspect his motives are more along the line of controlling it although I have to give the guy a lot of credit for trying to eradicate diseases.

I’ve just seen how readily kids take to Apple products. Considerably more thought goes into them. The little ones can get easily confused. And I’d contend once you learn on a Mac, a PC is a cinch albeit a frustrating one.

Languages intrigue me.

My brother asked me once what I was reading. I told him I had just finished “Hamlet”. Just sat down and read it. I found it to be considerably less difficult than I thought it was going to be but, then again, I love the Bard. I got dead silence like he doubted my veracity.

Just imagine if I told him I was learning Chinese brush calligraphy!

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I walked into an Apple Store this afternoon to talk to a Genius (after pre booking slot) because my iPhone 12 Pro battery was already down to 88% when the phone is not even 12 months old and i’m not a heavy user.

Within 10 minutes I walked out with a FOC replacement battery on order to be done in the next few days when it arrives.

It has been like that in the not too distant past. You’d try to book an appointment and there would be NONE because they only allowed the next 7 days, but more recently it’s been easier.

I find Apple Support is usually good. I had one big problem when I bought my first Butterfly keyboard MacBook Pro, though. I pre-ordered mine to replace my near-dead 2012 laptop, and the keyboard failed within two months.

So I went through support chains, and nada. These machines were still new, so they had “never heard of this happening,” “weren’t aware of this as a problem,” and thought “this must be your mistake, and the warranty doesn’t cover user damage,” etc.

Obviously, everybody who’s ever had one of those keyboards fail knows it wasn’t them.

I was steaming angry, and so I emailed Tim Cook (using his publicly known email address). 24 hours later, I had a response from Tim’s personal assistant, who had arranged a free replacement at my nearest Apple Store. It was a like-for-like model, even though my laptop was a very high-end BTO. All I had to do was head over, give them the old laptop so their engineers could attempt to diagnose what had failed, and they’d handle the swap immediately. They even told the store to help me transfer everything from one machine to the other before I left the store, if it was necessary.

Needless to say, I don’t have anything bad to say about Apple’s service these days.

(One more addition: Apple has since replaced butterfly keyboards and machines for me about half a dozen times. Never did I get a working butterfly keyboard. I switched to an iMac Pro to get out of the laptop hell. I miss that single-machine lifestyle and am thinking about getting a new laptop and a monitor to get back to that life.)

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I have spoken highly of support, including on this forum. However this weekend my wife had a dismal experience, worthy of the worst outsource merchants now so common. The reps actually tricked the system into thinking there was a ‘security’ problem to hide their dismal response to a simple inquiry she was making. Really put my opinion of Apple overall down a good notch.

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I’m beyond two years (elapsed) trying to get iCloud to work on my Mac. I ended up late last year with a REALLY good Senior Adviser who was doing some real digging and some real work in getting Engineering to come to the table and actually pay attention. I left it over Christmas and then when I emailed to the SA for an update — no response.

Apple’s inane process for SAs is that I either hope he is away on holiday and gets back to me eventually, or I ring up and automatically get assigned a new SA. Who will have to go through the whole process of learning the problem over again. And may be like the previous worst one I had who left the company and did not tell me and did not hand over my case.

Your mileage, as they say, may vary. A LOT.

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My experience with AppleSupport has been unbelievably good. I recently took my MacPro to the Genius bar because the computer did not turn off properly when the lid closed.

Every step of the experience was good. The computer was sent away for repair and mailed directly back to my house. Everything was documented. The packaging was excellent and allows me easily to send it back if some problem with the repair is identified.

When I have had problems with Apple products under AppleCare, I always have found the repair process to be excellent. From my corner of the world, nothing but praise.

AppleCare is expensive. The products are expensive. And I have NO complaints.

IMO there is no excuse for Apple support to leave you without an answer. Even if that answer is “we don’t know how to fix your problem”.

OTOH, perhaps you need to consider joining those of us who have given up on iCloud.