I am taking a look at the comments on this thread and im astonished. HN is full of intelligent, self-reliant people and yet, all throughout this thread I see so many users trashing people for complaints about price and service quality from Apple.
So many users here have had obviously bad experiences with Apple Care and Apple Repair Services, why is it so hard to believe them? Also, why is it so hard to imagine that Apple is making some mistakes in their repair model?
Commenters defending Apple here - they dont care about you at all, they dont need the assistance from you in defending them, and you dont get a discount for doing so, so what is your motivation for doing it? It is clear this 'Self Service Repair' model is designed to prevent independent repair shops from making money, therefore eliminating them. In what way is this good for the consumer?
For many of them, they identify with Apple. That is, part of their self identity is tied to Apple. To them Apple isn't just a for-profit company that makes good products, it's a philosophy, a way of life, a team, an identity.
If someone challenges or says something negative about Apple, it's a negative about their identity and they take it very personally.
To be clear, this tendency is not limited to Apple. Humans do it regarding all manner of companies/things. But Apple does have a particularly large and passionate following.
I do t think this is necessarily true for many of the users here "defending" Apple.
It's likely that many people just use their mac and find that the hardware quality, etc is nice compared to other competition. If the company now wants to make it possible to fix your computer, I would imagine that would typically be celebrated by HN, since apple has had such a history of lock-in/non-customization problems with the professional computing demographic.
The note here about affecting small businesses is nonetheless a good point, and should be recognized for the potential problems it may bring; however I don't think discrediting the users by making it 'their identity' to defend some hardware is correct.
There are reasons to not like Apple products, but there are also quite a few great qualities about them as well. For example, the ARM processors they're making right now are excellent (best in class by a lot, as far as I can tell) - for battery life. While they may certainly have lower benchmarks than some i7s, they are doing fantastic for only using 15W. In today's age, few developers use their laptop for more than ssh and firefox, so it makes more sense for a good Linux dev to be on asahi Linux with an M2, while the 'typical business user' or 'creative type' would be more likely to use a Falcon Northwest TLX with a nice dGPU for their heavier workload.
So, again - there are plenty of reasons to not like Apple such as all the lock-in associated problems - but you can certainly use a device and it not be 'your identity'.
I personally love the Apple products I own. I also have many other products from brands I trust that I love. When someone has a bad experience with a product I love, I try to help them, I don't put them down for trying to destroy my preferred brands reputation.
I agree with you. I didn't mean that all defense of Apple is for identity reasons.
I am often an Apple critic because of their lock-in/closed/proprietary nature, but i think this is a good move. Personally I think it's a cave to pressure from the right to repair movement, and they won't be sad about killing independent shops, but that doesn't make it a bad move. I'm happy to see it.
When I switched from PC to Mac about 10 years ago, for the most part I was thrilled. But I missed a few features. The two big ones I remember are cut and paste files with Cmd-X/Cmd-V, and selectively delete specific files from the trash.
I can't tell you how many times fanboys told me that neither of those features made any sense, and I was silly for even wanting them. Yet within a few years Apple added both features.
While it is possible that they hire surrogates to post on HN, the simpler explanation is that they have rabid fans that stick their necks out for a trillion dollar company. The proof is that this behavior has been around Apple even well before their re-rise to dominance.
It would be very interesting to pull a history of complaints about e.g. Apple’s white power cords and their failure rate from reddit and then examine the self-similarity of the “what are people doing, this has never happened to me” responses.
Of course to do this properly you also have to realize and account for the idea that others are just as incentivized to fund artificial critiques as Apple is to artificially defend themselves.
I disagree, the fewer assumptions means the simplest. I'd argue it's not worth the risk for Apple to hire people to shill for them, when there are so many who do it not just for free, but do it genuinely. Imagine if Apple hires shills, then they spill their guts to the NYTimes, that overall makes Apple look far worse.
We're both making the same number of assumptions. The difference is that yours is in the negative and mine is in the positive. Your example about the risk of someone leaking to the press shows we simply live in completely different realities, thus argument is impossible. Which is fine! In my reality people are leaking to the press all the time about such things and simply being ignored by most who don't want to confront how dark corporate and government PR and marketing has become.
Again, you're assuming they don't have surrogates. This is still an assumption. The miscommunication here is that you think I'm a conspiracy theorist or something, and I think you're naive. But so what? Sure, maybe I'm seeing phantoms where they don't exist. We've clearly had different life experiences though. To me the basic calculus of a multi-trillion dollar company perhaps throwing out a few million bucks a year to pay "surrogates" to influence opinion on popular online forums is not the claim that carries the burden of proof. I'd be absolutely shocked if they weren't doing this. But again, there's no way we can even argue if you think the burden of proof goes in the opposite direction. But at least understand that neither of our claims are "simpler" than the other. My original comment saying "more simpler" was a bit of sarcasm in case that didn't come through.
Yup. My hypothesis is unambiguously verifiable, and I've verified it to my own satisfaction through my personal experiences. Your hypothesis is not unambiguously verifiable, only statistically so (whatever that means). At least it's falsifiable, but there's a deep challenge there because falsification would unveil aspects of our society that most people don't want to know about.
Apple is following the Harley Davidson strategy. Their brand becomes a lifestyle and personality for their customers. Build quality falls, prices go up, and people who've bought into the brand-as-a-lifestyle defend it all while acting disturbingly hostile to everybody else who isn't in their club.
> It is clear this 'Self Service Repair' model is designed to prevent independent repair shops from making money, therefore eliminating them. In what way is this good for the consumer?
The quality can be highly questionable. One shop first put an old battery in my MacBook, and after I complained they put in a new one from a bad manufacturer which ended up breaking touchpad and keyboard.
On my iMac a different store installed the wrong screen (from the previous model that had ghosting issues and wasn’t as bright) - I ended up changing it myself for around EUR250 instead of 700 the store charged or 1100 Apple wanted. Also the screws were loose on the MacBook and the camera and microphone weren’t aligned on the iMac. I obviously went to different stores and checked the reviews before, but it didn’t help.
Ideally it should be simple enough to make these repairs- on the same MacBook I replaced a broken fan which worked perfectly fine for four years. You really don’t know what happens in the store.
That being said, I don’t think apple is seriously interested in helping users with this, it starts with the design of products. My old MacBook Pro retina was so much more robust than the new m1 pro I had to replace it with. The iMac screen is just silly with the easily breaking glass front that makes you replace the whole thing and also with the inaccessible drives.
>The quality can be highly questionable. One shop first put an old battery in my MacBook, and after I complained they put in a new one from a bad manufacturer which ended up breaking touchpad and keyboard. On my iMac a different store installed the wrong screen (from the previous model that had ghosting issues and wasn’t as bright) - I ended up changing it myself for around EUR250 instead of 700 the store charged or 1100 Apple wanted. Also the screws were loose on the MacBook and the camera and microphone weren’t aligned on the iMac. I obviously went to different stores and checked the reviews before, but it didn’t help.
Is this not due entirely to how hard Apple makes it to get OEM parts?
For the iMac panel: I did some research because I wasn’t sure if it actually had a problem (I just had a hunch on the brightness and the monitor symbol had changed) - then I found one that worked as expected on alibaba, but dealing with all the glued on panel etc. Was a real pain.
For the battery: probably. I didn’t bother searching replacing that one though and gave away the laptop. I would have changed it myself but at that time my government was subsidizing small shops with half price coupons so it was actually cheaper to go to a store than to change it myself (looking back I should have just registered as a repair shop and taken the subsidy myself)
Wow this is evil. Talking of a company that claims being super green by not adding a charger or using different boxes for refurbished devices, but then makes sure you have to replace your otherwise functional electronics every few years. Or also as a side note: causing a major annoyance with the non standard cable.
The panel I bought doesn’t have any apple references, just the LG part number. Funnily enough, the previous model panel from the store falsely had the same part number after I opened it.
The current state means you deal with “refurbishers” that mass sell used components (possibly fixing common issues at a micro-level), buy “broken” units yourself to harvest for parts or grab them off eBay et al.
Sometimes the manufacturers do run extra production runs so you get new OEM parts. Or there is cross compatibility.
I’ve covered a fair bit of the expense of my new Mac units by parting out my old ones.
> I obviously went to different stores and checked the reviews before, but it didn’t help.
This is an issue with reviews in general: most people critique the wrong things.
They have no idea how to review the finished product, but feel compelled to review anyway and beyond “it turns on now and it didn’t before” (which I guess is a great minimum bar), focus on the cleanliness of the shop, politeness of the staff or their hours. All of which I consider less important than fixing the issue properly.
> focus on the cleanliness of the shop, politeness of the staff or their hours
I was in a European country at that time, so all of this was pretty much standard for this tier of shop (reasonably clean, not very polite, bad hours), anything higher would have cost as much as the Apple Store, so it would have almost been worth replacing the whole device
From reading that a while ago, it seems to be designed so that Apple score some marketing points and plan ahead for regulations making that mandatory, while not actually delivering a credible service on that front. Virtually no one is going to use that service if it is indeed what's described in the article.
I think we are arguring the same point. I don't think Apple is doing this with good motivations and eliminating the independent repair shop is bad. The article you linked only further articulates why this move is bad for many other reasons, too
> It is clear this 'Self Service Repair' model is designed to prevent independent repair shops from making money, therefore eliminating them.
how is this clear? do you think everyone will simply start fixing their own devices? from my experience a tiny tiny minority of people have both the necessary experience and the time to do this, thus leaving the independent shops mostly unaffected.
It's clear because of the details. You need a serial number to get a part (so therefore cannot purchase in bulk or generically) and the prices are not any better, and in many cases worse, than apple's own in-house price.
LTT runs the numbers to demonstrate it. Apple is making you pay more to do it yourself, and you have to wait days for the parts to arrive, when you could just go down to the Apple Store. The pricing completely nullifies any real-world benefit of this program, making the program seem like it is entirely performative.
If an individual can't even save money doing it this way, the program is worse than useless for repair shops since they won't be able to compete with Apple Store repair services. That's also without even addressing the inability for repair shops to buy parts before a customer shows up with a problem. Repair shops want to be able to provide same day service, which this program makes impossible... unless your name is Apple.
There are no iPhone itemized repairs, with most items resulting in an equipment swap. Some of these are subsidized (for instance, some battery replacements). The replaced items are salvaged.
Linus's numbers are sensationalized on top of that - he drops the equipment return and salvage credit at some point, considers equipment rental as part of the part cost, as well as running numbers for his person's time (who I'm not sure is a trained technician, just that they value their time more than minimum wage). I personally would have looked for an AASP source for a cost comparison.
Mac numbers will lend themselves quite a bit more to an apples-to-apples comparison.
Repair shops have only been able to compete on pricing when they use non-OEM replacement parts or repair the OEM parts. Both these approaches are both getting much more difficult.
Independent repair shops also have the sales disadvantage when they don't have a relationship set up to cover warranty repairs - so they often would be quoting OEM replacement parts for gear with years of depreciation, as well as upgrade benefits when the customer does a cost analysis.
I'll go so far as to say if a repair place _ever_ quotes a cheaper price on a repair than Apple does themselves, they are doing a different repair. They are repairing the OEM part rather than replacing it, they are replacing a OEM part with a part salvaged from another device, or they are putting non-OEM parts in. For screen and battery replacements, the majority of phone repairs, it's almost always non-OEM parts.
Apple testified to Congress that their repair services lose them money [1]. If they have not focused on their own repair services profitability, then they likely also have not focused on profitability of independent repair services.
People upthread are saying Apple's OOW price for an MBA screen replacement is in the $500-600 range. The new self service program will sell you one for $300 if you return the old part, or $400 if you don't. Seems like it's perfectly possible to save money doing it this way.
The self-service prices for Mac weren't available yesterday, so all that we could discuss was their iPhone program. Apple doesn't publicly list repair prices for laptops, so it is hard to say exactly what you'll pay. I look forward to people doing more in-depth research and figuring out exactly how things balance out with the Mac self-service program, but the iPhone program did not live up to even the most basic expectations.
I'm also not seeing where you got that "$500-600" number "upthread", which presumably refers to the rest of this HN discussion, since I don't see any numbers like that. It could make the prices somewhat more reasonable than they were for iPhone, but I definitely haven't had time to do the research myself, and I don't appreciate how Apple hides the OOW repair cost for laptops, which makes this analysis harder.
I think it's because those comments are provoked reflexively by the appearance of $BigCo in a story (automatically guaranteed to generate generic complaints about $BigCo), and if the story is the tuple ($BigCo, $Theme) (where $Theme = something like support, repair, price, you name it) then the reflex is even stronger to reproduce any-associated-complaint in that space.
Because this is reflexive, it's not really a response to the story at hand—such comments are more self-referential than on topic. That is not intellectually interesting—we're not learning much from them. It's satisfying, though, to those who have similar pre-existing associations and feelings, so inevitably it brings up a lot of me-too reactions and similar posts. But again, those aren't particularly related to the original story—they're just prompted by it, sort of like tapping on a knee—so they aren't interesting to people who don't personally have the same associations with that topic tuple.
Eventually, users who have opposite associations get tired of seeing these generic, not-particularly-on-topic comments, and respond by complaining about the complaints. Of course that's a reflexive and generic response in its own right. I sometimes call this the contrarian dynamic of internet forums (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
The only two things I know of to counteract this trend are (1) for users to consciously post more substantive, on-topic, curious comments, which provide nuclei for better discussion to organize around; and (2) for moderators to downweight generic and offtopic subthreads, which counteracts their unfortunate tendency to stick at the top of the page.
This is a good post to reflect upon when considering the bias in HN moderation. The moderation is not just invested in YC financially, but the depth of self-righteous philosophical conviction is there too. This isn’t Reddit nor your average Trust & Safety team that aims at neutrality, dang wants to be a Drudge or a Jeff Zucker.
I think Apple has made major cost cutting changes on their repairs and returns department. As recently as a few years ago, Apple was much more liberal about returns and fees for repairs.
I've also noticed that the quality of the customer support around returns has gone south. I've seen cases where basic information about the context of the return seems missing and customers are put in long loops dealing with simple problems.
I've seen the miserly behavior myself. I've put a lot of cash toward Apple SW, HW and services but that loyalty is not recognized or rewarded in how you're treated by the company.
Between this lack of awareness of who their sophisticated customers are and their loyalty and cost cutting measure, I suspect some people have been shocked at how bad the repair / returns experience can be today.
When someone has a bad experience with a product I love, I try to help them, I don't put them down for trying to destroy my preferred brands reputation.
Apple users are always convinced that people experiencing problems with the product are intentionally complaining to damage Apple, rather than honestly having an issue
Apple is doing this to placate regulators. I want them to succeed because I don't want regulators dictating how the devices I buy, from Apple or otherwise, should be. Apple is fighting by my side.
So many users here have had obviously bad experiences with Apple Care and Apple Repair Services, why is it so hard to believe them? Also, why is it so hard to imagine that Apple is making some mistakes in their repair model?
Commenters defending Apple here - they dont care about you at all, they dont need the assistance from you in defending them, and you dont get a discount for doing so, so what is your motivation for doing it? It is clear this 'Self Service Repair' model is designed to prevent independent repair shops from making money, therefore eliminating them. In what way is this good for the consumer?