a) if the author speaks the truth (and I have no reason to believe otherwise) that the was never dropped - Google should fix it. That much is obvious.

Now, the b). b) C'mon Google - you know the author is a techie / twitterer / reviewer - of all the people to annoy with customer service, is a person like that really the good choice?

This incident clearly exposes non-positive elements in their customer support culture.

They don't? Who does then?

Now if you want to say they're not perfect and they've had their problems, I would agree with that.

Apple requires that you book an appointment at one of their stores, go there, wait on line anyway because there are people who don't want to book online, have someone who can't fix hardware problems look at it, and then say they'll take it but you must give them your file vault password first.

Dell on the other hand after ten minutes of hardware troubleshooting on the phone comes on site with replacement parts. If they can't fix it they send it back for you, and you can request that they give you the hard drive in the machine before they send it. It's very excellent.

On other hand - I have written a entire blog article about how shitty Apple customer care in India is - http://gnufied.org/2011/08/30/the-applecare-story/

I assume that's why there are so many new Latitude/Precision keyboards on eBay at any given time (people bullshitting their way to getting spares and then selling them on).

Only after I posted my experience on a public forum I was contacted by a Dell social media person in the US who then organized support from Dell Netherlands.

Dell customer support was hostile from the get-go, claiming "compatibility" problems with my MacBook. Compatibility? What could cause my laptop to be incompatible with the UP25 and yet compatible with the U23? Hogwash.

They finally agreed to exchange the monitor. They sent a refurb.

Since then, I've read multiple stories of people having problems with Dell monitors, using Windows or OS X. A common thread is the DisplayPort connection.

I also feel like you are comparing Dell's enterprise support to Apple's general customer support...

"My chair's seat fabric has torn a bit. Is there anything you can do?"

"When did you buy it?"

"Erm, around 6 years ago, I think."

Checks records

"No problem, an entire replacement seat will turn up in a truck tomorrow. We'll fit it and leave your chair good as new. Have a nice day, sir."

This article is one more piece of news that makes me glad I excised Google from my life almost completely (I haven't found an alternative to my Nvidia Shield TV yet, but I'm looking).

I can't imagine too many ways that a backpack or piece of furniture can become accidentally damaged by "user error." Remember, so many people try to misrepresent their own mistakes (perhaps because they didn't understand what happened or they didn't realize it was their own fault) as product defects that the phone manufacturers all had to add things like internal liquid sensors to their devices.

On another note, many of my non-technical friends conflate Android OS software problems with device defects (e.g. "my phone died" actually meant that they had 300 running processes because they never learned how to close running apps on Android -- which to be fair is a PRETTY buried feature that doesn't lend itself well to user discovery; the number of people I see that don't realize they have to manually close apps on their Android phone is shocking). It's probably the reason there are so many ways to buy "refurbished" devices.

Needless to say, if Apple or Google started honoring a lifetime warranty, they'd lose a lot of money pretty quickly.

Maybe on a 2011 device with 256MB of memory and Gingerbread this was true, but memory management hasn't been a problem on Android phones for a few years now. The memory management has improved in parallel with the amount of available memory, to the point where the device can actually perform worse if the user goes mucking about and closing apps manually. With Marshmallow and Nougat it has become even more efficient.

The OS already uses 950M of its 1GB of RAM.

Remember, memory is like a keg of beer, if everyone drinks it all, it's gone regardless of how you "distribute" it to people into smaller sized Solo cups or whatever.

I can think of a few things that could help but not solve the problem, but the crux of the problem is that it's still a finite resource:

https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/memory-overv...

Working against that, you also have Gates' Law.

Anyway, it's my understanding that Android uses custom heap size limits to help keep things running smoothly. This combined with efficient garbage collection makes for a generally smooth user experience on a constrained device like a phone or tablet. Android will cache, and later kill, processes that aren't being used, to free up memory for active processes. Memory may be a finite resource, but not in the way you described; it's not permanently used up and can always be freed for foreground tasks.

I lived with this for a few years and eventually contacted the local reseller to see if replacement parts were available. Got blown off because I wasn't a corporate customer.

About a year later, I decided to contact Steelcase corporate directly. I described the problem, as well as how I'd been basically ignored by the local dealer. Told them how I'd gotten the chair, and that I was willing to pay for parts. Not only did they apologize profusely, they sent me an entire (v2) seat assembly - in black leather - at no charge, described the changes between the versions, and said it would fit on my chair just fine. It did.

There's a reason I now have four of these LEAP chairs at home.

I understand that Barbour, the wax jacket company, are fairly incredible when it comes to customer service too. (Nothing has ever gone wrong with my jacket so I've yet to put this to the test.)

I had to fight tooth-and-nail for an aluminum chair that had scratches all over it on delivery to get it replaced. They blamed me for scratching a chair that I'd paid over $1k!

On the flip side, Apple Service is so good that now our IT organization just tells their employees if they have any issue, just go to the Apple Store and work with them directly. So, something to be said about that. And, it's getting to the point that almost all of the major cities I travel too have some kind of Apple Authorized repair - even if they don't have an Apple Store yet.

If you had enterprise-grade equipment. Their consumer support was absolutely horrible.

You can self-certify and manage your own component replacements, which works from small to mid scale. We do this for about 1,000 servers and it works pretty well; no phone calls where you roll the dice for quality of the tech, and I like frobbing hardware from time to time, it's a nice change from hacking C++ or PHP . . .

Fry's - Knowledgeable service for consumer goods and online price matching. Apple Stores are full of pretty idiots who love to make you wait.

Dell - Enterprise hardware, and support is great. Apple phone support is painful, if turning it on and off again doesn't help you are out of luck unless you have Apple Care and can wait a week for a replacement.

EDIT:

Buffalo - Great call line. People on the other end know their stuff.

Fry's Electronics sales people rarely know the product, inventory, or compatibility, and quite often make things up.

I love the store, the access, the inventory - but it's not a place I'd put on the list for knowledgeable service.

And as stated below, Fry's is a good place for fictitious advice. According to them, XP was discontinued long before MS extended sales of XP for netbooks.

I hate the physical stores, I hate the App Store.

1) Lost my power cord while traveling, so I thought I'd jump into the Apple Store and pick up a new one. Should be an in and out thing... took 1.5 hours of me just waiting around the store for them to sell me a power cord. This was in Sydney. Once I actually got to talk to someone, it still took 20 minutes. So painful. "Genius" is Apple for happy little idiot.

2) Tried to buy 8 laptops for a dev team. Bought them all online, went to pick them up... credit card cleared, no errors or messages on the website. Get to the store, "We're sorry, Sir. We can't give you more than 3 laptops per day." Uh? So you want me to come back once a day for 2 more days to pick up these laptops? "Yes Sir, that's our policy." It took a call to some regional corporate sales clown to get them to hand me 8 laptops the same day I paid for them.

3) Every try and roll out software to a team using the App Store as a source for any of that software? Is it the company Apple Account? Is it their Apple Account? Which account has the stupid software licenses bound to it, and how do I set it so I can use the company Apple Account to install the software, but not leave my master password for the company saved on their computer... I don't want to have to give them that password just so they can keep their system up-to-date... rather they just log in and expense software... nope, it's a cluster trying to keep it all updated once you have more than one account providing software. Apple does not care in the slightest about corporate users. I should have some sort of provisioning interface that lets me grant rights to use software licenses I own to their personal accounts... that's probably not pretty enough for Apple though.

2) I've run into this before (with iPads rather than MBP), so I know you're likely factual here. The business sales person said if I'd ordered from him, wouldn't have been an issue, but consumer orders live by consumer rules. He did at least tell me that it was two per person, not two per order, so I called my friend who lived near Valley Faire Mall at the time and had him bring four of his kids. Yes, it was stupid, but myself, him, and each of the four kids walked out with two iPads each in our arms.

3) pro-tip: check out Apple VPP. Very easy to sign up for and trust me, it's everything you need and more to make this a smooth process to handle.

I have to chime in "me too" here; it's hard to believe that Apple is this stupid, but they are. No iPad Air 2 cases in the front of the store!

Here's my story, not that it matters much but maybe when Apple eventually goes bust someone will chronicle the litany of stupid decisions they made along the way.

I bought an iPad Air 2 over Black Friday weekend, good price from an authorized seller. A few days later I received it.

I go to the Apple store to select a case. I can't find any. Some sales drone says the cases are in back, since they only have a "limited" amount of display space.

Directly in front of us are a bunch of pegs on the wall. Each peg is capable of holding quite a few cases. But each peg has exactly 1 iPad Pro grey case. There are six pegs next to each other, two rows of three. Each of the six pegs has exactly 1 iPad Pro grey case. Right next to these pegs are a bunch more, each with exactly 1 iPad Pro case, just a different color. Overall, literally dozens of pegs on the wall, each with exactly 1 iPad Pro case.

Yes, the display space is "limited", but they could get a wee bit more inventory out front if they didn't deliberately act like idiots about it. It must make sense to someone but not to me.

I walked out. I wasn't about to stand there while he rummaged around back for something to show me. I went to a local department store and got a decent case for a lot less than I would have paid Apple for one.

It would be understandable if the iPad Air 2 was discontinued. But as of 30 seconds ago I can still go to the Apple website and buy one. So, WTF???

2.) Yeah that's dumb. Maybe it's a stocking thing since it's Australia? Never heard of anything like that in the US.

3.) Almost everything on the mac store exists outside of it as well, but I agree it is somewhat designed more for consumers. You could use deployment tools if the source isn't App Store, or a 'family' account that shares purchases among users. Though I agree that's not ideal. Supposedly they're improving management with some new tools similar to how apps can be managed on iOS.

The max number of laptops was in Austin, the store in The Domain.

Just looked into the Volume Purchase Program as suggested in another post... interesting but doesn't help me 3 years ago when I had the problem. Glad they've made moves to fix it.

What I liked about HN was that it wasn't Reddit. You feel good because you can downvote me? Hooray, downvotes really add to the conversation.

Not much point in talking with someone who thinks I'm lying. And I don't give a shit about internet points, so keep downvoting me.

- Bored, doesn't-give-a-damn drone takes the broken thing and tosses it in a cart. Done.

- Mid-level manager gives me a hard time, and I wind up having an argument and threatening to reverse charges on my credit card.

My favorite episode: I buy a computer, get it home, and it won't even POST. Try to return it. They say, "We can't take this back, it's broken and we can't put it back on the shelf." WTF?

Yeah, you've been to a different Fry's . . .

I'm not going to pretend that Apple's customer service is horrible, but I can safely say that they aren't special anymore. Maybe I've just been incredibly unlucky, but simply put, their customer service is lackluster at best.

Edit: Just to be clear, this is all consumer level support.

1. Microsoft Band, a month after its warranty expired (bought in the USA), they still replaced it for free because of plastics wear, a common issue for that version

2. GF's Surface RT: faulty touch screen 1 year and half after she bought it, replaced for free, no questions asked, they even sent the replacement before I shipped the faulty one

3. GF's Lumia 925: she thought the pictures taken by the back camera were yellow-ish, she got it replaced with another brand new 925 for free. Six months later we bricked it trying to install a Windows 10 Insider Preview, replaced for free with a Lumia 830

4. My Lumia 1520, sent it in for repair because the battery was wearing out (it lasted a little more than a day instead of 1 and half/two), got a Lumia 950 XL instead

A friend of mine also got his Surface Pro 3 replaced for free.

I went ahead and did it but I struggled since it was not a small purchase price. I received the replacement and sent the defective unit back. Expecting the hold to be released with in 2-3 business days after they received the defect unit. Nope. They ended up holding the money for 15 business days.

I don't know if I'll ever buy something Microsoft again.

Back in '99, I bought a DEC Alpha. It was a great machine, although it had its quirks. I was having problems with the new chipset and compiling a linux kernel, and called support. I was about 16 at the time, and it's about 11 pm (CDT) on a Friday night.

I was put through to an actual engineer who must have been working late, and he helped me through the process. It ends up that certain kernel versions only supported certain chipsets.

Nowadays the company and the tech is mostly lost to the sands of time, and it seems good customer service went along with it.

I've also had laptops and monitors replaced by other companies on a "we'll send you a replacement, you send the defective one back in that box with this prepaid shipping label, and thanks for buying our products" basis.

I haven't heard of that from Apple.

When the G5 iMacs had problems with bad capacitors on the motherboards, Apple would send you the replacement midplane with swap instructions, along with a box to return the old one in.

I took pictures of the process: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/albums/1340761

They eventually switched to "take it to the local Apple store or mail it in".

But having a Google product doesn't make you a Google customer. We're basically parts of a hot-dog for them.

I filled in an online form, printed the pre-paid label, dropped it off at UPS. Within a week, no questions asked, a brand new pair showed up in the retail box (with another box, set of batteries, extension cables).

I've always found returns to manufacturers a huge pain in the ass, this was the first that wasn't.

Had a high end ("business" not gaming, same class as the MX Master or Performance MX in the current range) corded mouse circa 15 years ago, stopped working.

Called them, they just sent me a new mouse no questions asked.

People on the support line are diabetic themselves and are using the same monitoring devices to manage their illness so they really know what they're talking about.

IME Apple customer service is useless if you try to talk to them over the phone (though less hostile than Comcast), and good but not great if you go into a store. The best customer service comes from small companies selling premium outdoor stuff. For example, Darn Tough honors a lifetime warranty on their socks; OR tends to replace faulty products with no questions; and even REI will replace merchandise for a year. (REI used to do it forever, until assholes took advantage of their policy too often.)

No shipping delays, no not having the device while they "wait for spare parts", no discussions about access to the OS for testing, ...

If you don't have on-site with Lenovo and a service partner locally you apparently can bring/send it directly there and they'll claim the warranty with Lenovo, that might be a good deal as well if you know a trustworthy local shop.

https://www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/apple-support-honey...

There's a reason why third-party repair shops like Rossmann Group exist and make a killing doing component and board level repairs on iDevices.

I've had a few issues with devices in the last decade and after a quick check, if it's not a software issue that can be fixed, I'm leaving with a replacement device, even when on holiday it was painless to go into the nearest Apple store and get it replaced.

I rarely ever use the warranty on anything I buy as the process is usually not worth the effort but Apple Care is the only one I'd consider getting since I'll use it when I need, it's easy to find an Apple store and know they'll fix or replace anything with issues.

This is in contrast with most Android manufacturers who are happy to forget about you after the device has left the shop, and (free) Google online services which have basically non-existent customer support.

It will look pretty damning if Google itself can not build reliable customer service experience even while charging ridiculous prices for supposedly "premium" Android device.

This differs per jurisdiction, but in general you are entitled by law to receive a working device without flaws. In my jurisdiction this even extends beyond warranty. For example, you can expect a car, a door, or a guitar to work beyond 2 years. This law is irregardless of what you paid for the product or what the perceived quality is. The law even extends to software updates (security & reliability fixes).

As for Apple, they managed to ship my MBP 2010 with a broken discrete GPU yet fail to replace it. They also try to scam customers into buying extended warranty which basically is an anti harassment tax.

There are various factors:

* VAT is always included unless (if its aimed at business solely, like IBM, then this doesn't seem to be the case, but then that is being mentioned)

* Relatively low EUR. The EUR also isn't doing so well compared to the USD.

* Storage tax. This to compensate the entertainment industry.

* Environmental taxes.

The price you see in store is the price you're gonna pay (excluding S&H but the seller has to inform you on that before the sale is finalized). I find that practical.

> since they preclude inexpensive short-term-use or disposable electronics.

Which I consider a great thing because its better for the environment (although not good enough).

I'm not interested in buying a new phone every year because the software isn't updated anymore, or because the battery isn't allowing me to use the phone for a whole day anymore.

That's why -after burning myself with various cheap and expensive brands- I got myself a Fairphone. No, it isn't perfect and it won't run the latest version of Android, but at least it will have all security & reliability fixes backported. Monthly. At the very least its a step in the right direction, and the Fairphone is leading by example.

> * Relatively low EUR. The EUR also isn't doing so well compared to the USD.

For a non-Euro holder visiting Europe, doesn't that mean things are cheaper in Euro [the currency] countries? Most companies do not adjust the price of their products often.

I find what happened to this individual shocking - I hope this is not the future of Google's support.

While that level of customer service might have been too generous, Google clearly needs to do a lot better that the support they are apparently providing for the Pixel.

I guess this problem looks a lot like user damage though. Unless it's a widespread issue, might be hard to convince them otherwise.

The one Google exception that I have seen is Project Fi.

They have (24/7?) live chat and email/phone support available. They also have CSR's on /r/projectfi who seem responsive. I've had to contact support several times and had every issue taken care of immediately. It was been a much better experience than Verizon ever was.

Their entire business is based on data analysis. If their lack of customer and end user support was analytically shown to be a danger to their profits, they'd take action immediately. Computer says "no problem."

In Japan in the 70s and 80s, analysis showed that it was cheaper for Japan to build strongly reliable cars, because of the distance and shipping costs to their markets. And thus "reliable Japanese cars" became a thing.

Today in California, data shows the opposite, for Google. It's cheaper for them to suck.

It's not personal, it's just data.

I complained on Twitter about false positives and how I lost trust in it. They contacted me to say I can get a new replacement of the new version.

So I called them and the person spoke perfect fluent English and it wasn't tin can VoIP line. I was more amazed at those two things than getting a new smoke detector.

All good fast service I wish all tech support was as smooth. It was like being back in time when you got a person and everyone was polite plus your problem was resolved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45rRLkjdgrU

and how apple 'handled it' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDaPDHvI4Xg

[0] mine looks far worse than this http://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/image-jpeg.641961/

Do you work around mercury vapors, by chance? I wonder if it could also be something unusual in your sweat (perhaps from your diet)?

I destroy guitar strings on a near-weekly basis, despite all the anti-corrosion plating tech they have.

And Apple's service has topped "customer satisifaction" lists for years on end.

I'm not a shill, I promise. I just really like my Discover relationship.

I've owned 3 different models of iPhone and the premium support (if you pay it) is worth the price, aside from the issue of booking a time I always leave the apple store with my device fixed or replaced, I never have to come back another day and they always take my complaint very seriously (even showing me diagnostics indicating potential other issues I had not noticed).

I cannot fault Apple's customer service at all, in fact, it's why I still buy their phones instead of going through the impressive hoops I used to go through with sony-ericsson and nokia phones.