I'm primarily talking about companies that require more than basic customer support, not users who need help installing iPhoto (since this is Hacker News by Ycombinator after all). If you build your company upon the assumption that your target operating systems work without interaction with the vendor, good luck! Even if you're a $1m revenue startup targeting iOS or Mac, you will run into a blocking issue and discover that all Apple employees other than support and PR are outright banned from communicating with external parties about their products. No Apple employees are allowed to participate in their own public forums except in exceptional circumstances, and their "developer support" team seems to only be capable of copy-pasting vaguely relevant links from apple.com. Compare this to companies like Mozilla, GitHub, and even Adobe, who allow developers to be open and honest about issues that companies and individuals bring up. Apple, Google, and Facebook are the worst. Microsoft is decent and is fairly receptive to "user companies" if the issue is important enough.

I will admit I was being a bit facetious.

I work in a company that sells B2B software for developers, and as developers we do sometimes talk directly to our customers, it's a lot faster having a person on each side debugging the problem.

But our software does cost upwards of $5000 per year, so they certainly pay for that level of support.

I do understand why Apple bans people from helping outside of official support channels. Imagine how annoying it would be if you were in support and talking to a customer who is now telling you that an Apple developer somewhere on the internet suggested you try some solution that didn't work or even made things worse.

No they do not have better things to do. Most developers should be required to spend time with support queries. They might get a better understanding of what they are building and a little more perspective.

I'm going to contradict my earlier comment and say that I agree with you.

At my old company, they made devs do 2 hours of support a week, that was frontline support, so we got all the bullshit queries.

It definitely helped resolve some common issues. For instance, we got a lot of support queries about people forgetting their password. There was a reset password option, but it wasn't large on the screen, so customers missed it.

I made a fix, so that if they got their password wrong, there was a nice big message with the forgot password link. We didn't have a single forgotten password query after that. It was a 10 minute fix.

There were a lot of other support queries that had easy fixes that didn't make it back to the devs.