Agreed! However, I also wonder what their ratio of spam vs. actual ASL-requiring-customer calls is. Since it's so easy and quick to connect to a real human with comolete audio and video enabled on both ends, won't it be prone to abuse?

The more such a service gets attention from regular media (instead of the niche, targeted audience it aims to serve), I fear it'll be another case of "why we can't have good things".

It’s already pretty easy for anyone to talk to an human at Apple tbh, be it by phone or by going to a physical store, their support is already really accessible for everyone.

Here if I understand you don’t get access to support but to an interpreter who will call the support for you. It’s of no interest if you don’t know ASL

> Here if I understand you don’t get access to support but to an interpreter who will call the support for you. It’s of no interest if you don’t know ASL

I might receive some slack here, but I gave it a try (I don't know ASL). Within 5 seconds of clicking the button, I was connected to a live human, with both my video and sound, as well as the other person's, turned on (although I did have the ability to switch them off). There was no intermediate step to filter out spam calls. I did cut the call quickly though to avoid wasting their time!

Agreed, their customer side gets a person very quickly and so does their Apple Business Manager program. After spending many hours fighting AT&T’a automated and unhelpful customer support I got connected with a knowledgeable person instantly with ABM who was able to diagnose my issue at a level I never dreamed possible for what I’ve come to think of as “support” from most companies.

They were able to confirm the issue was on AT&T’s end, give me the exact language to use when talking to AT&T, and were nice and easy to work with. At one point they needed a picture of something and I braced myself for what that process would look like, it was stupid simple, they sent me an email with a link to upload the picture. It literally couldn’t have been easier but I don’t think most support places could have accomplished that task.

I have been an Apple customer for well over a decade and that ABM experience blew me away and made me happy I had gone with iPads for my business over cheaper Android tablets (one of _many_ reasons).

Something that baffles me about modern business is that Apple is far and away the most valuable company in the world, they’re phenomenally profitable, they’ve got an absolute mountain of cash, and they’ve done so by basically eschewing every page in the MBA playbook, and this has had no influence whatsoever on how the business world talks about proper business strategy.

They’re obsessive about quality, they treat design and customer experience as first class parts of the process, they invest heavily in long-term R&D, they have world leading support - they’ve basically done the opposite of what every financial analyst and business consultant in the world thinks is the right move, and as a result they’re worth more than Saudi-Aramco, and yet somehow every company out there is still sprinting in the exact opposite direction of how Apple operates.

Apple had one leader who thought differently, and that paid off, and now there is already some inertia inside apple because that is part of their brand. They put out one bad keyboard, mess with the ports in their macs and the world judges them harshly, everything is something gate.

Because Apple's way works does not mean other ways do not. Those other ways are way easier and cheaper, and businesses are fine chasing lower hanging fruits.

One part is probably because they are so secretive externally and internally, so there have been no business books on apples culture, playbook etc. No TED talks from ex Apple leaders.

I think Tesla is the closest to trying to follow their model, in a much scrappier way of course.

Tesla in no way follows Apple’s model. Musk has a very specific way of running companies reflected in both SpaceX and Tesla. That involves two key things Apple would never do:

- ship 90% solutions to learn very early what doesn’t work - iterate and make changes very rapidly to the product

This can be seen in the model 3, which has had significant variations even within a year. Both improvements (better fit and finish) and likely mistakes (deleting lidar).

The same is seen on the SpaceX side. The starship launches were wildly successful despite the catastrophic endings. This can be seen in the live streams of the employees cheering wildly at the end (which completely baffled armchair critics).

I’m on the fence if this is a good way to run companies long term, but the general point is that it’s about as far from Apple’s culture as you can get.

Nit: Model 3 never had lidar, radar is what they removed.

That Apple doesn't ship 90% solutions is laughable. The initial versions of OSX, iPhone etc. had a lot of rough edges, and were practically public betas.

The only difference is that Jobs and later his deciples were able to blow smoke up your ass, and sell the obvious incomplete product as focusing on some other distraction, or something. Clearly the reality distortion field worked.

Hardware vs software. Big difference because one can be easily updated.

You must not recall Antennagate.

I do, that’s one phone in how many models? And that wasn’t even “bad” compared to the flaws spacex/tesla are willing to accept.

I'm not suggesting that Apple has egregious hardware or software problems, but (as a fanboy of neither company) that you're cherry-picking by claim that Apple isn't "ship[ping] 90% solutions to learn very early what doesn’t work".

Panel gaps or whatever at Tesla are obviously something they know about, it's not like nobody at Tesla is aware that their fit and finish doesn't match a Mercedes S-Class.

Whereas Antennagate is something that shouldn't have escaped the lab, I can't really a similar incident with Tesla.

The recent Starship explosion was a success, if you want to see the cost of avoiding rapid iteration when it comes to rockets look no further than the SLS.

Tesla has not been known for great customer service. They are user friendly..ish, but human to human level experience is a hit or miss.

They were in the early days. I remember someone posting about how their Tesla broke down and a Tesla flatbed pulled up with a working car, swapped them out, and left their car as a loaner

Wouldn’t the spam calls be pretty minimal if they make it known that they will not provide support to non-ASL callers?

I thought it was AI

100%. Wonder how soon this will become automated though? Since ASL seems like an image recognition task, and AI models are getting pretty good at that.

It’s not really, ASL is it’s own distinct language from English, like most sign languages. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language, which still isn’t anything related to French and has its own linguistic features and independent development. Because of this translating ASL to English (or any other language) is no easier than translating to or from any other spoken language.

Sure, but machines are actually pretty good at spoken and written translation these days, so I would expect that once the image recognition is solved they could handle ASL readily as well.

Oh absolutely, I agree. I just wanted to make certain it was clear that it isn’t as simple as classifying images as words.

Since ASL doesn't have a massive corpus of scrabeable training data (at least I would think). It's probably on the harder side when it comes to creating machine translators.

There must be a huge corpus of TV broadcasts, filmed live events etc. where a person speaking is being translated into sign language in real time.

Those are usually subtitled.

in theory with a mastery of speech recognization one would assume you could then apply that to any diction that has an accompanying ASL translator to derive ASL elements from the contexts given by the spoken word.

in practice that's all difficult, if at all possible -- but just sayin; we have decently good speech interpretation at this point, perhaps we aren't far from self-training ASL against something similar.

Usually, but I'm referring to the broadcasts that have a live sign language interpreter on-screen.

If Apple is filming its ASL employees, it’s about to get a lot more

I suspect that buoys and placement make signed languages harder for machine translation than spoken ones.

And to add on a little, ASL is like any other language in that it has regional dialects. It's why many people introduce themselves with their name and where they learned to sign.

One of the more common examples from teachers is the sign for SLOW. On the west coast, we sign it as the flat palm being pulled slowly back along the extended non-dominant arm. But in the south and parts of the east, it is signed as the Y sign, thumb against the cheek, being tilted forward.

The way you fix this casually is to ask the other person to finger spell or mime what they meant. I can't see AI being able to do that well for a while but maybe..?

Never, the whole point is to employ ASL fluent people to keep the culture and language alive.

> ASL seems like an image recognition task

Not trying to be trite, but I imagine you don't know ASL. It is an extremely loose and context dependent language really. I am sure it can be done eventually, but I still think it's very far off in terms of recognition. Would love to find out more about the state of the art for ASL or BSL recognition though.

You mean a video recognition task.

Not just ASL but a total of nine signing options (click the Languages button in the top right).

And once again, the strange way Apple operates in Canada appears. They offer ASL, but not LSQ, the common sign language for francophones.

There's probably fewer than 1000 deaf speakers of LSQ, many of whom are also fluent in ASL.

ASL is a more common language for deaf people in Francophone communities than LSQ.

Do you have sources for that?

Canadian census table, "mother tongue", Quebec Sign Language is listed as 990; language spoken most often at home 1475; "Other language spoken at home 6200."

c.f. ASL at 4965, 8175, 37620.

I perhaps overstated the case, but...

Surely a good part of the 990-1500 are also functional in ASL. Those who aren't are a vanishingly small subpopulation to have a team of interpreters on staff scheduled to shifts, ready to videoconference.

> Surely a good part of the 990-1500 are also functional in ASL.

Do you, once again, have sources for that? I'm only trying to highlight the weird edge cases Apple constantly makes to operate in Canada, and you're carrying their water for them. They're adults, they could have explained themselves why they don't serve that language community.

I think I've done pretty well providing sources and you're pretty adversarial. e.g.

> you're carrying their water for them

[You made a statement, and anyone who chooses to disagree with you is "carrying [Apple's] water for them". So I guess we should just STFU?]

> they could have explained themselves why they don't serve that language community

I think this is ridiculous. Are you aware of any company making a statement about why they don't serve a specific language community?

In any case, sure, I will take the bait and further strengthen my point:

Within Quebec, 1310 in the last census indicated that they are conversant in ASL.

The number of people in Quebec who would prefer to speak Quebec Sign Language are dwarfed by the number of people in Quebec who would prefer to speak any one of Moriysen, Telugu, Bosnian, the Swiss dialect of German, Nepali, etc. I have not heard any statements by any firms about why they do not cater to these language communities in Quebec.

There's also hundreds of people in Quebec who are native speakers of other sign languages other than LSQ or ASL. Apple does not cater to these people, either.