In one part they say the store sucks because you can never find someone to purchase from because there are too many tech support “geniuses”, later they note that a lot of people need repairs. So, you know. Having a lot of tech support people would make sense.
I think the problem is pretty simple, the experience of going to an Apple store is a victim of Apple’s success. I can’t think of a store that gets that much traffic that I actually enjoy going to. The best you can do is streamline it, which they actually have done in some ways but not others.
I’ve also noticed the “it’s impossible to actually buy anything” problem with Apple Stores, especially in stores that get any appreciable amount of foot traffic. (Where I live there is at least one Apple Store in a mall that hardly anyone visits, and that one is just fine for service.)
However—and I’m not saying this as a defense, just as an interesting fact—at one point when I was waiting around trying to get the attention of someone to buy a stupid dongle, a staff member helpfully pointed out to me that I could just buy the thing myself with the Apple Store app on my phone (i.e. point my phone at the barcode on it, pay with card), and then walk out out of the store with the item, having never interacted with a single store worker (except perhaps implicitly with a plainclothes security guard who observed me doing this self-checkout flow and so didn’t tackle me on the way out. I don’t think your purchase is somehow remotely deactivating a magnetic anti-theft tag in the product or anything, so they’ve got to be doing loss-prevention for this flow the old-fashioned way.)
And while you can’t complete the entire purchase yourself for big-ticket items (the kind they keep back in the warehouse section and would have to retrieve for you), you can still do the “paying” part in advance of showing up at the store, through the app—or while you’re in the store, through the app—which turns the process of “finding an employee who has time to both guide you through SKU selection and ring you up” into “getting the front-door attendant to notify anyone with a spare moment that one of the devices already in the ‘waiting for pickup’ pile in the back can be grabbed and brought out.”
Honestly, this seems like it has somehow secretly become the primary flow that Apple Stores want to do [non-business-customer] purchases through, and yet they don’t mention it anywhere. They should have big signs in the stores telling you to buy things using your phone (and/or by using the store website on any of the demo computers)!
Right; the only unique thing about using the Apple Store app is that it lets you scan UPC codes for small-purchase items when you’re already in the store, allowing you to just pick something up and walk out with it. For large-purchase items, it’s the same whether you use the app or the website. (Although I think that when you show up to a store where you have an item waiting for you, and you have the app running, it does some kind of automatic prompting or notification to staff or something.)
I really hate their store pick up because you have to find the same random employee to go fetch the item for you. What should be a 69 second in-and-our is at least ten minutes at the store near me.
Actually, the thing that really makes them superior is that they have a dedicated pick-up area in the store. You know exactly where to go and you can get out of there quickly.
With the Apple Store I'm just walking into a big room full of busy people. I have zero idea of who the hell I'm actually supposed to talk to or where to go get the thing I paid for.
Yes. Picking up items at an Apple store still subjects you to mall parking hell, walking through the mall, finding Waldo to fetch your item and paying. I'de say pickup at Bestbuy or Home Depot is infinitely better... pickup desk generally at front of store.. ample parking steps away... in and out.
Went to go buy an apple watch and wanted to try the different sizes and feel the weights of the different models on my wrist. I signed in and was told that someone would come find me- that I just need to wait by the table. So I sit by the table for 25 minutes. I inquire around the table as to who's been helped/ try to gauge how many people are in front in "line". I wait for 20 minutes without any Apple employee coming to the table to help anyone. I see about 5 employees standing around- not sure what their purposes are. I find someone in a blue shirt and khakis and tell them that I want to give them money but there has been zero progress in the watch selling, but there are other people in line in front of who also are interested in giving them money but likewise not being helped. The person issues me the standard retail apology without any additional information. 5 minutes go by without any other communication and I leave the store without a watch.
My biggest complaint about the Apple Store is the long wait times when your computer breaks. You often have to wait for a few days to even get an appointment.
But the award for the most asinine thing about the Apple Store is their insistence on not having a proper area to pay for things. So people just wander around wanting to buy something and not knowing where to pay for it. And they end up wasting a lot more time that way.
Me too. Same day, even. This is in NYC and I live within five minutes’ walk from the nearest store. Compared to phone support from PC makers (even including the glorious no-questions-asked IBM hardware days), it’s a vast improvement for me.
Yea just to clarify, I'm not trying to compare it to owning a PC. It's still leaps and bounds better. But still the quality in my experience has gone down.
I think it depends on the area. I live near an Apple store, but it is the only one for a very large area that includes a college. It's literally packed from open to close. I haven't had bad experiences, but definitely not as smooth as yours.
People have been saying that Apple has not grown its store count along with the numbers of device users they have added. I think it shows in areas like mine.
Just for curiosity's sake what was the issue with the keyboard?
Because I work at a repair shop. Not an apple one (we're way too small for that, they want something ridiculous like $100,000 a year in used apple sales before they even consider letting you apply to be a reseller/repair store). People bring apple stuff here because there's nowhere else to take them except a three hour drive to the nearest big city.
The only issues I've seen on MacBook keyboards in my 8 years working here, required a full keyboard replacement. And I just did one a couple weeks ago. That's a good hour or two's work, just getting the thing disassembled far enough to get to the keyboard in the first place, then pulling all of the hundred or so screws for the keyboard, replacing it, and rebuilding everything.
The stores are more sterile and the employees and service is more "clinical" and less "hands on."
I miss the original stores' refurbished/discount tables/bin they used to have. You could find great deals on those tables..
Oh.. one other thing that annoys the hell out of me about the stores an service. I bought a new iphone8, I asked if they could transfer the iphone5 data+ apps to my new phone. They said no, do it yourself.. I was pissed. A damn tech company, that sells a portable cpu for $700+ dollars and they won't perform a data transfer?
What you describe sounds like a huge waste of everybody's time. Furthermore data migration on mobile devices mostly happens via iCloud these days - there's really no need to do that in store. It's part of the onboarding process whenever you boot up a new iOS device.
> There's no reason they couldn't do something similar/more modern with an iPhone and not have a security risk.
Of course there's a security risk. The security model of both the Macs and the iPhones have significantly improved. The hardware security models make this a difficult engineering task - and a dangerous one.
The modern day equivalent would be walking you through backing up to iCloud and restoring from iCloud. It’s not a security risk unless iCloud is one already.
When I bought an iPhone 7 earlier this year, they walked me through the transfer of the data from my iPhone 5. It was more like me doing it with a trained assistant at hand. They were confused at first because iPhone 5's don't have all the options for transfer that newer phones have.
>The award for the most asinine thing about the Apple Store is their insistence on not having a proper area to pay for things.
For small ticket items, you can scan, pay and leave without needing to interact with the staff.
>Thanks to the Apple Store app, you can use your iPhone to scan the barcode of an accessory off the shelf and use Apple Pay to pay for it. From there, you can just walk out of the store with your new Apple accessory in hand.
So same as with self scanning tills at supermarkets I'm now expected to do the work for one of the most profitable companies in the world, since they can't be bothered to have a proper checkout or hire enough people.
Huh? Self checkouts are great! Rather than having 1 or 2 tills you can have many times that manned by the same number of people. If you don't have any alcohol you can use it without interacting with anyone at all and its much faster.
That coupled with contactless payments make it super quick to buy just a few items.
A "proper" checkout is still king for large shops but for people I know (late 20s), that is becoming less common for more frequent, smaller shopping trips.
Edit: I should say this is for someone based in London.
Let's just say that - and that goes especially for the UK [I'm looking at you: Boots!] - self checkout tills and me seem to be in a perpetual war.
Herearound at least you scan your crap and pay. In the UK there's some shitty weight system, which I don't get and the system accuses me after every third item of being a thief and instructs me to call assistance (which cannot be found since, well, self checkout tills).
Look, if you want me to do your work then, at the very minimum, trust me not to cheat or kindly fuck off!
The worst experience I've ever had was in a Tesco in London were the completely rude security dude claimed that there's only self checkout.
My friend wanted a pack of cigarettes. Good luck getting that from a self checkout till.
My second-favorite self-checkout peeve is when I go to Target (+grocery) and want to buy two or three things for lunch, one of which is an apple--a Fuji apple, which I have memorized as produce #4131. The apple has to be weighed, so it goes on the scale. But the scanning lasers also go across the scale plate.
If the scanning laser manages to read the little bar code on the produce sticker before I manually type in the number on it, the whole self-checkout station immediately panics and calls for a store employee to unlock it. Every. Time.
This problem has existed for years. I now trigger it on purpose whenever I'm not in a rush. There's no excuse whatsoever for a self-checkout system to grind to a halt when reading a bar code that legitimately appears somewhere in the store.
>If you don't have any alcohol you can use it without interacting with anyone at all and its much faster.
I agree that you can do it without interacting with anyone at all. But I question whether it's faster.
For a class assignment on usability a while back, I observed self-checkout users and manned ("proper") checkout at a local grocery store and found that the absolute fastest of the self-checkout users were only just as fast (per item) as the average manned checkout user (among 24 users).
A few factors increase the speed of manned transactions. First, cashiers are familiar with common
produce numbers, avoiding the need to search for stickers or slowly look up the number of a particular
item. Second, a cashier can begin bagging items as the user pays by credit card or pulls out cash, so
some of the work is done in parallel. Third, sometimes manned checkouts have a person dedicated to
bagging, which reduces the time even further (though all times recorded for this project are single
cashiers without baggers).
Self-checkouts definitely feel nicer for me (except when the anti-theft "place item in bagging area" nagging starts). But now, when I'm in a hurry, I'll make a beeline for a register with a cashier instead of the self-checkout.
To me, the main advantage is that (at my local store) they implement a "wait for the next available machine" protocol rather than "pick a cashier to queue up behind."
That's kind of the key, right? If you're buying one or two items, the self-checkout is great! If you're buying a week or two worth of supplies, it's terrible.
Here in the US, at least at the stores I shop at, each item requires that you scan it, wait for the machine to tell you to place the item in the bagging area, wait for it to register the weight, then you're allowed to move to the next item. If you accidentally wait too long, and the attendant just clears the wait state (which they do all to frequently just to get things to move along), then it won't let you put the item in the area, and instead you have to call the attendant over to clear the "unexpected item" state, which just makes things take so much longer.
Then there's the times where some older person tries it out, gets really confused, and the attendant is spending all of their time with them, and everyone else gets held up by the quirks of the system.
It depends on the store design, Waitrose in the UK doesn't bother with the weighing thing, and you can scan as you go around the shop and just pay at the end. It is way more convenient.
One supermarket I went to tried that... but the user experience is so awful that no one wants to do it, so the scanners just sit at the entrance, lonely and unused.
I have the app. It works really well if you are an Apple nerd like me. But not everyone does. Judging by the number of people that wander around, this is clearly a solution that sounded good at Apple's Silicon Valley offices but breaks down doesn't work in the real world. This is not an area that needed innovation for innovation sake. Just have a sign and employee assigned so you can go to them and pay for stuff.
Apple Pay still isn't supported in most of the world, sadly.
I'd kill to be able to just use it for all my payments but so far most of Eastern Europe is of no interest to Apple, it seems. (Despite the really big following they have around here.)
I'm a developer who switched to Macbooks in 2006 and I go into the Apple Store at least a couple times per year (the last time was weeks ago), and I have never noticed that was possible. Seems like a failure to market this option. I know it might hurt the aesthetic they're going for, but if they're overwhelmed even with legions of store employees, they might as well have signs trumpeting this to move people along more quickly.
I know it's just my experience, but it looks like this thread (as the article) is all about personal experiences.
I had four time the same issue with a MBP 2011, the HDD cable was failing again ad again. First time they replaced it, next time they replaced the cable plus the HDD, third time they replaced cable plus logicboard, fourth I got a new MBP 2013. All for free, without Apple Care. Every time I got my laptop back in less than 4 business days (also the replacement unit, I received it at home even before they had picked the old one).
This is true heaven if compared to my nightmarish experiences with DELL, ASUS or ACER (as a private customer, not business).
About the repeated MBP issue, I blamed my way of carrying it around (with a passport bag) and the fact that the cable was directly in close contact with the unibody shell.
I had great experiences with their device support. Replacements, repairs, their folks seem to err on the side of cover the claim rather than deny the claim when the cause of the problem seems ambiguous. I don't have a complaint about support yet, but I can tell my keyboard on my current-gen macbook pro is going to start failing soon (the semicolon key no longer clicks when pressed, the tab key is inconsistent) and from what I've heard from others is that it will require turning my laptop in and waiting days or weeks until it gets fixed. This is a company machine and I can't simply "not work" for 3+ days because I'm waiting on Apple HQ to blow dust out of my keyboard.
Instead of taking it in, I'm looking at usb-c adapters so that I can plug in my external kb and use that instead. The _vast_ majority of engineers at my company uses some kind of external keyboard on these machines.
Your company doesn't have a backup machine you can work on for a few days? Even if you are a one person shop, you should have some sort of plan for hardware failure.
The majority of our company, especially on the engineering side, is remote employees. Honestly not a bad idea to ensure there is an employee hardware failure plan in place.
HW design, that fails 3 times in a row in the same place (and ultimately even destroys the logic board - probably because of the short on the exposed cable wiring), and the service that fails to prevent that, I'd hardly call a "true heaven". It's terrible.
Say, they failed to make the cable protected enough in the initial design. During the first service, they should just not replace the cable, they should also add the protection, so that the issue doesn't happen again for that customer.
If you google around, you'll see that this is a known problem and some people were even modding their MBPs proactively, to avoid this specific cable issue, caused by wrong design, to happen at inappropriate time.
Do you know how many Dells, Acers, and Asus laptops have known problems that affect the vast majority of units but will still take shipping your computer on your dime and being without for weeks at a time?
My mother can afford a Macbook, I've told her this, but she insists on buying cheap Dells on sale.
In 3 years she's gone through 3 200-300$ Dells. Every time they break Dell comes back with some untenable repair arrangement and off she goes.
She could have bought a used Macbook Pro 3 years ago, and today it'd be worth more than all of those Dells put together, and odds are it'd be in working condition unlike the 3rd one which she's telling me is picking up a flickering screen issue.
If something broke she could go to the Apple store and get it fixed within a couple of days. Even out of warranty she'd be better off than Dell out of warranty, which is like Apple's out of warranty support... except more expensive and slower.
Expensive laptops have the same exact known issues.
My last windows laptop, the HP Spectre x360, was about as much as a MBP had a track record of failing motherboards.
My old Zenbook, also in MBP pricing range was known to have the hinge fail.
You're making the same mistake that my mother makes, assuming a "dollar's worth" of laptop is fungible.
If you spend 400$ on a laptop, it's not enough that it only be at least 1/3rd as reliable as a 1200$ Macbook Pro. Every time a laptop fails there's a cost outside of just getting a new laptop, like transferring all your stuff, not having a laptop, etc.
Then don’t do that (tm). I wouldn’t go near any Windows manufacturers consumer line of computers. They are full of crap ware and have horrible support.
I have had no problem with Dell’s business laptops. Barring buying from the business line, I buy computers from the Microsoft Store.
Off the top of my head over the years I remember common LCD issues and GPU failures.
Every manufacturer has these problems, the difference is Dell releases something like 10 new Latitudes all with different model numbers and designations every year, so to find the common issues you search Dell latitude + your specific model.
With Apple there's 2 lines, with similar names. When there's an issue, everyone knows about it, it's easily searched and more importantly, easier to cover in a story. "The Macbook has tons of issues" gets reads. "The Dell Latitude 7490 has tons of LCD issues" gets... people who own Dell Latitude 7490, maybe. The former reads like a major story, the latter reads like a warranty announcement or something.
Every time only the flat cable was faulty (in fact I could always boot the HDD from usb with an adapter). They replaced the other components because they were thinking that those were damaging the cable.
Design flaw happens and Apple relatively quickly sorted it out. On the other hand, I will never forget Acer's screen hinges and how we were supposed to fix them [0]
Hard drive cables are a known issue in 2010/2011 MBPs. They were once acknowledged by Apple and replaced for free, but not anymore...
Luckily they cost $10 on Amazon and can be replaced in 10 minutes with a small phillips screwdriver. I managed my school's computer repair room for IT and replaced at least a hundred of these cables while I was in school.
Nah, it wasn't you. Those cables are a very common failure. We keep them in stock at our (not apple) computer store.
Normally it's just the cable. Sometimes it's the cable and the OS needs a reload (because whatever goes wrong with the cable causes the drive itself to get corrupted, but not actually physically fail).
> You often have to wait for a few days to even get an appointment.
Here's the thing that got me - last year the laptop broke on my MacBook Pro. Very common and typical problem.
Whenever I tried to book an appointment there was literally no appointments in the entirety of London. It was actually impossible to book an appointment. I ended up just walking into a store on my Tuesday lunch break and they told me all their walk ins for the day have been taken up, and I should line up in the morning and wait for the store to open.
You call it wasting time, Apple calls it "increased product exposure". It's the same reason Target staggers their registers and makes their checkout process slow as hell; they found that the more time you spend waiting in line, the more likely you are to remember something you wanted to buy and return to the store to get it. They don't care how quickly you leave the store, they only care about how much you leave with.
Advertising on the App Store really broke my heart, I thought Apple just made money from us all by selling expensive, high quality devices and apps. These ads are a desperate attempt to now make something over and above by selling my attention, what a shame!
It feels like a way for Apple to claw back even more than their 30% cut. Even if you have a successful app, now you have to take some of your money and buy the search ads for it, otherwise somebody else is going to be the first result when potential customers come to the store looking specifically for your app.
You can try and drive traffic straight to your store page from outside sources to bypass that search, but that sort of marketing costs money too. And word of mouth searches are going to be through the App Store search regardless.
It was nice when Apple's search felt like it was just trying to help you find what you were looking for. But it's 2019 and we need to put ads in everything now.
It would be one thing if I searched for "notebook" or "handwriting" or "notes," but I searched for a specific app by name and they're sending traffic to a competitor because GoodNotes "only" pays 30% of their revenue to Apple, and Apple wants even more on top of that or else a competitor gets their traffic.
Sometimes search is bad because search is a hard problem and it's difficult to know what a user is looking for.
Apple knows exactly what I was looking for. They're just being dicks about it.
What’s going to happen when Apple rolls out the game subscription? Will they favor those games over publishers that decide not to be part of it?
I think (and hope) that I read that it will be a separate tab. My heart goes out to the few non scammy, paid up front/pay one time to get rid of ads publishers that might be affected, but honestly if all apps that are dependent on ads, in app purchases of coins, power ups and loot boxes disappeared from the store, nothing of value would be lost.
I really hate ads on phones. There is relatively little space on phones and for any of that space to have ads is really distracting.
I’m really disappointed that Apple is going anywhere near ad-tech. I stay in the Apple ecosystem because they have my preferred value system - I give them money and they give me stuff.
I live near an Apple store and frequent it every few months when I need to fix a phone or laptop, or buy a dongle, etc.
The store near me gets lots of foot traffic, but the experience is just fine. There are usually at least 2-3 employees who will come up and ask me how I'm doing and what they can help with. Given the size of the store, the number of employees is surprising actually. And it's as easy as ever to book appointments, in my experience anyway.
I think what's changed is that the novelty has worn off. When Apple Stores first became a thing, it was new and sexy. Now, they're everywhere and don't have that wow factor, because it's become a feature of our lives that you go there every so often if you want to try out, fix or buy an apple product in person. And with the novelty factor gone, people find things to complain about if their experience isn't perfect, even though Apple's customer service is still light years ahead of most anyone else [0].
[0] I say this as an Android and Lenovo X1 user. I personally prefer non-mac products, but my wife has a Macbook Pro and an iPhone and I'm always jealous that when things break, she can get them fixed right away, while I worry that a fix will entail multiple unpleasant interactions with phone agents, followed by a multi-week repair process.
EDIT: I want to add two ideas here in the hope that someone here finds them helpful. When I make laptop purchases (for non-apple products), the first place I look is Costco. They offered the Carbon X1 laptop with pretty good specs (16gb RAM, i7 processor, 512GB SSD. Similar specs on the Dell XPS 13 that they sell) at a great price, with a 90 day, no questions asked return policy and an extra year of warranty included in the already great price. Even if you aren't a costco member, it's probably worth joining for this deal if you are looking to get a Dell or Lenovo laptop. And in my experience, Costco is very easy to deal with when problems arise.
A second idea is to buy using a Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card, which also add a year on to the manufacturer's warranty. Usually, they require you to get a quote from a repair shop and they will reimburse you. In some cases, they will just replace the product straight up. And they are fairly easy to work with. This is the only card I use to make purchases that I know have a chance of breaking.
Lenovo's onsite service is inexpensive and, in my experience, excellent. I've used it a few times over the years and it's involved minimal interaction with helpful, focused staff and techs.
In my city, for onsite service, I have two options within 30 miles: one is an office depot, and the other is a computer repair store. Both seem to contract with Lenovo. I'm sure that there are some repair centers that provide excellent service and some less so.
Meanwhile, Apple has five stores within a 30 minute drive. And in my experience, every single Apple store I've been to gives me a more-or-less consistently good experience. Is it perfect? Far from it. But they can fix most issues I've had onsite, and the turnaround time is predictable when they ship out for repairs.
Meanwhile, with other companies, it's a crapshoot. I had a phone from LG that broke. I mailed it in and after 5 weeks and many follow up phone calls, I still didn't have it back. They claimed that they were out of the part that they needed to repair the phone and were waiting for it to come in. They initially told me that the repair would take 2 weeks. In my mind, a company with decent customer service would see that the part is out of stock and just give me a replacement phone if they can't turn around the repair in a reasonable time frame.
With Apple, you know what you are getting into. And if they say 1 week, they usually mean 1 week.
Onsite is your site. It is at times a confusing term, but if you get an onsite warrant you needn't go anywhere, you wait at your place of business or your home and the tech comes in and fixes it. Lenovo actually does pretty well at this.
I spent four weeks trying to order a genuine replacement keyboard for for my X1 after Lenovo Service tried to charge me $400 for a user-replaceable part. The parts order line was only open a few hours a day and hold times tended to go past their closing time. I'll never Lenovo again.
I think the "add a year to the warranty" feature is pretty common among credit cards. Last I checked, all my credit cards offered that. It pays to read the fine print!
It is almost impossible to pay in person but the Apple Store app offers ability to scan the barcode on almost any accessory and pay on the spot for it without ever seeing staff. I do not have many issues with this model, in fact it makes visits to the Apple Store for the odd cable quite easy. However, I did find that sometimes specific accessories are simply not presented and one must flag down staff to have one pulled out from storage.
It is the repair/service story that has really deteriorated over time and Apple would bode well to remember that although PC vendors need to play catch-up they will eventually become good enough.
I did find Joint Venture invaluable. Essentially it is a Pay-to-Play scheme which allows you to book same-day appointments and access the Business Team (which gives a slight discount).
Anybody remember the good old days when you could have AppleCare send you a box and a return label?
> It is almost impossible to pay in person but the Apple Store app offers ability to scan the barcode on almost any accessory and pay on the spot for it without ever seeing staff.
It's the same problem that they have with most of their products. All design considerations are controlled by people driven exclusively by thin, light, minimal. It's getting tired and cliche.
I don't live in a place big enough for an Apple forest grove or whatever. It's an undersized store in a mall that was remodeled two years ago. The people who designed it never were in such a store before. It's crowded, too loud, and stripped of basic functions. The old version of the Apple store felt busy and energized, the new ones are disorienting.
The old Apple store in the same retail space was much more functional. It had a nice little kids corner with a lower table and fancy toadstool chairs. It was a great way for kids to explore iMacs and iPads. Now purged as a lower table isn't symmetrical enough. The training area is just a table in the middle, and it's just not as pleasant -- people can't hear and leave.
Apple has a great thing going with people there though -- it's a real asset. The staff are incredibly friendly, patient and helpful.
The sound thing is a real issue. The Apple store by my parents moved into a larger and renovated space recently with double the height ceilings. It got way louder, to the point where you can barely hear what the reps say to you. I'd have a migraine every day if I had to work a whole shift in there.
It's the same problem in restaurants and bars that have this style of concrete floors, hard walls, and exposed duct work ceilings: there is nothing to absorb the sound. When people stripped drapes from windows, carpet from floors, and coverings from ceilings, no one stopped to think why these sound absorbing materials were used in the first place. You can fix this by spraying sound insulating foam all over your beautiful exposed ceiling that no one looks at because it's dusty and painted black and 20 feet in the air, but that's clearly a cost that's already been calculated and cut.
As a result, you can't hear anyone at breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, the bar, the gym, or even the Apple store.
>[Angela Ahrendts'] overhaul of the Genius Bar has been especially controversial. Customers looking for technical advice or repairs must now check in with an employee, who types their request into an iPad. Then when a Genius is free, he or she must find the customer wherever they happen to be in the store. Ahrendts was determined to get rid of lineups, but now the stores are often crowded with people waiting for their iPhones to be fixed or batteries swapped out.
[...] Some employees speculate she’ll [Deirdre O’Brien] bring back the original Genius Bar.
I don't see how the old dedicated space for a Genius Bar would work better. The problem is that the old way tied tech support to a spatial location in the store. The new way assigned tech support to a person instead of a location. This allows any and every table in the store to become a temporary "genius bar" for that customer session.
In theory, if you had a dedicated area for the Genius Bar, you'd hope it would be free of crowds and be very inviting. An example photo showing open seats ready for instant service for the next customer: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Apple_Ge...
If an Apple exec wants to bring back the dedicated area for the Genius Bar, how does one avoid the logistical nightmare of those lines? You still have to work within the same finite retail floor space.
I don't like the new Apple Stores but I do know I'd rather sit down at one of the retail tables instead of stand in line at the old store layout.
One way is to make the check-in person more than a dumb data enterer. My iPhone suddenly stopped getting any carrier signal one day. I took it to the Apple store that evening because I needed to go out of town the next day, and I had to have a working phone. I checked in at the front of the store and waited 2.5 hours for my turn with a Genius. The fix was to press the very specific "reset network settings button" (which isn't under Cellular settings, it's under General->Reset). I was relieved it was such a simple fix, but it was ridiculous to wait over 2 hours to press the right button. The check-in person should ask what you've tried and do the most basic triage to avoid this kind of problem congesting the store.
I can see how this division of work makes sense. Genius training is expensive, and it's important to quickly check in customers. That said, I like your idea of equipping these employees with a basic remedy or two. After inputting the issue, the iPad could display a prompt with common self-solve solutions. The trick is how the employee frames it. You don't want customers thinking it is the solution, as no diagnostics have been performed, nor do you want them thinking less of Genius Bar if it does not work.
> If an Apple exec wants to bring back the dedicated area for the Genius Bar, how does one avoid the logistical nightmare of those lines?
Maybe I misunderstand the issue but the problem is not lack of table space but the lack of free personnel. in that case increasing the surface only make for longer logistic times and the risk of being missed if you are outside their field of attention.
> If an Apple exec wants to bring back the dedicated area for the Genius Bar, how does one avoid the logistical nightmare of those lines? You still have to work within the same finite retail floor space.
The 'logistical nightmare of those lines' is just how every other store that has a similar problem operates. It maybe wasn't great, but the alternative of having people randomly milling round the stores (and usually getting in the way of people who want to browse) is much worse and a terrible customer experience. 'Every table is a potential Genius bar' is a great line to sell the idea internally, but it's a disaster in real life.
In Apple worldview, 50 people milling about the store bored and confused looks nicer than 50 people standing in line (and doesn't scare off shopper as much as seeing all these people waiting for repairs), and therefore is preferred.
The problem is that a line delivers crucial information: you can estimate roughly how much time it'll take before you're up next, you can see the constant progression, and you know you're not being forgotten or skipped over.
If you want people to sit around all over the store in a haphazard fashion, you need to somehow provide these things. Without them, you will massively increase customer anxiety and therefore impatience.
>The problem is that a line delivers crucial information: you can estimate roughly how much time it'll take before you're up next,
The Apple employee checking in customers usually tells you what the estimated wait time is. Last year when I went in for the free iPhone 6 replacement battery, she said the wait was about 2 hours. Sure enough, the wait turned out to be 2 hours.
>, you can see the constant progression,
I agree you can't see this. Maybe Apple can mount a LCD display that constantly updates the customer wait times. Something like the LCDs at airport gates showing standby passengers their status. Or they can simply text you a status every 10 minutes on your iPhone. That may be preferable as customers can leave the Apple Store and do something else to kill time and return later.
> I don't see how the old dedicated space for a Genius Bar would work better. The problem is that the old way tied tech support to a spatial location in the store. The new way assigned tech support to a person instead of a location. This allows any and every table in the store to become a temporary "genius bar" for that customer session.
It's better UX. As a customer, I know what a service counter looks like, but I can't recognize a tech support employee roaming around.
> If an Apple exec wants to bring back the dedicated area for the Genius Bar, how does one avoid the logistical nightmare of those lines? You still have to work within the same finite retail floor space.
Their current process is a logistical nightmare. Basically they take a description of what you're wearing, then tell you to hang around in a crowd by the "Genius Bar" next to the iPhone cases. Eventually some employee is supposed to pick you out of that crowd based on the description they entered earlier.
Lines are a well understood, tried-and-true technology for managing crowds. What they're doing is different but not better.
>, I know what a service counter looks like, but I can't recognize a tech support employee roaming around.
But you don't have to recognize them. The idea is that the Apple employee greeting you at the door brings the tech support person to you.
>Lines are a well understood, tried-and-true technology for managing crowds. What they're doing is different but not better.
I guess I'm underestimating typical customers. Would most people really rather stand in line for 45 minutes to 2 hours instead of just sitting down somewhere? That seems very uncomfortable.
Standing in line seems way more uncomfortable and therefore worse UX.
As comparison, Apple's "check out" process to buy something isn't tied to a specific location of a bank of cash registers. Instead, each employee uses their iPad/iPhone as a "roaming register" to process credit-cards and send receipts. In effect, the whole store's floor space acts as a checkout register. I just don't see customers complaining about that and wishing that Apple would just consolidate all checkout processes to a specific location because they prefer to stand in line. Customers seem to comprehend the "no line" checkout process without trouble. Apple does more sales than Tiffany's jewelry store that has traditional fixed cash registers. It seems like Apple extended the concept for "roaming checkout registers" to "roaming genius bars".
> But you don't have to recognize them. The idea is that the Apple employee greeting you at the door brings the tech support person to you.
N = 3, but that's never happened to me. They're always busy with someone. Customers actually have to wait in line to greet the greeter (3-5 deep last time I was there, when I had a Genius bar appointment that I was on time for but they weren't).
> A lot of times, I see customers sitting on the cube chairs and waiting there.
The store I go to is pretty busy and they haven't dedicated space for seating like that, so you get to join the crowd waiting next to the phone cases.
> Instead, each employee uses their iPad/iPhone as a "roaming register" to process credit-cards and send receipts.
That's one retail innovation they've done that actually makes some sense. Given that almost every large retail store has roaming employees, if you can flag one down you might as well finish your transaction with them.
I went in a few months to get a hardware thing fixed with an appointment set and nobody helped me. I waited for like 10 minutes past by appointment time and everyone was booked up. I tried pestering people but everyone was helping someone else and asked me to wait for another associate.
Eventually I gave up and left the store. I'm sure their analytics never even noticed me, their data says I just never showed up for the appointment. It's a bad outcome, I sold the old half broken macbook and switched to a thinkpad.
I still think their phones are better than android, but mainly that's just because I don't want anything that Google touches anywhere near me.
Their genius bar is just slowing down since they want you to buy new instead of repair what you have. Not always the case but I get that feeling. That and “IT at home” requests seem to flood the bar now.
Like when I brought a MBP in with a charging circuit issue - just wouldn't charge, OS said battery was healthy, but at 0% capacity. Would run on AC.
I thought $200... no... $600.
Not "Would you like to schedule that service?" (I didn't - for its use case it could stay on AC the rest of its life)... but the first comment after the price?
"That's quite a bit, huh? Maybe we should talk about getting you into a new Mac instead?"
I setup an appointment at an Apple Store and walked in about an hour earlier then the appointment. The person at the front created me a walk-in appointment and told me to wait.
An hour goes by without anyone so I ask the person at the front (new person) and neither my scheduled appointment nor my WALK-IN appointment were checked into... How the hell do you check-in to a walk-in appointment?
Definitely not a great experience. He checked me into both and 10-20 minutes later I get two people asking me what I need help with.
It seems like the standard inevitability for every service related thing that it degrades noticeably with time.
Start out and offer a thing and tout the level of service, then shave off bits of service to save money until it is bad... probabbly still touting service.
That's one of the reasons I left a career of 20 years supporting high end networking equipment. Company after company would talk big but the gradual (sometimes sudden) dialing back on training, tools, and staff (sometimes outsourcing that cost even more than locals in the end) seemed inevitable and tiresome. But the pressure on individuals to maintain the service level was always increasing. Eventually it was a grind that I just didn't want to do anymore despite the pay being good. You can only take so much talk talk talk from the company but decreasing investment and conflicting action before you lose heart. I decided to start over with something else.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes hold inside service related business units.
I saw a strong trend where good leadership in those business units simply leave that area and move into other business areas (engineering, sales etc) when it became clear that any initiatives they started that didn't involve cost cutting were not going to happen in any support related department.
There was a serious brain drain as far as leadership with vision, a backbone, knowledge as far as support organizations went. I had conversations with several who recognized that there was simply no future / chance of them being able to do much of anything in those roles so they simply moved on.
Meanwhile what was left were largely yes men who embraced the endless (often counter productive) cost cutting, and in doing so didn't really need / care to understand how things worked if all you had to do was slice out X% and hit some arbitrary metrics.
I fear that fundamentally support related business units are just not likely to have anyone who knows how to do it right (even if suddenly given resources), let alone care.
> I fear that fundamentally support related business units are just not likely to have anyone who knows how to do it right (even if suddenly given resources), let alone care.
Yeah, the rot starts from the top and needs to be fixed from the top, and least in today's corporate structures. I think it's the conventional wisdom of C-suite people that needs to change.
Thiknpads are easily serviceable and Lenovo often just sends you a replacement component if one on your laptop fails and you know how to replace it on your own.
Apple instead is trying very hard to make everything not easily replaceable, even the failing keyboard is hard to remove for a common user
+1, I've benefited from Lenovo sending out parts before. If you want to swap the part, they will happily mail you the part and send a link to their step by step guide on how to swap said part.
You can service pretty much everything yourself with thinkpads (except some recent models). No need to ask anyone to open up your machine as long as you have a screwdriver.
I think it's safe to say that someone who switches from a Mac to a Windows/Linux machine just because of a bad experience at the Apple Store is probably not quite telling the whole story. I assume they had other experiences that were already pushing them to make that decision, but which are not shared in this post.
Well I’m one of those people and it’s the only factor. They wasted so many hours of my time and money because of their poor service, I just feel bad buying anything from them.
To each their own, but you're setting yourself up for a lot of unhappiness if you think there isn't a corporation out there that won't disappoint you at least once. Switching your entire ecosystem out for one bad experience seems like asking for an unnecessary headache.
It’s not that I expect fewer issues. The reason I started using Apple over Linux was because I thought I could avoid some of those headaches and I do think years ago they cared about quality of experience. But if I’m going to have just as much trouble I might as well keep my freedom.
Agreed, with two caveats. You have the option to switch hardware vendors with Linux and Microsoft, without having to sacrifice your entire ecosystem. There is also a world of difference between being disappointed by a single experience with the corporation addressing it in a meaningful way, and having that disappointment cascade into a series of disappointments because the corporation is not addressing the problem.
You can't dump a glass of water on a MacBook and expect it to still work. You can on a ThinkPad. Lenovo has a partner network and Lenovo authorized service centers worldwide that can fix your Thinkpad when it eventually does break.
Admittedly I'm biased as I work for Lenovo ASP and reseller and daily with a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. My MacBook Air stays at home.
I have also had a bad experience with repairs. Took my laptop in for the first time for keyboard repair, when I got it back they had damaged the screen and some brown hues where randomly popping up on it (its apparently caused by leaving dust inside when assembling the laptop). I took it in the second time and they replaced the screen but didn't tighten the screws inside properly and now my screen wobbles a bit
This was how my keyboard looked after my last repair from Apple. They were so busy that day they shuffled me out without getting to inspect it in store:
I mean, it was an easy enough fix that I ended up fixing it myself on this model rather than take it back. But for a company that used to pride itself on "painting both sides of the fence", now they're not even painting the front of the fence.
I've moved on to a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 now - I don't "love" it, but so far it's required no repairs and been reliable, while that MacBook Pro has had 6 repairs during its 3 year lifetime (all internal SATA cable replacements).
> I waited for like 10 minutes past by appointment time and everyone was booked up
Ha. Here in New York, I’ve never had an Apple Store appointment honored inside an hour. Usually an hour and a half. My strategy is now to get a cocktail at the Cipriani Dolce, walk it across to the Apple Store, ignore the “you can’t bring that in here” protests and wait out the hour with a drink.
This is hilarious, if you actually do this you should make videos where you tell jokes or just film yourself silently drinking for an hour while waiting. Instant viral success.
Last I heard, Google also tends to keep data to themselves. The difference in business model is that Google internally uses user data to effectively place and sell advertising, not that advertisers have direct access to that data. Apple isn't an advertising company the way Google is.
I walked in a few months to ask about a phone glitch. The rep was happily asking me detailed questions and for a moment I thought they were going to actually help me. Only then did I realize he was just making an appointment for me weeks in the future.
I made an appointment last year for an iPhone SE battery replacement several weeks in advance. Showed up on time at my appointment. Waited 15 minutes just to hear someone tell me that they don't have the SE battery in stock. When I made the original appointment, I had to specify that it was for a SE battery replacement.
I think the slam of less user-friendly products, higher comparative prices, and worse customer support will make any company lose its luster. Apple's done all three, and unless there's a change in the ship's direction, it'll continue bleeding out cash in stock buybacks and dividends and losing premium customers and great employees.
The in store experience has changed with the staff. Two examples that come to mind. I remember going in to buy an iPhone 8 after new prices announced. I spoke to a rep for 2 minutes for him to then to say: “let me get someone for you.” Then the actual transaction of buying occurred. Are there so many window shoppers that they have staff just to talk to non-buyers? The second was the genius bar. A speaker blew-out on my MBP, I made an appointment and I am trying to get someone AT THE BAR to tell me how long the repair is going to take before I send it in for service. Meanwhile the person to my left is there because they ran out of hard drive space and cant check their emails. And the person to my right has been there for 4 hours about a phone repair only to trade it in instead. I couldn’t believe the genius bar was inundated with those requests. I know I don’t need special treatment but I literally need actual hardware help. /rant
The issue with the person with a full disk I recognise. A lot of people are so untechnical/uninterested that they have no idea how to maintain their computers/phones.
I have a friend who is an electrical engineer(!) no less, who bought a new Windows machine when the old one was so infected by malware (kids used it) that it became unusable. Most of my relatives have dedicated siblings or kids providing tech support. Some people don’t have this support and end up at the Genious bar.
The number of people I come across who admit to having no backup systems is mind boggling. People who depend on their computers for work.
For me the apple store has basically come to mean:
- Very long lines/overcrowded store
- It's all full of Apple Watches and stuff like that and trivial luxury accessories
- Not enough Macs anymore
- None of the really cool displays they used to have like a Mac Pro set up for music studio or video work complete with a camera or midi controller or other instrument plugged in.
- For some reason they always smell like BO. Either it's the employees or customers they attract, there is something odd about the design of the store that screws with HVAC, or they're not cleaning well. Very weird thing.
So yah, not much luster. Even when they introduce new products these days I don't really want to go into the store and try them cause the experience is bad enough it outweighs the interest to check out the new product.
It is weird cause they are such copycats but I think the MS stores are better run now.
I agree with your observations about the Apple store, but I wouldn't say the MS stores are run better.
At the MS store you can get fast service, but thats mostly because it's empty. The floor staff descends upon you like hungry vultures when you enter, and you can't get rid of them. Thats what I've experienced at the Austin one anyway.
I think part of it is that Apple doesn’t have many interesting new products. I used it be excited about iPhones or iPads but now they just release variations if the same thing I know already pretty well. Why go to a store? And the wait times for support are way too long.
Two things that were features aren't anymore now that I moved to Miami.
I'm tired of Face ID. Give me back Touch ID please. My sunglasses prevent Face ID from working when I have them on, and that's quite often here, and I don't want to switch to a light form of Face ID that doesn't check that I'm actually looking at my phone. Sometimes I temporarily take my sunglasses off to use Face ID.
The cooling design makes my MacBook Pro very quiet, but it doesn't always keep up with the heat indoors here. I've got to the point where I have to suspend my Vagrant box before I close the lid, or there's a good chance it won't wake up when I open my MacBook Pro and I'll have to restart it. I wish it used fans more to keep it cool.
I need to take it into an Apple Store because I think it might be a real hardware problem and not just a limitation or a software problem that causes it not to wake, but I'm not sure. Fortunately we have lots of Apple Stores and the availability is not too bad. There's only one appointment available today and that's 40 miles away in Boca Raton, but there are appointments at about 5 different Apple Stores in the area with appointments available tomorrow.
It's especially annoying if I want to install an app while I'm in bed, and the code won't work, and I have to enter a full password. If I switch to a password that's easier to type, that should be better.
Another thing - some sunglasses work with Face ID when its attention detector is enabled, because Face ID can see eyes through them. I'm going to see about it when I get a new pair of sunglasses, which I need anyway because having only one pair of sunglasses in Miami is kind of like having only one pair of shoes. The sunglasses that work with Face ID might become the ones I wear the most often.
FaceID works fine for me with my sunglasses and "require attention".
I did also have trouble unlocking while laying in bed though. For awhile I thought it wasn't recognizing me without any glasses on, but then I realized that when I don't have any glasses on, I hold the phone much closer to my face, and it doesn't recognize me that way. It unlocks fine without glasses as long as I hold it at the same distance. Still kind of an awkward process.
Yes, it works with some sunglasses. My sunglasses are Ray-Bans that aren't very dark. They're a pretty ordinary pair of sunglasses, but they don't work with the default FaceID setting. I think it's a bit random whether you get ones that work or ones that don't, if you're looking for a practical pair of sunglasses and not paying attention to whether it works with FaceID.
I lived in Cancun for a couple of years and even indoors with AC my 2015 MBP ran too hot. Very often it was unusable on my lap, and even a simple Skype call turned on the fans at max speed.
Strange. The article doesn't reflect my experience of Apple stores at all. The only problem I have with them is trying actually to get in past the hordes of kids playing with the latest tech.
They could downsize them to street corner booth for repair needs, or even better just sell some self-help-kits to cover majority of the basic DIY fixes.
I don't use apple, my Dell PC and Thinkpad laptop and Android phones never needed any repair, if they do, most likely I will just repair them myself or buy new ones(e.g. keyboard etc).
Apple will be struggling for a while after the iphone era for sure.
When I want to buy something from Apple I can buy it from apple.com and have it shipped to me, but the last time I did this their "two day shipping" took a full week. Never again. Or I can buy it from Amazon, but last time I bought an Apple product from Amazon, I didn't notice it was counterfeit until well after the return window. Never again. Or I can buy it from their physical store. Last time I bought AirPods I drove 45 minutes to the Apple Store and had to wait for 10 minutes for the employee who was going to check me out to answer questions for the customer ahead of me, even though all he needed to do was swipe my credit card (there's a category of products that you can't self-checkout and it includes AirPods).
I went to buy a brand new laptop at the Apple Store, and despite knowing exactly what I wanted I had to wait for at least 20 minutes - when I walked in, I was told to wait until an associate was free (whereas in most stores I could just grab a product off the shelf and go check out), then I was ping-ponged around at least 2 other people (both of whom I had to wait for - 'just hang around this area and we'll send someone over' - they each spoke to me for less than a minute once they knew I just wanted to buy a thing.
What a hassle. The only reason I went brick and mortar at all was because of a promotion where you get a free headphone set, and I wanted to be sure to receive it.
Good point - it's been a while since I've bought something like that in-store. I did buy a console, though, and that's a pretty smooth experience for a similar item (some stores even just have them out, otherwise you just find someone to grab it and then go to the cashier).
The rest of my experience was still abhorrent. The store was practically empty (though that might be an illusion since the store was huge and not visibly mobbed), some employees were just standing around just to tell people to wait in a corner. There was no real system to ensure your 'connection' would actually find you, since you were just told to loiter around the store.
In the UK, John Lewis, Curry's, PC world. At the least you can ask someone to get one from the stock room for you and you can have it and be on your way within 10 minutes. I bought my last laptop from John Lewis in about 5 mins of entering the store.
This comparison is almost not fair. I've recently moved back to the UK and experienced John Lewis for the first time. Now I almost try to avoid buying from Amazon if I can help it, I can't believe how good the shopping experience is there. Also, they price match most online retailers if I remember/understood correctly which is insane.
Yeah and they do a great extended warranty as standard, the others I mention will increase check out time to hassle you to buy their warranty. John Lewis has it as standard and their returns is very customer focused
I can contrast with my recent experience at Best Buy. Last weekend, they had $50 off the new Series 4 Apple Watches. I dreaded going in-store because of my problems with Apple Stores.
But I went in, asked the Samsung guy where the Apple Watches were, and he pointed me to a counter in the middle of the store with 2 registers. I had a brief conversation with a sales guy there, confirmed the $50 off, size, and color I wanted.
I waited about 5 minutes and a different guy brought one from the back, complete with a silly dramatic bow where he handed it to the first guy (made me laugh.) I declined the warranty, swiped my credit card, signed, and was on my way.
The entire process took about 10 minutes, whereas buying at the Apple Store can definitely result in the "ping-pong" effect and can take upwards of an hour. And they were not pushy about the warranty.
I would buy from Best Buy again given this experience.
Late 2017ish, I bought a new MBP from Best Buy. As I was completing the purchase, the store manager came out to thank me personally for my business. I've seen zero evidence that anyone working in an Apple store cares that much about the customers.
You can do all of this in best buy with just pointing with your index finger at a rep, then the laptop, not needing to utter a word during the entire transaction, and be back in time before OPs reps find him again in the apple store. Only at Apple and a car dealership does it not take five minutes to buy a product off a shelf.
For a while I was buying a laptop every 2 weeks from the Apple store for my business. I would walk in, say I need 1x of Model XXX macbook YYY, guy would go get it - I swipe card on phone, and back out the door in 5 minutes. Was pretty painless. Maybe it's how direct you go in? Or maybe they just had me memorized...
I’ve noticed most apple stores are super friendly and fast all over the world.
But their San Francisco flagship store is utter shit. Understaffed, too small, absolutely mobbed by people. And it makes sense, it’s a single store serving a city of 900,000 people with millions driving in every morning for work. They desperately need more locations.
The Palo Alto store, for example, is pure delight. I’ve had nothing but great experiences the few times I visited their NYC stores as well.
If you know exactly what you want I think they’d prefer you buy it online tho.
Gawd, that store is such a disaster. Imagine you've never stepped foot in an Apple store, and you would like to buy an Apple product. I imagine it is much like the person I directed the last time I was in there, who "just want(ed) to buy this cable". Yeah, good fsckin' luck, buddy, because there's no signage and no one to tell you where to stand. I told him where to stand only because I "know" Apple stores (and even then, I wasn't 100% confident that the random cluster of people was the correct cluster). All the while, it took twenty minutes to get the Space Gray 256GB iPhone XS (no Apple Care, thanks) I originally came in for.
Yeah, yeah, buy it online for in-store pickup, use the Apple Store app to self-checkout, yada, yada, tribal knowledge. Including the tribal knowledge that the Apple B&M retail experience doesn't have queues, signs, or anyone to direct you.
Not that Bellevue is alone. When I last visited my Mom, I thought we'd swing by the Brandon, FL store, get her an Apple Watch. Man, I've never tried so hard to give someone $600 in my life.
I knew there’s some across the bay, but they sure hide the other two stores in SF. Never seen them even show up on their genius bar search.
Are they official Apple stores or are they apple-branded franchise stores? Reason I ask is because that’s the model I’ve seen a lot in Europe. A store that has a license to be an apple store but isn’t actually owned and run by Apple.
They are real Apple stores. Short of dedicating a downtown city block to an Apple store, there probably isn't any way to fix the capacity problems at the OG SF store so, as you've found out, it's best avoided.
They don’t know (and/or trust you if you assert) that you know exactly what you want; so they’ve got to assume that whoever’s helping you is going to need a large enough time-slot available to help you select SKUs, too.
If you pre-purchase online for in-store pickup (which you can do while you’re standing around in the store), that’s essentially a guarantee on them that you won’t need “SKU selection” service, so once you’ve done that, you can go up to the receptionist staffer at the front and get someone to bring out your purchase pretty much immediately. (Because they do have staff free all the time, but they’re only free for a minute or two at a time between scheduled time-slots. “A minute or two” is enough time to service a pick-up, but not a complete in-store purchase flow.)
I love the store itself. The problem is, the ones closest to me are almost 2 hours away, and in HUGE shopping malls that are a pain to get in and out of.
They are packed, but if you make an appointment they usually get to you on time or even early.
Each mall also has a Microsoft store which is a sad abyss of emptiness.
One main reason the stores anger me is that they're actively disincentivezed to develop PWAs (progress web apps) or cross-platform technologies.
The App Store makes Apple billions.
By locking you down they get the ability to get a cut of your app.
If you could install a mobile app directly from the web, they're cut out of the loop.
They also can't use it as a system of control to block apps they dislike.
I agree that there are times where this might be valuable and that there are APIs that you might want to restrict but then have a fair policy about which apps you block and also have a way to get PWAs approved easily.
Also, it's VERY expensive to get your app there due to their use of Dunn and Bradstreet.
You either have to pay $1000 or you have to wait 1-3 months until your company is approved.
When I've seen people doing those sit-down training classes in the store, I wonder if they retain any information at all, because it's in the midst of a massively noisy and distracting environment.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadI think the problem is pretty simple, the experience of going to an Apple store is a victim of Apple’s success. I can’t think of a store that gets that much traffic that I actually enjoy going to. The best you can do is streamline it, which they actually have done in some ways but not others.
However—and I’m not saying this as a defense, just as an interesting fact—at one point when I was waiting around trying to get the attention of someone to buy a stupid dongle, a staff member helpfully pointed out to me that I could just buy the thing myself with the Apple Store app on my phone (i.e. point my phone at the barcode on it, pay with card), and then walk out out of the store with the item, having never interacted with a single store worker (except perhaps implicitly with a plainclothes security guard who observed me doing this self-checkout flow and so didn’t tackle me on the way out. I don’t think your purchase is somehow remotely deactivating a magnetic anti-theft tag in the product or anything, so they’ve got to be doing loss-prevention for this flow the old-fashioned way.)
And while you can’t complete the entire purchase yourself for big-ticket items (the kind they keep back in the warehouse section and would have to retrieve for you), you can still do the “paying” part in advance of showing up at the store, through the app—or while you’re in the store, through the app—which turns the process of “finding an employee who has time to both guide you through SKU selection and ring you up” into “getting the front-door attendant to notify anyone with a spare moment that one of the devices already in the ‘waiting for pickup’ pile in the back can be grabbed and brought out.”
Honestly, this seems like it has somehow secretly become the primary flow that Apple Stores want to do [non-business-customer] purchases through, and yet they don’t mention it anywhere. They should have big signs in the stores telling you to buy things using your phone (and/or by using the store website on any of the demo computers)!
With the Apple Store I'm just walking into a big room full of busy people. I have zero idea of who the hell I'm actually supposed to talk to or where to go get the thing I paid for.
It was off-putting to say the least.
But the award for the most asinine thing about the Apple Store is their insistence on not having a proper area to pay for things. So people just wander around wanting to buy something and not knowing where to pay for it. And they end up wasting a lot more time that way.
My two local stores are in Bethesda, MD.
People have been saying that Apple has not grown its store count along with the numbers of device users they have added. I think it shows in areas like mine.
Because I work at a repair shop. Not an apple one (we're way too small for that, they want something ridiculous like $100,000 a year in used apple sales before they even consider letting you apply to be a reseller/repair store). People bring apple stuff here because there's nowhere else to take them except a three hour drive to the nearest big city.
The only issues I've seen on MacBook keyboards in my 8 years working here, required a full keyboard replacement. And I just did one a couple weeks ago. That's a good hour or two's work, just getting the thing disassembled far enough to get to the keyboard in the first place, then pulling all of the hundred or so screws for the keyboard, replacing it, and rebuilding everything.
I miss the original stores' refurbished/discount tables/bin they used to have. You could find great deals on those tables..
Oh.. one other thing that annoys the hell out of me about the stores an service. I bought a new iphone8, I asked if they could transfer the iphone5 data+ apps to my new phone. They said no, do it yourself.. I was pissed. A damn tech company, that sells a portable cpu for $700+ dollars and they won't perform a data transfer?
peace
Without it what service can they provide?
Pretty happy they don't do that anymore, then. It sounds terrible for security.
There's no reason they couldn't do something similar/more modern with an iPhone and not have a security risk.
For my Grandpa who’d never figure it out on his own it was a real benefit.
Of course there's a security risk. The security model of both the Macs and the iPhones have significantly improved. The hardware security models make this a difficult engineering task - and a dangerous one.
Just ... sign in to iCloud? To "do this for you", you'd be giving them your credentials no? Seems like an unfair complaint.
For small ticket items, you can scan, pay and leave without needing to interact with the staff.
>Thanks to the Apple Store app, you can use your iPhone to scan the barcode of an accessory off the shelf and use Apple Pay to pay for it. From there, you can just walk out of the store with your new Apple accessory in hand.
https://www.howtogeek.com/338754/how-to-buy-stuff-at-the-app...
So same as with self scanning tills at supermarkets I'm now expected to do the work for one of the most profitable companies in the world, since they can't be bothered to have a proper checkout or hire enough people.
+) Not you, personally, obviously.
edit: reformat
Worse! You have to first buy the device and use their own payment apps. That's an expensive way to just feel cool/modern!
That coupled with contactless payments make it super quick to buy just a few items.
A "proper" checkout is still king for large shops but for people I know (late 20s), that is becoming less common for more frequent, smaller shopping trips.
Edit: I should say this is for someone based in London.
Herearound at least you scan your crap and pay. In the UK there's some shitty weight system, which I don't get and the system accuses me after every third item of being a thief and instructs me to call assistance (which cannot be found since, well, self checkout tills).
Look, if you want me to do your work then, at the very minimum, trust me not to cheat or kindly fuck off!
The worst experience I've ever had was in a Tesco in London were the completely rude security dude claimed that there's only self checkout.
My friend wanted a pack of cigarettes. Good luck getting that from a self checkout till.
If the scanning laser manages to read the little bar code on the produce sticker before I manually type in the number on it, the whole self-checkout station immediately panics and calls for a store employee to unlock it. Every. Time.
This problem has existed for years. I now trigger it on purpose whenever I'm not in a rush. There's no excuse whatsoever for a self-checkout system to grind to a halt when reading a bar code that legitimately appears somewhere in the store.
I agree that you can do it without interacting with anyone at all. But I question whether it's faster.
For a class assignment on usability a while back, I observed self-checkout users and manned ("proper") checkout at a local grocery store and found that the absolute fastest of the self-checkout users were only just as fast (per item) as the average manned checkout user (among 24 users).
A few factors increase the speed of manned transactions. First, cashiers are familiar with common produce numbers, avoiding the need to search for stickers or slowly look up the number of a particular item. Second, a cashier can begin bagging items as the user pays by credit card or pulls out cash, so some of the work is done in parallel. Third, sometimes manned checkouts have a person dedicated to bagging, which reduces the time even further (though all times recorded for this project are single cashiers without baggers).
Self-checkouts definitely feel nicer for me (except when the anti-theft "place item in bagging area" nagging starts). But now, when I'm in a hurry, I'll make a beeline for a register with a cashier instead of the self-checkout.
Here in the US, at least at the stores I shop at, each item requires that you scan it, wait for the machine to tell you to place the item in the bagging area, wait for it to register the weight, then you're allowed to move to the next item. If you accidentally wait too long, and the attendant just clears the wait state (which they do all to frequently just to get things to move along), then it won't let you put the item in the area, and instead you have to call the attendant over to clear the "unexpected item" state, which just makes things take so much longer.
Then there's the times where some older person tries it out, gets really confused, and the attendant is spending all of their time with them, and everyone else gets held up by the quirks of the system.
There doesn't need to be a dedicated employee for sales. Just ask one of the employees roaming around the stores.
I'd kill to be able to just use it for all my payments but so far most of Eastern Europe is of no interest to Apple, it seems. (Despite the really big following they have around here.)
This would make me very uncomfortable - without the ceremony of payment it would appear to others that I'm stealing.
I had four time the same issue with a MBP 2011, the HDD cable was failing again ad again. First time they replaced it, next time they replaced the cable plus the HDD, third time they replaced cable plus logicboard, fourth I got a new MBP 2013. All for free, without Apple Care. Every time I got my laptop back in less than 4 business days (also the replacement unit, I received it at home even before they had picked the old one).
This is true heaven if compared to my nightmarish experiences with DELL, ASUS or ACER (as a private customer, not business).
About the repeated MBP issue, I blamed my way of carrying it around (with a passport bag) and the fact that the cable was directly in close contact with the unibody shell.
Instead of taking it in, I'm looking at usb-c adapters so that I can plug in my external kb and use that instead. The _vast_ majority of engineers at my company uses some kind of external keyboard on these machines.
Say, they failed to make the cable protected enough in the initial design. During the first service, they should just not replace the cable, they should also add the protection, so that the issue doesn't happen again for that customer.
If you google around, you'll see that this is a known problem and some people were even modding their MBPs proactively, to avoid this specific cable issue, caused by wrong design, to happen at inappropriate time.
My mother can afford a Macbook, I've told her this, but she insists on buying cheap Dells on sale.
In 3 years she's gone through 3 200-300$ Dells. Every time they break Dell comes back with some untenable repair arrangement and off she goes.
She could have bought a used Macbook Pro 3 years ago, and today it'd be worth more than all of those Dells put together, and odds are it'd be in working condition unlike the 3rd one which she's telling me is picking up a flickering screen issue.
If something broke she could go to the Apple store and get it fixed within a couple of days. Even out of warranty she'd be better off than Dell out of warranty, which is like Apple's out of warranty support... except more expensive and slower.
My last windows laptop, the HP Spectre x360, was about as much as a MBP had a track record of failing motherboards.
My old Zenbook, also in MBP pricing range was known to have the hinge fail.
You're making the same mistake that my mother makes, assuming a "dollar's worth" of laptop is fungible.
If you spend 400$ on a laptop, it's not enough that it only be at least 1/3rd as reliable as a 1200$ Macbook Pro. Every time a laptop fails there's a cost outside of just getting a new laptop, like transferring all your stuff, not having a laptop, etc.
I have had no problem with Dell’s business laptops. Barring buying from the business line, I buy computers from the Microsoft Store.
Off the top of my head over the years I remember common LCD issues and GPU failures.
Every manufacturer has these problems, the difference is Dell releases something like 10 new Latitudes all with different model numbers and designations every year, so to find the common issues you search Dell latitude + your specific model.
With Apple there's 2 lines, with similar names. When there's an issue, everyone knows about it, it's easily searched and more importantly, easier to cover in a story. "The Macbook has tons of issues" gets reads. "The Dell Latitude 7490 has tons of LCD issues" gets... people who own Dell Latitude 7490, maybe. The former reads like a major story, the latter reads like a warranty announcement or something.
Design flaw happens and Apple relatively quickly sorted it out. On the other hand, I will never forget Acer's screen hinges and how we were supposed to fix them [0]
[0] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Uhe4i2yLFTY/maxresdefault.jpg
Luckily they cost $10 on Amazon and can be replaced in 10 minutes with a small phillips screwdriver. I managed my school's computer repair room for IT and replaced at least a hundred of these cables while I was in school.
Normally it's just the cable. Sometimes it's the cable and the OS needs a reload (because whatever goes wrong with the cable causes the drive itself to get corrupted, but not actually physically fail).
Here's the thing that got me - last year the laptop broke on my MacBook Pro. Very common and typical problem.
Whenever I tried to book an appointment there was literally no appointments in the entirety of London. It was actually impossible to book an appointment. I ended up just walking into a store on my Tuesday lunch break and they told me all their walk ins for the day have been taken up, and I should line up in the morning and wait for the store to open.
Interesting, that's my favourite things about Apple Stores! I wish more stores adopted this model.
Advertising on the App Store really broke my heart, I thought Apple just made money from us all by selling expensive, high quality devices and apps. These ads are a desperate attempt to now make something over and above by selling my attention, what a shame!
You can try and drive traffic straight to your store page from outside sources to bypass that search, but that sort of marketing costs money too. And word of mouth searches are going to be through the App Store search regardless.
It was nice when Apple's search felt like it was just trying to help you find what you were looking for. But it's 2019 and we need to put ads in everything now.
The fact that the search results dedicate most of my screen to Notability (one of their main competitors) is some bullshit on Apple's part.
https://i.imgur.com/4T7sLXb.png
It would be one thing if I searched for "notebook" or "handwriting" or "notes," but I searched for a specific app by name and they're sending traffic to a competitor because GoodNotes "only" pays 30% of their revenue to Apple, and Apple wants even more on top of that or else a competitor gets their traffic.
Sometimes search is bad because search is a hard problem and it's difficult to know what a user is looking for.
Apple knows exactly what I was looking for. They're just being dicks about it.
I think (and hope) that I read that it will be a separate tab. My heart goes out to the few non scammy, paid up front/pay one time to get rid of ads publishers that might be affected, but honestly if all apps that are dependent on ads, in app purchases of coins, power ups and loot boxes disappeared from the store, nothing of value would be lost.
Edit: meant that search is bad enough on Apple Music too (not that it has ads)
I’m really disappointed that Apple is going anywhere near ad-tech. I stay in the Apple ecosystem because they have my preferred value system - I give them money and they give me stuff.
Meanwhile, the Microsoft store diagonally located across the mall is usually empty. But some kids are there to play the games on the Xbox side.
peace
The store near me gets lots of foot traffic, but the experience is just fine. There are usually at least 2-3 employees who will come up and ask me how I'm doing and what they can help with. Given the size of the store, the number of employees is surprising actually. And it's as easy as ever to book appointments, in my experience anyway.
I think what's changed is that the novelty has worn off. When Apple Stores first became a thing, it was new and sexy. Now, they're everywhere and don't have that wow factor, because it's become a feature of our lives that you go there every so often if you want to try out, fix or buy an apple product in person. And with the novelty factor gone, people find things to complain about if their experience isn't perfect, even though Apple's customer service is still light years ahead of most anyone else [0].
[0] I say this as an Android and Lenovo X1 user. I personally prefer non-mac products, but my wife has a Macbook Pro and an iPhone and I'm always jealous that when things break, she can get them fixed right away, while I worry that a fix will entail multiple unpleasant interactions with phone agents, followed by a multi-week repair process.
EDIT: I want to add two ideas here in the hope that someone here finds them helpful. When I make laptop purchases (for non-apple products), the first place I look is Costco. They offered the Carbon X1 laptop with pretty good specs (16gb RAM, i7 processor, 512GB SSD. Similar specs on the Dell XPS 13 that they sell) at a great price, with a 90 day, no questions asked return policy and an extra year of warranty included in the already great price. Even if you aren't a costco member, it's probably worth joining for this deal if you are looking to get a Dell or Lenovo laptop. And in my experience, Costco is very easy to deal with when problems arise.
A second idea is to buy using a Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card, which also add a year on to the manufacturer's warranty. Usually, they require you to get a quote from a repair shop and they will reimburse you. In some cases, they will just replace the product straight up. And they are fairly easy to work with. This is the only card I use to make purchases that I know have a chance of breaking.
Meanwhile, Apple has five stores within a 30 minute drive. And in my experience, every single Apple store I've been to gives me a more-or-less consistently good experience. Is it perfect? Far from it. But they can fix most issues I've had onsite, and the turnaround time is predictable when they ship out for repairs.
Meanwhile, with other companies, it's a crapshoot. I had a phone from LG that broke. I mailed it in and after 5 weeks and many follow up phone calls, I still didn't have it back. They claimed that they were out of the part that they needed to repair the phone and were waiting for it to come in. They initially told me that the repair would take 2 weeks. In my mind, a company with decent customer service would see that the part is out of stock and just give me a replacement phone if they can't turn around the repair in a reasonable time frame.
With Apple, you know what you are getting into. And if they say 1 week, they usually mean 1 week.
Amex does 2 years too. Their customer service is unmatched when it comes to warranty claims. I've had them credit my account same day.
https://www.comparecards.com/blog/extended-warranty-credit-c...
It is the repair/service story that has really deteriorated over time and Apple would bode well to remember that although PC vendors need to play catch-up they will eventually become good enough.
I did find Joint Venture invaluable. Essentially it is a Pay-to-Play scheme which allows you to book same-day appointments and access the Business Team (which gives a slight discount).
Anybody remember the good old days when you could have AppleCare send you a box and a return label?
After you pay what is the next step?
They still do this. Just a standard advance replacement.
I don't live in a place big enough for an Apple forest grove or whatever. It's an undersized store in a mall that was remodeled two years ago. The people who designed it never were in such a store before. It's crowded, too loud, and stripped of basic functions. The old version of the Apple store felt busy and energized, the new ones are disorienting.
The old Apple store in the same retail space was much more functional. It had a nice little kids corner with a lower table and fancy toadstool chairs. It was a great way for kids to explore iMacs and iPads. Now purged as a lower table isn't symmetrical enough. The training area is just a table in the middle, and it's just not as pleasant -- people can't hear and leave.
Apple has a great thing going with people there though -- it's a real asset. The staff are incredibly friendly, patient and helpful.
It's the same problem in restaurants and bars that have this style of concrete floors, hard walls, and exposed duct work ceilings: there is nothing to absorb the sound. When people stripped drapes from windows, carpet from floors, and coverings from ceilings, no one stopped to think why these sound absorbing materials were used in the first place. You can fix this by spraying sound insulating foam all over your beautiful exposed ceiling that no one looks at because it's dusty and painted black and 20 feet in the air, but that's clearly a cost that's already been calculated and cut.
As a result, you can't hear anyone at breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, the bar, the gym, or even the Apple store.
I don't see how the old dedicated space for a Genius Bar would work better. The problem is that the old way tied tech support to a spatial location in the store. The new way assigned tech support to a person instead of a location. This allows any and every table in the store to become a temporary "genius bar" for that customer session.
In theory, if you had a dedicated area for the Genius Bar, you'd hope it would be free of crowds and be very inviting. An example photo showing open seats ready for instant service for the next customer: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Apple_Ge...
But reality turns out differently. In the following photo, notice the long lines crowding the back of the store at the Genius Bar: https://tr4.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2006/10/03/fce299cc-c3bf-11...
If an Apple exec wants to bring back the dedicated area for the Genius Bar, how does one avoid the logistical nightmare of those lines? You still have to work within the same finite retail floor space.
I don't like the new Apple Stores but I do know I'd rather sit down at one of the retail tables instead of stand in line at the old store layout.
Maybe I misunderstand the issue but the problem is not lack of table space but the lack of free personnel. in that case increasing the surface only make for longer logistic times and the risk of being missed if you are outside their field of attention.
The 'logistical nightmare of those lines' is just how every other store that has a similar problem operates. It maybe wasn't great, but the alternative of having people randomly milling round the stores (and usually getting in the way of people who want to browse) is much worse and a terrible customer experience. 'Every table is a potential Genius bar' is a great line to sell the idea internally, but it's a disaster in real life.
Apple has been at war against its former genius for decades:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/3/
If you want people to sit around all over the store in a haphazard fashion, you need to somehow provide these things. Without them, you will massively increase customer anxiety and therefore impatience.
The Apple employee checking in customers usually tells you what the estimated wait time is. Last year when I went in for the free iPhone 6 replacement battery, she said the wait was about 2 hours. Sure enough, the wait turned out to be 2 hours.
>, you can see the constant progression,
I agree you can't see this. Maybe Apple can mount a LCD display that constantly updates the customer wait times. Something like the LCDs at airport gates showing standby passengers their status. Or they can simply text you a status every 10 minutes on your iPhone. That may be preferable as customers can leave the Apple Store and do something else to kill time and return later.
It's better UX. As a customer, I know what a service counter looks like, but I can't recognize a tech support employee roaming around.
> If an Apple exec wants to bring back the dedicated area for the Genius Bar, how does one avoid the logistical nightmare of those lines? You still have to work within the same finite retail floor space.
Their current process is a logistical nightmare. Basically they take a description of what you're wearing, then tell you to hang around in a crowd by the "Genius Bar" next to the iPhone cases. Eventually some employee is supposed to pick you out of that crowd based on the description they entered earlier.
Lines are a well understood, tried-and-true technology for managing crowds. What they're doing is different but not better.
But you don't have to recognize them. The idea is that the Apple employee greeting you at the door brings the tech support person to you.
>Lines are a well understood, tried-and-true technology for managing crowds. What they're doing is different but not better.
I guess I'm underestimating typical customers. Would most people really rather stand in line for 45 minutes to 2 hours instead of just sitting down somewhere? That seems very uncomfortable.
A lot of times, I see customers sitting on the cube chairs and waiting there. Example photo of those chairs: https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2018/06/img_0...
Standing in line seems way more uncomfortable and therefore worse UX.
As comparison, Apple's "check out" process to buy something isn't tied to a specific location of a bank of cash registers. Instead, each employee uses their iPad/iPhone as a "roaming register" to process credit-cards and send receipts. In effect, the whole store's floor space acts as a checkout register. I just don't see customers complaining about that and wishing that Apple would just consolidate all checkout processes to a specific location because they prefer to stand in line. Customers seem to comprehend the "no line" checkout process without trouble. Apple does more sales than Tiffany's jewelry store that has traditional fixed cash registers. It seems like Apple extended the concept for "roaming checkout registers" to "roaming genius bars".
N = 3, but that's never happened to me. They're always busy with someone. Customers actually have to wait in line to greet the greeter (3-5 deep last time I was there, when I had a Genius bar appointment that I was on time for but they weren't).
> A lot of times, I see customers sitting on the cube chairs and waiting there.
The store I go to is pretty busy and they haven't dedicated space for seating like that, so you get to join the crowd waiting next to the phone cases.
> Instead, each employee uses their iPad/iPhone as a "roaming register" to process credit-cards and send receipts.
That's one retail innovation they've done that actually makes some sense. Given that almost every large retail store has roaming employees, if you can flag one down you might as well finish your transaction with them.
Eventually I gave up and left the store. I'm sure their analytics never even noticed me, their data says I just never showed up for the appointment. It's a bad outcome, I sold the old half broken macbook and switched to a thinkpad.
I still think their phones are better than android, but mainly that's just because I don't want anything that Google touches anywhere near me.
Like when I brought a MBP in with a charging circuit issue - just wouldn't charge, OS said battery was healthy, but at 0% capacity. Would run on AC.
I thought $200... no... $600.
Not "Would you like to schedule that service?" (I didn't - for its use case it could stay on AC the rest of its life)... but the first comment after the price?
"That's quite a bit, huh? Maybe we should talk about getting you into a new Mac instead?"
An hour goes by without anyone so I ask the person at the front (new person) and neither my scheduled appointment nor my WALK-IN appointment were checked into... How the hell do you check-in to a walk-in appointment?
Definitely not a great experience. He checked me into both and 10-20 minutes later I get two people asking me what I need help with.
Start out and offer a thing and tout the level of service, then shave off bits of service to save money until it is bad... probabbly still touting service.
That's one of the reasons I left a career of 20 years supporting high end networking equipment. Company after company would talk big but the gradual (sometimes sudden) dialing back on training, tools, and staff (sometimes outsourcing that cost even more than locals in the end) seemed inevitable and tiresome. But the pressure on individuals to maintain the service level was always increasing. Eventually it was a grind that I just didn't want to do anymore despite the pay being good. You can only take so much talk talk talk from the company but decreasing investment and conflicting action before you lose heart. I decided to start over with something else.
I don't think that's an inevitability, just the effect of a particular type of corner-cutting business culture that's very prevalent nowadays.
Today's business conventional wisdom isn't very wise, and I do hope that it's eventually replaced by something better.
I saw a strong trend where good leadership in those business units simply leave that area and move into other business areas (engineering, sales etc) when it became clear that any initiatives they started that didn't involve cost cutting were not going to happen in any support related department.
There was a serious brain drain as far as leadership with vision, a backbone, knowledge as far as support organizations went. I had conversations with several who recognized that there was simply no future / chance of them being able to do much of anything in those roles so they simply moved on.
Meanwhile what was left were largely yes men who embraced the endless (often counter productive) cost cutting, and in doing so didn't really need / care to understand how things worked if all you had to do was slice out X% and hit some arbitrary metrics.
I fear that fundamentally support related business units are just not likely to have anyone who knows how to do it right (even if suddenly given resources), let alone care.
Yeah, the rot starts from the top and needs to be fixed from the top, and least in today's corporate structures. I think it's the conventional wisdom of C-suite people that needs to change.
Di you switch to thinkpad just because of this service support issue? Because I don’t think thinkpad is better in service dept
Apple instead is trying very hard to make everything not easily replaceable, even the failing keyboard is hard to remove for a common user
Admittedly I'm biased as I work for Lenovo ASP and reseller and daily with a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. My MacBook Air stays at home.
https://twitter.com/syneryder/status/1066258885923635200
I mean, it was an easy enough fix that I ended up fixing it myself on this model rather than take it back. But for a company that used to pride itself on "painting both sides of the fence", now they're not even painting the front of the fence.
I've moved on to a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 now - I don't "love" it, but so far it's required no repairs and been reliable, while that MacBook Pro has had 6 repairs during its 3 year lifetime (all internal SATA cable replacements).
I don't understand, one has contributed to world development and the other makes their own charger to screw you out if 30$.
Ha. Here in New York, I’ve never had an Apple Store appointment honored inside an hour. Usually an hour and a half. My strategy is now to get a cocktail at the Cipriani Dolce, walk it across to the Apple Store, ignore the “you can’t bring that in here” protests and wait out the hour with a drink.
But perhaps things have changed.
A subtle, but important distinction.
I have a friend who is an electrical engineer(!) no less, who bought a new Windows machine when the old one was so infected by malware (kids used it) that it became unusable. Most of my relatives have dedicated siblings or kids providing tech support. Some people don’t have this support and end up at the Genious bar.
The number of people I come across who admit to having no backup systems is mind boggling. People who depend on their computers for work.
- Very long lines/overcrowded store
- It's all full of Apple Watches and stuff like that and trivial luxury accessories
- Not enough Macs anymore
- None of the really cool displays they used to have like a Mac Pro set up for music studio or video work complete with a camera or midi controller or other instrument plugged in.
- For some reason they always smell like BO. Either it's the employees or customers they attract, there is something odd about the design of the store that screws with HVAC, or they're not cleaning well. Very weird thing.
So yah, not much luster. Even when they introduce new products these days I don't really want to go into the store and try them cause the experience is bad enough it outweighs the interest to check out the new product.
It is weird cause they are such copycats but I think the MS stores are better run now.
At the MS store you can get fast service, but thats mostly because it's empty. The floor staff descends upon you like hungry vultures when you enter, and you can't get rid of them. Thats what I've experienced at the Austin one anyway.
Mostly my observation is the way they run events and stuff seems very cool.
E.x. letting the kids come in and play Fortnite or do coding classes. Seems to always be free.
Then they've got VR demos or XBoxes setup with car cockpits..
"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
I'm tired of Face ID. Give me back Touch ID please. My sunglasses prevent Face ID from working when I have them on, and that's quite often here, and I don't want to switch to a light form of Face ID that doesn't check that I'm actually looking at my phone. Sometimes I temporarily take my sunglasses off to use Face ID.
The cooling design makes my MacBook Pro very quiet, but it doesn't always keep up with the heat indoors here. I've got to the point where I have to suspend my Vagrant box before I close the lid, or there's a good chance it won't wake up when I open my MacBook Pro and I'll have to restart it. I wish it used fans more to keep it cool.
I need to take it into an Apple Store because I think it might be a real hardware problem and not just a limitation or a software problem that causes it not to wake, but I'm not sure. Fortunately we have lots of Apple Stores and the availability is not too bad. There's only one appointment available today and that's 40 miles away in Boca Raton, but there are appointments at about 5 different Apple Stores in the area with appointments available tomorrow.
Personally, I prefer FaceID (which surprised me!) to TouchID except in bed, when I desperately miss TouchID.
[0] https://www.imore.com/how-make-iphone-x-face-id-work-sunglas...
Another thing - some sunglasses work with Face ID when its attention detector is enabled, because Face ID can see eyes through them. I'm going to see about it when I get a new pair of sunglasses, which I need anyway because having only one pair of sunglasses in Miami is kind of like having only one pair of shoes. The sunglasses that work with Face ID might become the ones I wear the most often.
I did also have trouble unlocking while laying in bed though. For awhile I thought it wasn't recognizing me without any glasses on, but then I realized that when I don't have any glasses on, I hold the phone much closer to my face, and it doesn't recognize me that way. It unlocks fine without glasses as long as I hold it at the same distance. Still kind of an awkward process.
I don't use apple, my Dell PC and Thinkpad laptop and Android phones never needed any repair, if they do, most likely I will just repair them myself or buy new ones(e.g. keyboard etc).
Apple will be struggling for a while after the iphone era for sure.
What a hassle. The only reason I went brick and mortar at all was because of a promotion where you get a free headphone set, and I wanted to be sure to receive it.
The rest of my experience was still abhorrent. The store was practically empty (though that might be an illusion since the store was huge and not visibly mobbed), some employees were just standing around just to tell people to wait in a corner. There was no real system to ensure your 'connection' would actually find you, since you were just told to loiter around the store.
But I went in, asked the Samsung guy where the Apple Watches were, and he pointed me to a counter in the middle of the store with 2 registers. I had a brief conversation with a sales guy there, confirmed the $50 off, size, and color I wanted.
I waited about 5 minutes and a different guy brought one from the back, complete with a silly dramatic bow where he handed it to the first guy (made me laugh.) I declined the warranty, swiped my credit card, signed, and was on my way.
The entire process took about 10 minutes, whereas buying at the Apple Store can definitely result in the "ping-pong" effect and can take upwards of an hour. And they were not pushy about the warranty.
I would buy from Best Buy again given this experience.
I’ve noticed most apple stores are super friendly and fast all over the world.
But their San Francisco flagship store is utter shit. Understaffed, too small, absolutely mobbed by people. And it makes sense, it’s a single store serving a city of 900,000 people with millions driving in every morning for work. They desperately need more locations.
The Palo Alto store, for example, is pure delight. I’ve had nothing but great experiences the few times I visited their NYC stores as well.
If you know exactly what you want I think they’d prefer you buy it online tho.
Yeah, yeah, buy it online for in-store pickup, use the Apple Store app to self-checkout, yada, yada, tribal knowledge. Including the tribal knowledge that the Apple B&M retail experience doesn't have queues, signs, or anyone to direct you.
Not that Bellevue is alone. When I last visited my Mom, I thought we'd swing by the Brandon, FL store, get her an Apple Watch. Man, I've never tried so hard to give someone $600 in my life.
There are three Apple stores in SF proper and a couple just across the bay.
Are they official Apple stores or are they apple-branded franchise stores? Reason I ask is because that’s the model I’ve seen a lot in Europe. A store that has a license to be an apple store but isn’t actually owned and run by Apple.
If you pre-purchase online for in-store pickup (which you can do while you’re standing around in the store), that’s essentially a guarantee on them that you won’t need “SKU selection” service, so once you’ve done that, you can go up to the receptionist staffer at the front and get someone to bring out your purchase pretty much immediately. (Because they do have staff free all the time, but they’re only free for a minute or two at a time between scheduled time-slots. “A minute or two” is enough time to service a pick-up, but not a complete in-store purchase flow.)
Well, and then wait in line at a cashier to be fair. Probably less than 20 minutes though.
They are packed, but if you make an appointment they usually get to you on time or even early.
Each mall also has a Microsoft store which is a sad abyss of emptiness.
The App Store makes Apple billions.
By locking you down they get the ability to get a cut of your app.
If you could install a mobile app directly from the web, they're cut out of the loop.
They also can't use it as a system of control to block apps they dislike.
I agree that there are times where this might be valuable and that there are APIs that you might want to restrict but then have a fair policy about which apps you block and also have a way to get PWAs approved easily.
Also, it's VERY expensive to get your app there due to their use of Dunn and Bradstreet.
You either have to pay $1000 or you have to wait 1-3 months until your company is approved.
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/
This is so sad, and reminds me of cheap and greasy sales people but not of Apple.
It looks more like a shop that went bankrupt and needs to sell its inventory ASAP. This impression is really sad.