My Apple Experience
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I have personally not had the level of frustration with my iPhones that you have, but I've heard of others like you. They seem to be rare, but that doesn't help the afflicted at all. This is going to sound flippant, but it's not. The few times I have had a problem, I've resorted to having my 22 year old daughter take my phone to the Apple Store. My 5'8", wavy blonde haired, slender, very attractive 22 year old daughter, who has seemingly perfected the art of mentally controlling men, especially the nerds at the Apple Store, and convincing them of pretty much anything she wants, including replacing malfunctioning iPhones for free. So if you have one of those types of daughters, or know someone who does, I suggest giving it a shot. And yes, I am perversely proud of her. Horribly evil of me, I know, but I'm a horribly evil type of person in general.
We are so easily manipulated ;)
cheers Chris Maunder
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The Apple fanboi thing always rubbed me the wrong way, but I do love their hardware*. Their software is a mess: buggy, complicated Frankensteins, with UIs that lock up, and a "find me if you can" approach to feature discovery. However, their hardware is slick. Except when it stops working. My iPhone 6 started getting hot. Really hot. So hot that I couldn't leave it in my pocket. Naturally the battery life went from a couple of days to a few hours, and for the life of me I couldn't work out what happened. I removed apps, I factory reset, I turned off every single thing that could possibly be using power. It still ran hot and died. I took it to an Apple Genius (I'm sure they appreciate irony) and the guy held my hot phone and says "it's normal", runs some diagnostics and says "no, there's nothing causing the battery to die. The battery is in perfect condition and there's no history of apps running that could drain it". That's because I closed and deleted all the apps, genius. He suggested all the standard stuff (turn off background stuff, turn off notifications, keep it in a dry dark place and try not to actually use it) but I'd done all that. So instead of saying "your phone's dead" he said "this is normal". Which clearly it isn't. So my backup phone is a backup phone because the battery goes from 40% to 0% instantly. Given that my main phone is unusable I figured $99 for a new battery for the old phone while I wait until the new phones come out in September is my best bet. So they take my old phone, slap a new battery in it, give it back and say "plug it in to iTunes and do a restore and it'll be good as news". Except it isn't. It's a brick locked in restore mode and nothing - not even those "get out of restore mode for free" apps can fix it. It's completely cactus. So. I book another genius bar visit. Except I clicked the wrong time and you can't go backwards (you get an error if you try). So I wait for the email confirmation to arrive and figure I'll just change the time. Except the link to "Manage your reservation" doesn't work: it says my case ID (which they sent me) and me email (which they sent it to) don't match. So stuff them. I'll book again, ignore my first booking, and then try and explain how they bricked my phone, misdiagnosed my other phone, and can't manage a simple appointment booking app to a young energetic kid who will assume it's this poor, sad, confused user's fault, and not the fault of a company that has completely lost it's focus, it's passion, and it's unbending
Chris, I have to say I quite enjoyed your notes all the responses that you caused. It shows that people are beginning to wake up from their zombie-like trances that surround current technologies. I have been writing, along with others, about the many issues that are being caused by recent technologies. So here are my notes on the subject... 1) Mobile technologies were designed and provided to the commercial market for a single purpose; to make as much money as possible. Hence, the constant releases of Apple's iPhone upgraded products and all the copycat junk that follows it. It was done with the blessings of the intelligence agencies as they would be able to get people to volunteer personal information freely. All they had to do was watch the FaceBook "phenomenon" to come up with some really vile plans. 2) Steve Jobs in all senses was a megalomaniac, not a visionary considering that practically every idea he ever came up with was just a redesign of existing technologies that the Xerox Parc Labs originally developed in the 1970s. The man was a one-stop horror show and yet people idolize this monster. They should work for him for a day. 3) Cell phones have two substantial uses only; emergency communications and to transfer important information when other methods are not available. They were not designed so every idiot on the planet could spend hours a day to pass hot air that is supposed to pass as intelligent conversation. However, that has been the result. Parents bank accounts get drained due to the enormous costs caused by their children thinking that everyone needs to yammer on a tiny device to make their lives worth saving. Adults, like their children become nothing more than zombified, unintelligent beings that no longer have any awareness of the surroundings. Many credible sociological studies substantiating these conclusions have been done on this subject alone. 4) Practically all development on new technologies ended with the refinement of Microsoft's ASP.NET WebForms and Java's increases in performance. Everything that came after has been nothing but redundant garbage that does the same things that has been done for years prior with more mature technologies. Who in their right minds would trade in the easier to use ASP.NET WebForms and WinForms for more difficult to use technologies such as MVC and WPF (though I happen to like WPF a lot and it has been made more difficult from the lack of quality documentation on it). Think about it people; you are doing a heck of a l
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The Apple fanboi thing always rubbed me the wrong way, but I do love their hardware*. Their software is a mess: buggy, complicated Frankensteins, with UIs that lock up, and a "find me if you can" approach to feature discovery. However, their hardware is slick. Except when it stops working. My iPhone 6 started getting hot. Really hot. So hot that I couldn't leave it in my pocket. Naturally the battery life went from a couple of days to a few hours, and for the life of me I couldn't work out what happened. I removed apps, I factory reset, I turned off every single thing that could possibly be using power. It still ran hot and died. I took it to an Apple Genius (I'm sure they appreciate irony) and the guy held my hot phone and says "it's normal", runs some diagnostics and says "no, there's nothing causing the battery to die. The battery is in perfect condition and there's no history of apps running that could drain it". That's because I closed and deleted all the apps, genius. He suggested all the standard stuff (turn off background stuff, turn off notifications, keep it in a dry dark place and try not to actually use it) but I'd done all that. So instead of saying "your phone's dead" he said "this is normal". Which clearly it isn't. So my backup phone is a backup phone because the battery goes from 40% to 0% instantly. Given that my main phone is unusable I figured $99 for a new battery for the old phone while I wait until the new phones come out in September is my best bet. So they take my old phone, slap a new battery in it, give it back and say "plug it in to iTunes and do a restore and it'll be good as news". Except it isn't. It's a brick locked in restore mode and nothing - not even those "get out of restore mode for free" apps can fix it. It's completely cactus. So. I book another genius bar visit. Except I clicked the wrong time and you can't go backwards (you get an error if you try). So I wait for the email confirmation to arrive and figure I'll just change the time. Except the link to "Manage your reservation" doesn't work: it says my case ID (which they sent me) and me email (which they sent it to) don't match. So stuff them. I'll book again, ignore my first booking, and then try and explain how they bricked my phone, misdiagnosed my other phone, and can't manage a simple appointment booking app to a young energetic kid who will assume it's this poor, sad, confused user's fault, and not the fault of a company that has completely lost it's focus, it's passion, and it's unbending
Chris, I have to say I quite enjoyed your notes all the responses that you caused. It shows that people are beginning to wake up from their zombie-like trances that surround current technologies. I have been writing, along with others, about the many issues that are being caused by recent technologies. So here are my notes on the subject... 1) Mobile technologies were designed and provided to the commercial market for a single purpose; to make as much money as possible. Hence, the constant releases of Apple's iPhone upgraded products and all the copycat junk that follows it. It was done with the blessings of the intelligence agencies as they would be able to get people to volunteer personal information freely. All they had to do was watch the FaceBook "phenomenon" to come up with some really vile plans. 2) Steve Jobs in all senses was a megalomaniac, not a visionary considering that practically every idea he ever came up with was just a redesign of existing technologies that the Xerox Parc Labs originally developed in the 1970s. The man was a one-stop horror show and yet people idolize this monster. They should work for him for a day. 3) Cell phones have two substantial uses only; emergency communications and to transfer important information when other methods are not available. They were not designed so every idiot on the planet could spend hours a day to pass hot air that is supposed to pass as intelligent conversation. However, that has been the result. Parents bank accounts get drained due to the enormous costs caused by their children thinking that everyone needs to yammer on a tiny device to make their lives worth saving. Adults, like their children become nothing more than zombified, unintelligent beings that no longer have any awareness of the surroundings. Many credible sociological studies substantiating these conclusions have been done on this subject alone. 4) Practically all development on new technologies ended with the refinement of Microsoft's ASP.NET WebForms and Java's increases in performance. Everything that came after has been nothing but redundant garbage that does the same things that has been done for years prior with more mature technologies. Who in their right minds would trade in the easier to use ASP.NET WebForms and WinForms for more difficult to use technologies such as MVC and WPF (though I happen to like WPF a lot and it has been made more difficult from the lack of quality documentation on it). Think about it people; you are doing a heck of a l
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The Apple fanboi thing always rubbed me the wrong way, but I do love their hardware*. Their software is a mess: buggy, complicated Frankensteins, with UIs that lock up, and a "find me if you can" approach to feature discovery. However, their hardware is slick. Except when it stops working. My iPhone 6 started getting hot. Really hot. So hot that I couldn't leave it in my pocket. Naturally the battery life went from a couple of days to a few hours, and for the life of me I couldn't work out what happened. I removed apps, I factory reset, I turned off every single thing that could possibly be using power. It still ran hot and died. I took it to an Apple Genius (I'm sure they appreciate irony) and the guy held my hot phone and says "it's normal", runs some diagnostics and says "no, there's nothing causing the battery to die. The battery is in perfect condition and there's no history of apps running that could drain it". That's because I closed and deleted all the apps, genius. He suggested all the standard stuff (turn off background stuff, turn off notifications, keep it in a dry dark place and try not to actually use it) but I'd done all that. So instead of saying "your phone's dead" he said "this is normal". Which clearly it isn't. So my backup phone is a backup phone because the battery goes from 40% to 0% instantly. Given that my main phone is unusable I figured $99 for a new battery for the old phone while I wait until the new phones come out in September is my best bet. So they take my old phone, slap a new battery in it, give it back and say "plug it in to iTunes and do a restore and it'll be good as news". Except it isn't. It's a brick locked in restore mode and nothing - not even those "get out of restore mode for free" apps can fix it. It's completely cactus. So. I book another genius bar visit. Except I clicked the wrong time and you can't go backwards (you get an error if you try). So I wait for the email confirmation to arrive and figure I'll just change the time. Except the link to "Manage your reservation" doesn't work: it says my case ID (which they sent me) and me email (which they sent it to) don't match. So stuff them. I'll book again, ignore my first booking, and then try and explain how they bricked my phone, misdiagnosed my other phone, and can't manage a simple appointment booking app to a young energetic kid who will assume it's this poor, sad, confused user's fault, and not the fault of a company that has completely lost it's focus, it's passion, and it's unbending
I had the Apple thing all figured out after I got the first IPad (that they supported for about 2 years) and having to deal with ITunes... The other half bought an IPad Mini recently that became "unusable" after about a month (and which I do not want to touch).
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Chris, I have to say I quite enjoyed your notes all the responses that you caused. It shows that people are beginning to wake up from their zombie-like trances that surround current technologies. I have been writing, along with others, about the many issues that are being caused by recent technologies. So here are my notes on the subject... 1) Mobile technologies were designed and provided to the commercial market for a single purpose; to make as much money as possible. Hence, the constant releases of Apple's iPhone upgraded products and all the copycat junk that follows it. It was done with the blessings of the intelligence agencies as they would be able to get people to volunteer personal information freely. All they had to do was watch the FaceBook "phenomenon" to come up with some really vile plans. 2) Steve Jobs in all senses was a megalomaniac, not a visionary considering that practically every idea he ever came up with was just a redesign of existing technologies that the Xerox Parc Labs originally developed in the 1970s. The man was a one-stop horror show and yet people idolize this monster. They should work for him for a day. 3) Cell phones have two substantial uses only; emergency communications and to transfer important information when other methods are not available. They were not designed so every idiot on the planet could spend hours a day to pass hot air that is supposed to pass as intelligent conversation. However, that has been the result. Parents bank accounts get drained due to the enormous costs caused by their children thinking that everyone needs to yammer on a tiny device to make their lives worth saving. Adults, like their children become nothing more than zombified, unintelligent beings that no longer have any awareness of the surroundings. Many credible sociological studies substantiating these conclusions have been done on this subject alone. 4) Practically all development on new technologies ended with the refinement of Microsoft's ASP.NET WebForms and Java's increases in performance. Everything that came after has been nothing but redundant garbage that does the same things that has been done for years prior with more mature technologies. Who in their right minds would trade in the easier to use ASP.NET WebForms and WinForms for more difficult to use technologies such as MVC and WPF (though I happen to like WPF a lot and it has been made more difficult from the lack of quality documentation on it). Think about it people; you are doing a heck of a l
Unfortunately I disagree with many of your statements. Obviously large companies invest a lot of time and money to make even more money. That's often why they exist. You can't say that mobile technology was created solely to make money. Nor can you say "cell phones have two substantial uses only". That's a gross generalisation that beggars the real world experiences of billions who have a smartphone. As a single data point (that's repeated by many of those I know), I use a phone to manage my business. Email, messages, alerts, administration of the site, booking and managing my travel, keeping up with my technical knowledge by reading eBooks and websites, and even just listening to music and doing a little photography. Occasionally I actually use it to talk to people. I also take issue with "It was done with the blessings of the intelligence agencies". You do realise that encrypted messaging apps and the encryption now being introduced as standard on phones is makeing the life of intelligence agencies very difficult. "practically every idea he ever came up with was just a redesign of existing technologies that the Xerox Parc Labs originally developed in the 1970s" Yes and no. The iPod, iPhone and Apple watch weren't from PARC, but even so, I love the story about Bill explaining to Steve[^] the genesis of Windows 1.0 ""Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.". Microsoft, for its part, has a long history of doing things first and doing it poorly (remember tablet PCs? Remember Passport? Remember CodePlex?). Innovation doesn't mean creating something totally new from nothing. It often means bringing together things right under our noses and presenting them in a new way. The absolute best innovation is that which is so simple, so obvious, that in hindsight no one sees it as innovation. And yet, moments before it was unveiled no one could picture it in the form that would come to be obvious. MVC: Actually I like MVC a lot. It's faster than webforms, it's cleaner, and frankly it forces me to structure my code with far better separation of concerns than webForms. And I've been doing WebForms for 15 years. I also know p
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I had the Apple thing all figured out after I got the first IPad (that they supported for about 2 years) and having to deal with ITunes... The other half bought an IPad Mini recently that became "unusable" after about a month (and which I do not want to touch).
What happened? I :love: my iPad mini (except it's first gen and slow on the latest OSs)
cheers Chris Maunder
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email: I wait till I get back to the office. weather: I have glass windows - I can see what the weather is. fights: I drive. games: I wait till I get back to the office. Or sports radio. :thumbsup:
Ron Anders wrote:
fights: I drive
Road-rage will get you everywhere :)
I came into this game for the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone. Now they got the whole country sectioned off, you can't make a move without a form.
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I have a whole set of rants directed at those other issues. I'm non-denominational when it comes to my frustrations. It really feels like we're in a tech slump. Android is a total Wild West mess that Google is desperate to get under control, and yet Google themselves are so engineer-biased that they seem incapable of delivering a user experience that covers the other 95% safely. Apple...ah, Apple. Enough about them. Microsoft. Wow. I've been digging into .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, EF Core etc this weekend and it's like they sent the engineers off to an island for 5 years and said "Go crazy!". It's a frigging mess. They have the most awesome IDE in existence and yet all you see in demos and docs is an endless series of powershell, command prompt or Nuget console text commands to do things that shoudln't have to be done. So much work in automatic wiring up of all the bits and pieces, so much other work in bypassing it all and getting out the zip-ties and duct tape. I could go on about Garmin, The SQL team, Git repos and Nuget if you wish... :)
cheers Chris Maunder
Chris Maunder wrote:
They have the most awesome IDE in existence and yet all you see in demos and docs is an endless series of powershell, command prompt or Nuget console text commands to do things that shoudln't have to be done.
I've played around with ASP.NET Core and TBH I find it all works better on a Mac (using VS Code or WebStorm). Weird in a way, but I guess all the command prompt (terminal) stuff is much easier on *NIX based OS's.
I came into this game for the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone. Now they got the whole country sectioned off, you can't make a move without a form.
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Chris Maunder wrote:
It's completely cactus.
:confused: My guess - you have been hacked. Probably by the Russians and we will soon see your personal emails on the wicked leaky site. :-\
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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Absolutely. I really only have a few grips 1. They were working off what their diagnostic apps said, not what common sense says. I found it fascinating that their diagnostic apps only provide info on apps that are running, not the OS. It's like the OS is a big blind spot that can't (or aren't allowed?) to question. I really just wanted them to say "It's dead, Jim". 2. They gave me back my repaired phone in a non-operable state. It wasn't even turned on and tested after the battery replacement. They acknowledged this was an error on their part (which was awesome of them). I do still have a deep, deep sadness at the direction Apple has gone. It's run by a conservative committee that now follows and chases instead of a single person who leads.
cheers Chris Maunder
Re 1, the OS cannot be really checked unless the device is booted from something else which is considered to be impossible with iDevices. The security chip in iPhone adds complications. They might be instructed to search for a bad app to be purged from the store first and help the customer second, unpleasant but understandable. Normally it is assumed that if the OS is reset it is OK now and anything else is above the level of a genius. Why they did not recognize a hardware problem immediately is beyond me, as well as how they dared to let a customer with a hardware battery problem to go away and potentially return with burns and attorneys. Re 2, I guess you just hit not the brightest genius. I do not think Apple has gone in wrong direction, they are just going. Being under extreme pressure after 2 bad quaters, they may do something really supid righ now, hope they will not. A committee that follows and chases can be OK for a while, but thinking that iPhone SE 16 GB is the best $400 phone in line with the "we are making the best" mantra is not OK, iOS cannot compensate for everything. They should upgrade 16 GB models to 32 GB immediately, we will see in a month.
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Re 1, the OS cannot be really checked unless the device is booted from something else which is considered to be impossible with iDevices. The security chip in iPhone adds complications. They might be instructed to search for a bad app to be purged from the store first and help the customer second, unpleasant but understandable. Normally it is assumed that if the OS is reset it is OK now and anything else is above the level of a genius. Why they did not recognize a hardware problem immediately is beyond me, as well as how they dared to let a customer with a hardware battery problem to go away and potentially return with burns and attorneys. Re 2, I guess you just hit not the brightest genius. I do not think Apple has gone in wrong direction, they are just going. Being under extreme pressure after 2 bad quaters, they may do something really supid righ now, hope they will not. A committee that follows and chases can be OK for a while, but thinking that iPhone SE 16 GB is the best $400 phone in line with the "we are making the best" mantra is not OK, iOS cannot compensate for everything. They should upgrade 16 GB models to 32 GB immediately, we will see in a month.
Surely a few in-house diagnostics within the OS aren't too much to ask for? They clearly have a bunch of diagnostics around apps, so adding these to things the OS manages (CPU / battery power spent on GPS, Compass, Bluetooth etc) shouldn't be hard. Actually I'd be extremely surprised if they weren't already there. I don't think Apple will do anything stupid after a couple of soft quarters. This is a company that takes the long view. I don't think Apple will do anything stupid now. Or risky. Or exciting.... And that's the problem. (and I don't count their foray into electric cars as novel or exciting. "Massive distraction fuelled be a need to stay relevant and own an ecosystem", yes, but not novel.)
cheers Chris Maunder
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email: I wait till I get back to the office. weather: I have glass windows - I can see what the weather is. fights: I drive. games: I wait till I get back to the office. Or sports radio. :thumbsup:
Luddites rule! (At least, in their own minds.)
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I've owned one Apple product, an Apple IIc, and I'll never own another. Pure crap, hardware and software.
Will Rogers never met me.
A lot of people who bought Windows 8 as their first Microsoft product share your perspective. Odd thing is that things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.